Missing the shit times

“The blistered hand of nostalgia gave my heart a good squeeze and I realized you miss shit times as well as good times, because at the end of the day what you’re really missing is just time itself.”

- Steve Toltz, A Fraction of the Whole

Post Script

Hello again Redhead,

Today I miss New York so much, I’m browsing Craigslist for apartments. I’m listening to Fleet Foxes’ “The Plains / Bitter Dancer” on repeat and it’s sounding like the soundtrack to The Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler and I’m missing the Met and remembering how I used to wander its halls every Friday evening to escape the loneliness of Barnard. Alone in San Francisco and craving the city on the opposite coast, it is hard to believe I was ever lonely in New York.

There was a time when I thought it impossible to be lonely in a city. In the country, you are always alone with your thoughts, but in the city — oh, in the city, the subway cars breathe with you, the “don’t walk” signs throb in sync with your heartbeat, you are surrounded by everything and everyone. But no matter how much everything and how many everyones I encounter, I am still alone with my thoughts, alone with my grey Ikea couch and my solemn walks up California Street when San Francisco has shut down for the night.

I come back to my sentence from before: “It is one thing to make yourself at home, but it is an entirely different thing to find yourself at home.” San Francisco is a familiar place. But when will it be familiar out of warmth and not out of routine?

I am tired of being brave and pretending to live in the present when I know I live in the past.

- Co

For kids that think it still exists

Dearest Redhead,

Tonight was one of those nights when I lay sprawled out on top of a three-day-old pile of clean laundry on my Ikea couch and stared at the barrenness of my beige walls while LCD Soundsystem croaked “New York, I Love You But You’re Bringing Me Down” from the right speaker of my laptop in the corner of the living room next to Chris’ photo of a bespectacled Walkman-wearing fellow I once met in an Au Bon Pain in New Brunswick. This seemed like a good time to cry, but I’ve been dehydrated lately, so my body’s holding tears hostage until I down some more Bubba Gump-sized glasses of water.

I wanted to be in New York City for the hurricane. I wanted to be there when they closed down all the subway stations, I wanted to photograph taped-up store windows and complain about everything the way only New Yorkers do and pretend to tune you out as you energetically and academically discussed the city’s emergency response plans, all while jauntily walking over to the Apple Tree to stock up on potato chips (Baked Lays for you and Dad, sour cream and onion or salt and vinegar for me and Mom), Fizzy Lizzies, and Skinny Cow ice cream bars, which we’d have no choice but to eat quickly if the freezer lost electricity. I wanted to be in the city that’s always moving at that one rare moment when it became completely stagnant. I wanted to be connected to everyone and everything, not through Twitter and Facebook and (your favorite) NYTimes.com, but through actual experience. Mostly I just wanted to be home, but I wonder more and more these days where home actually is. (I’m crying now. Flood warnings in the laptop area!)

San Francisco is no New York. I tried to go to Walgreens yesterday after work and found out it closed at 6pm. Do you know of any Duane Reade that would ever close at such an obsequiously early hour? And once I walked an hour home from the train station at midnight on Saturday and only saw about ten people total. Granted, I wasn’t in any of the “clubbing” neighborhoods, but lack of clubs never stopped any New York neighborhood I know of from having people out and about on a Saturday night. San Francisco has this going for it, though: There are more sidewalks that twinkle like stars! But who will go dancing amongst them with me, at midnight on a Saturday when there’s no one else around? Who will help me keep time with the hum of the city crickets?

Have I told you about how I keep one ear open for identifying city crickets? In New York, it was always the chirping of the taxi meter churning out a receipt. On summer nights, with my bedroom window open and the ribbons of its curtain playing footsie in the shadows, I could sometimes hear the city crickets downstairs mark the end of your evening of gallivanting around your city, your Small’s and your Canfield’s. And when I fell asleep on Mom’s shoulder during cab rides home from one of the movie theaters by Lincoln Center, those crickets were there to tell me, “You can go upstairs and replace your comfy, comfy pillow for that carpet-bag-covered arm!”

San Francisco’s crickets, I’ve found, inhabit the cable cars’ metal tracks in the middle of the streets. They don’t chirp so much as tinker. They are industrial little crickets, steadfast yet comforting. They tinker all day long, but it’s only at night, when the streets are unsettlingly quiet in terms of foot and car traffic, that you can really hear them ticking. As I stroll along in solitude, sneaking a twirl or two on the dance floor of stars below me, San Francisco’s tinkering crickets keep me company.

I’m grateful for that. And for a city that offers new surprises each day, and predictable moments, like the shoe shiners I walk past on my way to work, who never seem to have any customers at 9:45am except each other. Still, I long for that sense of familiarity I had in New York. I have no Carol around the corner, no reliable sunset at the bottom end of the 1 line, no P&W’s, no sing-a-longs, no peacock-lined paradises. I don’t need a Cheers, where everyone knows my name, but is it so much to ask for just one place where anyone knows my name? The pig parts store doesn’t count, since they think my name is Dilia. I know, I know, it takes time. A year from now it will all be different. But a year from now is still a year from now.

It is one thing to make yourself at home, but it is an entirely different thing to find yourself at home.

Nostalging,
Co

P.S. I cringe as I write about New York in the past tense, particularly the sentence “In New York, it was always the chirping of the taxi meter churning out a receipt.” … “it was always” “it was always” “it was always” … I make it sound like my New York exists solely on an old VHS tape in a box in Mom’s garage that I can’t even watch because I don’t have a VHS player. But my New York is living and vibrant and ever-present and everywhere. It just occurred to me today that this is the longest I’ve been away from it in fifteen years, and the realization is hitting me like a gust of wind from the fan at the 168th St. 1 train station. Oowee!

Protected: On what this might be

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July 25th, Attica, KS

We stood outside last night remarking that the lack of stars meant there must be clouds.

We danced as we felt the first sporadic raindrops on our shoulders.

I thought the sky was sweating.

Stream of New York Consciousness

It is 19:42:19 on 04-24-11 and I am standing on the 1-3 platform at the Harlem Metro North train station. I have a paper to plan, and a paper to research, and a paper to wrap my bulbous head around, and books to read, and projects to finish, and projects I keep saying I’ll finish soon that I still haven’t even started yet. But today it is raining on the train tracks in New York City and I have just come to the realization that I will probably only see this city (my city) two more days before I move across the country, before who knows when I’ll be back again. And I’m hoping my eyes won’t start dripping like those clouds that envelop the city in a blue haze. Blue-grey clouds against yellow-orange lights, the city alive in contrasts and complements. I could compliment it for ages, or at least until 8:03pm, which is when my train leaves.

It is 19:47:50 on 04-24-11 and I am witnessing a light show on the tracks, each raindrop a firework bursting orange on reflective black. In the background, blinking, yellow and red bulbs alternate on a sign on 125th that says, “Look at me!” But it’s so blinding, I’d prefer to look away. The city is alive in sound and texture and I swear if I ever have children they are going to have a CD of soothing music and it’s just going to be the sound of cars driving in the rain – no honking, mind you, just that calming shhhhh like waves on the beaches I trained myself not to like because they were too pastel, too soft, too full of reminders of former life – shells, footprints, washed up driftwood. But the city is always alive. Yeah, my kids will fall asleep to that momentous sound of a bus warming up to cross the street, a plastic bag rustling in the wind (American Beauty style), their father whispering, “But Cordelia, dear, we’re in San Francisco…” I know, man, I know, but they’ve got the blood of a New Yorker in those tiny veins of theirs, and their DNA’s double helix twists round like Broadway and Amsterdam at 72nd street. You know what I mean? I certainly hope you do, or else you’re with the wrong woman.

It is 19:58:02 on 4-24-11 and my train will be here in 5 minutes and I just lied to a homeless man, said, “Sorry, I don’t have any money on me, but happy birthday…” I hate it when I do that, but I can’t give my change away or else I won’t be able to pay for the taxi at the other end of the train. The sun seems to have set, as most suns do on a fairly regular basis, but the sky is still a vibrant muted blue, if something can be vibrant and muted at the same time. Muted from the rain, I guess, but vibrant from all those New York City lights, alive and bursting, like the raindrop fireworks on the train tracks.

You are walking too slowly

Was my frustration apparent
In the way I cocked my head back,
Threw it to the sky,
And said, Aaaaaargh?
If so, oops.

Nothing, really

“Can I ask you a question,” I asked.

“Yes,” he said.

“Correct,” I said. “Goodnight.”

I am writing a poem!

Calloused feet against dirty green linoleum
I should do something about that, maybe
But first
A bandaid for my ankle
A tissue for my nose
Gushing like a pomegranate, gross

There are bumps on my face
And there’s that one bump I call my back
And there’s not enough Peroxide,
Not enough Posture,
Nor Patience nor Perseverance
To fix them

Or anything, really
I could at least Swiffer the floor

On Nostalgia, Excerpt 1

Part of a larger piece I’ve been working on:

It is one of those hot July days in Attica, KS, the kind that makes you wish you were one of the tomatoes out in the garden so that someone would come along and bathe you in cold water.  We are sitting around the table in Nonnie and Poppa’s kitchen and Dad is telling everyone about the time little Phil accidentally rolled down a hill when they were all living in Denver.  Dad leans back in his chair, the seventies-style wood creaking under the weight of all that denim and all those signature Nonnie butterscotch cookies, and his arms spin around like crazy, like the fan on the ceiling.  Five-year-old Little Phil versus the wilderness!  Across the table from Dad, grown-up Phil sits silent, pensive, as always.  His nose twitches, and Dad proceeds to describe the laborious process of picking all the burrs out of Little Phil’s clothes and counting his scrapes and bruises.  Suddenly Aunt Berta is laughing and Dad is chuckling and Phil breaks out of his stoicism with a smile, and there is something about the memory of Little Phil that is sending everyone into a tizzy.  Even the way Dad says “Little Phil” is vaguely amusing, and despite the trauma of such an event, the Tibbs have grown to relish the telling of that memory.

We fall backwards into 1960s Denver and all pile into the back of Poppa’s pick-up truck, where we bounce up and down as we follow the winding roads to pick up a giant cube of ice, and the bouncing is comforting, like a mother rocking her baby, and not at all the painful, frightening thing it really was, precariously perched folding chairs hopping five inches off the metal floor, sliding five feet at every turn.  Now we are in a backyard some years later and there’s a swimming pool and there’s a monkey, for reasons unbeknownst to me, and it walks over to Dad and bites his wrist.  I’m not making this up!  He’ll show you the scar.