I hope the readership will excuse me if I nurse a hangover whilst making this post.
It always used to be part of my game plan, since way back when I was just starting high school, that my spiritual move from North Jersey to the City (which occurred when I started attending the Greatest High School on Earth, which is in New York City) would correspond with finding some cosmopolitan city-dwelling compatriots. My ideal girlfriend in those days was a sleek urbanite, also someone for whom my headstrong stubbornness and my occasional tendency to use North Jersey greetings like "Fuck you!" and "Where the fuck'd you learn how to drive??" would just be par for the course if not embedded somewhere in her own vocabulary. I primarily saw her as cultured, well read, chic -- a projection of all the things I hoped the City would allow me to become.
That was eight years ago. And permutations of it have cropped up since... I used to get remarkably frustrated that L couldn't deal with my tendency to express frustration in swear words. (That had an interestingly circular effect). L and Leah both wondered, often and aloud, how I could love someplace with so few trees. L only started to believe me about the beauty of the radio towers at night strewn across the Meadowlands right before she left me. I used to think, "damn. A city girl would understand this. she could look at these red-blinking lights, this suspended steel, these abandoned ferry terminals, and find beauty."
Lately, though, I've begun to realize precisely how wrong I've been. The City did make me into who I wanted to be. Spiriting up to my roof and watching the Pulaski Skyway continue to hang low over Kearny and Jersey City, or running the Volvo 100mph down an empty stretch of turnpike to try to take in all the radio towers at once, this is still my beauty. But the people I love, the women who I've been able to share who I am with, have by and large been rural or rural-sub-urban. And I've been thinking about that, and why that might be, and I realize that there's a counterpoint to that beauty out of decay and chaos. That counterpoint is L sitting on a beach the night we met, facing the ocean and saying to me only "Listen." That counterpoint is L on a North Carolina tobacco farm with the silt between the toes of her bare feet. That counterpoint is Leah in the New England snow, getting lost among the trees.
I love the city, and dearly. I owe to it the way I see beauty. I owe to it my patience with humanity and human development. And I owe to it my penchant for four letter words. But I am enough city for me. I need that balance in my life. That counterpoint is me, upstate at the farmhouse, banging away on an underwood typewriter. That counterpoint has been my patient partners in life who have forced me to look beyond bright light and abandoned steel, gasoline fumes and subway handholds. I truly need that element in my life.
So now, what to do with the phone number I got at the bar last night?
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5 comments:
well-written, among other things.
i saw once--i think we've talked about this before--someone asking what one question they should ask of a stranger to learn something important about them. the only suggestion i remember was where are you from, and how do you feel about it?
which...well, yeah.
it was startling to see, yankee week, how at home you were; it was clear that it wasn't just because you were comfortable at L's house; it was something about the place in a larger sense. and in different ways, in nola and at the farmhouse. somehow you got parts of other places in you.
i don't know how that happens. the first time i took the bus up to jersey from va--suddenly looked out the window and there were the meadowlands and radio towers and container ports, and that immediately felt like home. rural north florida, same thing. which is something i still don't have in new york at all, or even new haven.
this nurse business needs more detail.
also, before it falls off the front page and i forget about it: conclusions aside, curious about your thoughts on "not about love." 'cause my opinions are sitting there all alone.
of possible intellectual (not emotional) interest to you:
"The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature" by William Cronon. I can email you a pdf if you'd like.
Please do send me a PDF, that would be great.
comma splice
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