Up and Running Again

School started again this past week, my final semester. It was hectic and uncertain. I walked into the SIPA building on Tuesday morning not really registered for anything (seriously) and nervous about whether and how I was going to pull choosing classes off. I partly wasn’t registered because the classes I wanted were full, but they were full because I never really focused on what classes I wanted to take. Over winter break I was focused on lots of things–our trip to California, my new niece, the report I was writing for the Greenmarket, practicing my knife skills. Not school. By Wednesday evening, it had all come into focus, and somehow, quite happily, all of my classes fell into place and I believe that I will graduate with a masters, understanding how to step into the next part of my life, realizing what that might take and how I might get there. I’m not sure I’ve ever quite felt that way before. (Cut to the Dirty Dancing Lift).

On Wednesday we’re going to Sundance!  I can’t wait to see Marshall’s movie…

On Reading and Writing

As I begin writing this post, I already feel in over my head, under-equipped to try to express what I am feeling without sounding didactic, obvious, dumb. I’m going to try. In many ways it proves my point  (that I will quickly get to) that I am writing this blog for myself, for the practice of writing, as motivation to observe closely and look for ways to articulate truths, however coarsely.

Scott and I just subscribed to the weekend edition of the New York Times, the print version, and it just arrived for the first time this weekend, split between Saturday and Sunday. We read the online version all the time, it’s in the constant browsing rotation for both of us, but now we have the print version as well. I love it. It feels shiny and new again. I’ve had this conversation many times with many different friends that there’s something about reading the physical paper that makes you read things wouldn’t necessarily click on online. It’s less self-selecting, less targeted. One of the reasons that I love the New Yorker is that my attention and curiosity often pulls me to read about something I wouldn’t have told you that I find interesting, and yet. I do.

It makes me wonder about the experience of reading and writing. The fact that reading the paper or the New Yorker is different online than in print is interesting. I wonder what all this writing is for, and why it feels satisfying and luxurious to hold print material in our hands rather than to scan it on a screen. How has giving webpages an inverted L-shaped passover (that’s how we read things online, reading the first two or three lines across and then skimming down to the bottom, missing most of it) informed going back to getting lost in actual books, turning down pages, making notes in the margins? Are we more facile readers because there are so many ways to encounter and digest words? What is all of this writing for, I ask again? I’ve struggled with this, which I imagine is why I can’t get past this cheap, fast and most-importantly low-commitment blog. If I hadn’t started it in Brazil, would I just be journaling? (I do that, too, you don’t get to read everything I think, but perhaps way more than you need), would I have had the motivation to start writing a book rather than just writing about eventually writing a book here? It’s hard to say. Are we in a time of more options and diversity of word vehicles in a good way? Or has there been too much of an opening for laziness? It’s hard to imagine that more options is a bad thing, but in only speaking for myself, I know that it leads to guilt (I should read everything!) and sadness (there’s so much I will never know) and excuses (well I’m writing something, at least.) Without knowing any real answers, in the meantime, it’s nice to turn the pages of the paper, inside, on freezing cold January Sundays.

Fleur de Sel Caramels

I’m about to spill my “secret” recipe:

Dear Ms. Garten,

I wanted to thank you for your Fleur de Sel Caramel recipe.

I got married this past October and decided to make one thousand of your fleur de sel caramels as favors for my guests. I had made single or double batches before–for a New Year’s Eve dinner party, and as birthday gifts, but it was a much bigger project than I anticipated. It was also a huge success for a number of reasons.

My mom and I had a tough time through my wedding planning. Our normally wonderful relationship had turned contentious and by the last weekend in September, when I made the caramels, we were barely speaking. In a way, making the candies brought us back together, put us back on the same page. My Manhattan kitchen is far too small to make a thousand of anything, or refrigerator is slimmer than normal. I turned to my mom’s suburban kitchen for the weekend, aided with her extra fridge in the garage. It turned out that making the batches of sweets went fairly quickly, but wrapping up a thousand caramels took a long time. I went about it all day, watching the sugar turn that deep brown, eyeing the thermometer, preparing pans with parchment and measuring out cream. At midnight, my parents came home from an event, and I still had hours of wrapping left.

Our stand-off, the tension that had built up between us melted and dissolved as she helped me cut squares of wax paper and we stood at the counter, twisting up the wrappers. It softened and sweetened the whole thing, to the point where we were laughing at two in the in the morning, our fingers sticky and sweet and salty. We were married at Blue Hill at Stone Barns, and our guests were full of delicious food, and they still managed to complement your delicious fleur de sel caramels.

The experience also confirmed that I want to go to culinary school as soon as possible. I’m currently pursuing a masters of international affairs, and it’s just not right. I heard you speak last year at the 92nd Street Y and your career trajectory was more inspiring than you know.

Thank you.

Warmly,
Brooke Lewy

 

Textured Meditation

I wiped out while I was running today. It happens probably more often than it should, and every time I think I won’t tell anyone, not even Scott, because it’s embarrassing. What grown person takes a spill on a sidewalk and skins their knee like a child? Well I did, and here I am telling all of you about it. There wasn’t even really anything there, my toe caught a little lip of sidewalk, and there I was, palms pressed to the stones that comprise the sidewalk of Bleecker Street just outside of Bonpoint.

The important thing is not that I fell, my leggings and left knee are a little worse for the wear, but I’m fine. It kind of put a sour note on my run though. I already just wanted to get it over with (sometimes I love it, crave it, want it to go on forever, and sometimes I want to, you know, get on with the rest of my day) and the fall just made it worse. I could have turned around and gone home, but I kept going. I was sans iPod, no music, no podcast (I usually listen to NPR) and I was bored. I tried different things to distract myself. The one that worked was meditating, kind of. I have been trying to actively meditate at least a little bit for about a year now (wedding planning will make a girl look for some peace and balance) and it’s hard. It hasn’t gotten any easier and most of the time I think that I’m really terrible at it.

This time, while also mindfully putting one foot in front of the other, I tried to notice colors, focusing on the blue of the sky with a spare tire of smog hovering just above the New Jersey skyline. I looked at the Hudson’s murkiness, the gray of the stones of the path, the green, slick glass buildings at Perry Street. The thing that I noticed most this time, in winter’s drabness, was the amount of texture that there is in everything. The grass, a mottle of green, yellow and tawny brown looked more like a collection of Van Gogh brush strokes than anything else. Those stones were striated in different shades of slate and silver and the water of the river held ridges of opalescent (oil?) pale blue where it reflected the sky. Then there was the structure of the trees and the gears of a passing bicycle and I was absorbed. Is this mediation? I’m not sure, but it made the run go faster and my head wasn’t spinning with what classes I’m going to take and when I’m going to finish the Greenmarket project that I’m working on, and the other zillion things that spiral through.

While we were in Big Sur, Scott and I had a conversation about hiking. I was eager to go to bed early so we could get up in the morning and climb through those mountains. But what if, he asked, you can see the view from the ground? from the road? (we could, and had, and would see more jaw-dropping vistas from the PCH), what’s the point? if you want exercise, why not just go for a run? It was the first time I was really forced to articulate why I love hiking, why I did it every summer through high school and why it factored so heavily in college. I realized that it’s meditative for me. It’s like meditation with training wheels. You’re mostly focused on putting one foot in front of the other, not tripping (you can imagine how hard that is for me when there are rocks and roots involved, given my history with sidewalks), absorbing what’s around you. The view is nice motivation, but it’s more than that, it’s a place to clear your mind and reset, and to that end, it doesn’t matter that much if I’m in Big Sur or in Vermont or Harriman State Park, where you’re close enough to the city to see the lights of the Empire State Building at night. It’s about the repetition of the steps and what that does to your thoughts.

West Coast

Scott and I got back late last night from California. There’s nothing sadder than the taxi line on a cold, winter Sunday night at JFK full of people just off a plane from someplace sun-warmed like Los Angeles.

We covered a lot of ground, starting in San Francisco, driving up to Napa and and then down along Highway 1, stopping in Big Sur and ending in Los Angeles, where I got to spend time with my new love, Baby Bea. I apologize that I’m out of practice documenting my travels, this trip had many purposes and I sort of forgot that I was actually on vacation and might want to share some of what we saw. Sorry. I’ll do my best to describe the important parts and put in pictures (mine or other people’s) where I have them.

In San Francisco we mostly walked. And walked up. Then walked down. Then up again. Many times we came over a ridge and saw water and smiled big smiles and said, “It’s kind of like Rio.” We ate delicious food, too. Lindsay took us for a great drive around the city that included the ocean and soup dumplings and a spicy kind of peanutty dumpling at a hole in the wall somewhere west of where we would have gotten to on foot. They were extraordinary.

Sausalito

We breakfasted on pastries at Tartine Bakery and ate a few different Italian meals, all with excellent company. The best food was at Flour + Water, and we loved the vibe there, too. It was the perfect mix of cozy and what I think is being described as kind of “eco chic” decor now, with reclaimed wood tables, exposed bulbs and glowing candlelight. We had a blast on New Year’s Eve at Locanda in the Mission and were warmly welcomed at a house party (not something that reliably happens in New York) and then continued on.

From San Francisco we drove up through Oakland and stopped briefly in Berkeley before continuing to the surreal expanse of Napa. The vines were bare this time of year, but the sideways light was perfect. We had a delicious meal (that included a mountain of truffle fries) at Bouchon in Yountville and checked out the castle (!) that is the Culinary Institute of America just north of the picturesque downtown of St. Helena.

From there we headed down to Palo Alto and then to Highway 1, to Big Sur, which literally took my breath away. It’s almost deliriously pretty. We did the stretch between Carmel and Big Sur as the sun was flaming out orange and pink, fading to cool blues and we ran out of words. I tried to breathe in as much as possible, fill my lungs with the air of a place that has mountains sloping into the Pacific. We ate at Nepenthe, the former home of Orson Welles and Rita Hayworth and went for a quick hike in the morning.

At this point in the trip, I learned some things about myself in California. I learned that I jay-walk like crazy. In San Francisco, people don’t really do it. I never think of myself as that much of a New Yorker, but people in California really just stand on the curb (on the curb, not two steps into the street ready to make the dash) until they get the walk signal. Even if there are no cars coming. They just…wait.

I also learned that as much as I love good food and exquisite coffee, I am not nearly as patient (see above) as California natives. There’s a Blue Bottle Coffee here in Williamsburg, and man, it’s good coffee. It’s sweet and mellow and whenever I’m over there, I try to stop in. Blue Bottles are all over San Francisco and I couldn’t have been more excited about taking in as much of their New Orleans style iced coffee as I could, however the lines were so long everywhere, at every stand, inside the Ferry Building, outside at the farmers market, in Hayes Valley, pretty much everywhere that we went. I kept passing it up, thinking that I would have another opportunity. On Tuesday, the day that we left San Francisco, I had not yet had the coffee I had been so excited about and so I woke up and walked to the Blue Bottle closest to where we were staying. And I waited for twenty minutes along with people who were also waiting for twenty minutes on their way to work for deliberate, pour-over coffee. Do people in San Francisco budget their mornings for half-hour coffee stops to get a to-go cup? This blew my mind. Especially when it happened again at Ritual Coffee in the Oxbow Public Market in Napa (where we had to wait for the water to seep through grounds as the barista poured it over. Slowly.). In Big Sur, at the Big Sur Bakery, again we waited for twenty minutes while coffee was made (not ours, the people directly in front of us). No one seemed in a hurry, and neither were we, really, we were on vacation, it just seemed crazy that people were so consistently patient.

From there we drove down to Los Angeles, through Santa Inez (Sideways) to check out SoCal’s rival wine region and were surprised to see that the towns running through that area were like Epcot villages, the first like a wild west caricature, the next a slice of odd Scandinavia, with A frame buildings and women walking down the street in lederhosen.

And then we arrived in Los Angeles, at Marshall and Heather’s, and I fell in love with Little Bea. It’s been a day and I already miss her.

Los Angeles was mostly consumed by staring at my niece, snuggling into her little downy head, and watching her funny faces. We did have a comical lunch at Cafe Gratitude with some friends (there is no other kind of lunch to have there, although seriously, the I am Powerful is really delicious) and went to a friend’s barbecue in Santa Monica and out in Venice. We had one of those magical experiences of the unexpected. Hanging out at a bar called Townhouse, one of our group exclaimed, “I want to dance! Let’s go downstairs.” Usually when this exclamation is made, the scene becomes more club like with strong beats and colored lights. Sometimes that’s fun, but it wasn’t really the mood we were feeling, and then, after paying the cover and descending down the stairs we were… listening to a great band with a lead singer with a smooth, strong voice. It was a perfect small music venue, with upbeat, laid back energy that carried us through our final late night tacos and back home to Baby Bea.

Beatrice Putney Lewy

I have a new niece! And I’m in love with her.

 

 

Three-legged Race

Scott and I talk a lot about our future, where we want to go from here, what we want to do. We also talk a lot about what it’s like to be thirty, how it’s hard to figure out what that means we’re supposed to be like. Do we keep holding on to being 24, where we stayed out late, sometimes drank too much, lived in apartments that weren’t coherently put together, with mismatched furniture. The job itself wasn’t so important because it was just a stepping stone to something else, a place to gain experience the world was open (it was also pre-recession). Most of the time it feels like we’re beyond that–we crave a more “grown up” apartment. When we go visit friends who have bought their places and have had shelving units installed, it feels like a logical next step. On the other side, the baby thing is just starting to happen among people close to us. The first baby felt like an outlier, a crazy thing ahead of the curve, but now it’s happening. And not just in a facebook way, where the pictures in the newsfeed transitioned from wild nights out to weddings to babies (though that’s happened, too) it’s real. It changes when and where and how often we can see people we used to see all the time. Doors have closed on some jobs and we expect ourselves to be in certain places by now, to have certain responsibilities, or at least ideas on what the trajectory looks like. Our peers own companies, they are in charge of other people.

And so we’re somewhere in the middle, too old for the things that felt acceptable and comfortable before, and not quite ready for the next thing. It feels like adolescence, making concerted choices about who we are and who we’re going to be. Only this time, we’re attached to another person, married, a pair, with separate ambitions that must go forward at the same time. As we talk about the choices that we’ve made together so far and how they might look next month, next year, marriage during this period of our late twenties and early thirties feels like a three-legged race. Sometimes we coordinate and move seamlessly forward, as we did in moving to Brazil. Sometimes it’s choppier. I didn’t realize until long after that my pull toward graduate school yanked Scott away from that country too fast and it was much too late to fix it. Enter the word that will now come up in our lives because it has to: regret. Many times in trying to please the other person, to help, to guess what they might be feeling or want, or trying to anticipate what they might need, we wind up tripping all over one another, not going nearly as fast as we might go on our own. And that’s scary, but I guess also part of the deal. In the end, it just points to the advice we’ve gotten over and over again as we embark upon marriage, communication is paramount. I wonder how long it will take us and how consistently we can follow that “inside, outside, inside, outside, inside, outside” rhythm.

Choices

Last night we went to a place called Torrisi Italian Specialties for dinner with close friends. It’s a perfect little New York restaurant with delicious food that makes you consider new flavors, layers of texture and mind-expanding tastes. There has been a lot written about it, here and here and here and here, and there are more, too. I don’t really need to talk about the food. Go there, the bread with tomato butter and handmade warm mozzarella will blow your mind as it did mine, it’s a nearly perfect bite of food.

One of the most interesting things about eating there was the relief that we all felt from not having to make choices. Every night they have a prix fixe menu. We had to pick a wine (there were probably thirty reds and the same number of whites, not pages and pages) and there was a choice between fish and chicken for the main course, that was it. Maybe it takes a certain kind of place where people have faith in the quality of the food that they’re willing to eat anything that’s presented (in our case, this faith included trying tripe). Maybe putting that much trust in the eating establishment puts a certain population off, and so they don’t go there. For us, it was liberating, it made us all sigh in relief. I’m realizing now as I write this just how much anxiety comes with ordering food off a menu. When it’s decided for me, as it was last night, I didn’t have to consider whether something was the healthiest thing on the menu, whether it had vegetables, where the meat came from, if a particular dish had been written about over and over again and was the thing to order even if you’re not in the mood for meatball sliders or pork belly buns, or any other number of things that get into my head as I read obsessively about food. I can check my crazy, and my knowledge and politics at the door. For me, specifically, and I think for at least a few of my friends, it releases us from the tension of having to make the right choice, whatever that means, in a delightful, relaxing way. It’s funny, though, to relish the absence of choice.

Consumption

No, I don’t mean the turn of the century disease. Or the overwhelming amount of buying and wanting and getting and giving that goes on this time of year. I mean being totally consumed by something all at once, thoroughly. It has been that kind of day for me. In all honesty, I am not a focused person. I admire Scott for his concentration and intensity, if he sits down to do something, he will do it with his full attention for however long it takes to get it done. I am not like that. If I sit down to say, write a paper, within seconds I can be back up getting a glass of water, staring out the window, looking at cookie recipes, checking to see if my passport safely arrived in Philadelphia (which reminds me…). But today was not like that.

I went to a knife skills class, and for that three hours, it never occurred to me to check my email, let alone remember that I own a device that does a thousand distracting things no matter where I am. I did not look up, I didn’t notice that the room that I was in had no windows, I didn’t search the walls for a clock. The only thing that mattered, the thing that took up my attention, was whether I was cutting properly, making perfect, tiny, two millimeter carrot cubes. It was beautiful and precise. I learned other things, too, like that you should buy all vegetables and just about everything whole, and how restaurants use every part of everything (almost) that comes into the kitchen. It’s like there are little secret stores of flavor everywhere.

After lunch with a friend–equally as engaging–I took a rainy stroll through the Union Square farmers market. It’s perhaps one of the most consuming places for me, even on a day like today that’s terribly gray and drippy. We’re going away and I couldn’t really buy any vegetables, so today I was drawn to a maple sugar stall, where they were selling maple sugar bars–really just bits of tart dried apricot and cashews barely held together by maple candy. Chewy and crunchy, salty, tart and sweet all at once. I also stopped by a stall selling grains, each seed of farro and freekah a promise that could come alive with some water and time.

Now I’m home, sitting at my computer and I was supposed to do work and got distracted in a completely consumed way reading about a husband and wife that started a tomato sauce company and another that started a clothing company with super cute clothes. It was light enough when I came home that I didn’t turn lights on and now I feel like a creep at a bright computer in the middle of a totally dark room.

It feels good to be focused, consumed. It’s satisfying. Perhaps I don’t need to turn the lights on yet. I can just be absorbed in the dark for a little while longer, today, I probably wouldn’t notice anyway.

 

Leaps of Faith

I sent my passport off to get renewed this morning. Is there anything scarier than letting such an important, personal thing out of your sight?

Maybe it’s just the family in which I grew up, but we always knew where our passports were, and I still do. Or did until I sent it out into the wide, rainy, windy, Christmas-gift saturated world to find its way through the opaque entwines of government agencies. When we were small my dad had our passports. They lived in the top right drawer of his dresser, next to the extra checkbooks and  other important papers. When we traveled, he held on to all five passports in the inner pocket of his navy sport jacket. He had his travel face on, the ambassador between his rambunctious, tired, whiny, sweet, restless, enthusiastic family and the (previously) orderly, official world of airports. They were handed over at check in all together, as a block, the agent’s eyes flicking down to the picture up to dad, down to the next picture, up to mom, down to the next, oldest brother, down, up, middle brother, down little girl barely visible below the counter. They were handed back all at once and secured back in that sport jacket pocket.

When I started traveling myself, I developed my own system. I know exactly where my passport lives in my apartment, all the time. There’s no chance that it would ever be haphazardly thrown in a drawer, it has it’s place. You never know when you’re going to need to find it immediately, and the idea of missing out on a trip, an experience, some type of fun because it’s misplaced, that just sounds too sad to think about.

Which leads me to this day, right now, where I am sans passport and full of anxiety. If my sister-in-law in London has her baby especially early, I’m screwed, I can’t go see him. If Scott decided to say, whisk me off to Tuscany or Thailand, forget it, I have to wait two to three weeks. While both of these things are unlikely, I’m without the option to go, and that’s scary.

So a small Channukah wish: Please, FedEx, please don’t lose my passport in the rush of tinsel and shiny paper and bows. US Passport Processing Center I wish for you to have a happy holiday and an unprecedented efficiency with my little helpless blue booklet that gives me access to the world. Please don’t let me down. I need no other gifts, honest, just this one little thing. Thank you.

Three-quarters Done

I’m three-quarters done with graduate school. It seems hard to believe, sort of shocking that in the last year and a half, since returning from Brazil, I have done three semesters of graduate school, lived in two apartments, had two internships, a marriage proposal and a wedding (!) I’ve written a gagillion words and read even more pages and I now understand things that I thought were unavailable to me, things that only certain, smarter, more curious people could know. Turns out not only am I allow to know them, too, but I can understand them well.

We watched Margin Call last night. It was wonderful for many different reasons–it’s subtlety and nuance, the skill of the acting, the tact that the director and writers took in framing the beginning of the crisis. It also allowed me to test how well I learned something that perhaps in the past I might not have felt allowed to know, to explore, something that belonged in the realm of my father and brothers, Scott and the Business section of the New York Times, the Bloomberg channel that I flipped past. In this last few years I turned on a part of my brain made me hesitate before. It’s comforting to know that it’s not ever going to be turned off, this dark corner is now illuminated.

Incredibly… Jealousy Inducing

I have a visceral reaction to Jonathan Safran Foer. It’s not pretty, in fact, it’s pretty ugly and uncalled for.

In the fall of 2003 I walked into Joyce Carol Oates’ office in the building at 185 Nassau. I was a senior in college, and I had been delighted the previous spring to learn that not only was I granted permission to write a creative thesis, but that she had selected me (she had selected me!) to be a thesis advisee. I was nervous, she was famous. And she was small, with an iron core, wrapped in bonito flakes, sheets of fluttery tissue paper. I have respect for her as a writer. Especially after she broke my heart with this New Yorker piece about her late husband. That day, however, I felt clunky, impossibly big and stuttering.

So what will you write your thesis about ? she asked me from the other side of her desk. I had taken many writing classes, but never with her.

I think I’ll write a book, I said.

She looked back at me skeptically, more iron than fluttery paper at this moment. Did you start yet? She asked.

Well, no.

Jonathan started over the summer. He nearly had a full draft by now.

There’s no worse feeling than being behind before you even start. Unfortunately, I feel that way a lot. She didn’t tell me I couldn’t write a novel, she didn’t actually know anything about me beyond the portfolio I had submitted with my application to write a creative thesis. Perhaps she had guessed that I was a little OCD about detail and description and that I was much worse at plot development. And so I wrote a collection of stories about the same characters. A cop out really. But Jonathan, her thesis advisee from a few years earlier, he wrote a novel. He started over the summer. And now, not only has he had a few (wildly) successful books, but the film industry is buzzing about the adaptation of “Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close.” I haven’t seen it, or read that novel, so I don’t judge, but I still have that visceral reaction, that anxiety about being behind. Behind what? you might ask. I’m not sure.

So I begin my New Year’s Resolution a few weeks early. I will feel excited for Jonathan Safran Foer and the others like him who make me feel nervous that I have to (proverbially) spend the rest of my life writing short stories just because I didn’t start over the summer. I will celebrate their success, and applaud them, knowing that their hard work and talent paid off. And mine will, too, whenever I get there. I don’t have to write short stories because JCO told me to, or because someone else started a little before I did. Fortunately, there’s room in this world for all of us and their success just means that there’s a place for mine even more.

Central Park

There was another thing I meant to write about today.

I walked through Central Park yesterday for the first time in a while, and I was struck by the same sensation that I always get when I take that first step in, whether it’s in the middle of a fetid New York summer or a glistening cold snap. It’s the only part of New York City that breathes. You feel it on your skin, it touches your face. It’s a certain kind of moisture in the air, a softness that even that little bit of fake nature provides. The rest of the city, the concrete streets and buses and cars and subway grates and sturdy and glassy buildings and people and stores and restaurants, we all just exhale. Everything carries a smell that’s slightly stale, a little bit already used, a kind of tired viscosity. In Central Park, even with that first step in, your lungs, and your eyelids and that space and the top of your nostrils remember that there does exist a wisp of something fresh somewhere in the middle, between the burdened rivers and all of the busy chaos.

All Those Coupons

I have pretty much unsubscribed from every coupon email list around. It was too many emails, too much lost money in expired opportunities–surf lessons in Rockaway, juice cleanses, hair treatments. However, as I learned last night, they do contribute anecdotal value. Perhaps that’s their main function.

Last night my friend Suzie invited me and Scott to what we both thought was a normal dinner at a brick oven pizza place somewhere in the East Village. Her coupon was a gift from a deal-loving relative, and it was going to expire at the end of the week. Excited to catch up with my friends, I was game. It turned out that the place was way up on the Upper East Side, and it was a wine tasting. It was one of the strangest things–we were led to a dim back room with tables around the edge and bad art on the walls. There was a table with wines in the center and a pseudo-Italian man pacing us around telling us what we were drinking. There was no list, no place to spit out the generous pours and no water. There wasn’t much food (bad when you’re tasting cheap wine at 9pm with no dinner) until they brought out pizza toward the end. There were other people there to use their soon-to-expire coupons as well–a group of fratty-ish guys and a foreign woman and her mother, dolled up in a tight black dress for a night on the town. The whole event was hilarious. They sent us each home with a bottle of Shiraz.

As a result of this coupon, I went to a part of the city I haven’t been in for probably a year, I got to spend some time with my friend and her boyfriend, and I laughed a lot, which is always worth something. Perhaps I was too quick to unsubscribe from all of those coupon lists. Perhaps the threat of expiring coupons is the push that we need to go have silly, unpredictable experiences that make for good (or maybe not so good), stories.

Anecdotes

I’ve had a hard time figuring out what this blog should be since we returned from Brazil a year and a half ago. There’s something different about the indulgence of a blog while you’re away from your friends and family than when you’re in the city where you live all the time, and most of your friends and family live there, too. That said, I have an idea.

I was listening to an NPR podcast the other day (I listen to a lot of Fresh Air and This American Life when I run) and I forget who Terry Gross was interviewing, but her guest was talking about living his life for the value of the anecdote he would derive from a particular action or event. While I think I’d like to have more of an overarching goal, it’s not a bad philosophy to live by. Live for the anecdote. It will ensure a rich life with varied and interesting experiences and will probably include colorful people and spontaneous fun. I think it will also make for fun blog posting. Here is my challenge to myself: every day (now that I’m nearly done with finals in my second to last semester of graduate school) I will post every day a current anecdote or a past one. They might be large or small, banal or interesting, we’ll see how it goes. Stay with me. If it stinks, if it’s boring, let me know–I’ll adjust. If it’s too indulgent, please tell me that, too.

My anecdote for today: Scott and I went to see the National on Monday night. It was at the Beacon Theater on the Upper West Side, which is a weird place for a show, and we were in the last row at the top of the balcony. The theater is all gilt and red velvet, with a suit of armor to the left side of the stage. The band itself was mostly side lit, with those ground level lights that shoot soft cones of luminance. In the back flickered a live, hipstomatic-ish black and white film of what was happening on stage. It was beautiful, and cozy, and really, it didn’t matter that there wasn’t that much to see, the music was enveloping, the kind that’s rich, textured and visceral. The theater was a cocoon and the music got into the fibers of my sweater, the strands of my hair, the cilli of the velvet of the folding chair. In the back of the theater, especially at the top of the theater, no one can see if you’re just closing your eyes, absorbing, rather than going through the things you’re supposed to do at rock concerts.

And then I wrote about Wilmington

Check out my new piece on Wrightsville Beach, NC.

Hello, sweet friend

A lot has happened between then and now (then being whenever you want it to be–yesterday, the last time you read this blog, Brazil. The then I had in mind was about a year and a half ago when I visited Hans’ garden out on the eastern edge of Sao Paulo. Or maybe it was last summer when we lived in Brooklyn and I made it a point to buy vegetables at the Cadman Plaza farmer’s market). It’s only now that I’m writing this that I realize how much I’ve learned since then, how dramatically my philosophy on food and exercise and being outside have changed. The importance of awareness.

I mostly stopped writing here, in this space, because I don’t think what I think about New York is even minimally interesting. There are 22 million people living in New York, and all of them have their own stories, their own lenses and filters. Maybe something that began as a way to keep in touch with people I love (or those who wanted to know that we were safe or adventurous while living in the southern hemisphere) will turn into a space for me to learn how to write again, to practice the way that I should be. We’ll see. No promises.

My interests in delicious, fresh food finally turned into growing things today. It’s not much, just a few two dollar terracotta pots, a little bit of (definitely inorganic, chemical laden) potting soil (where does one find soil in New York City if not the Archie’s hardware store on 14th Street east of Seventh Avenue?), and six little herbs from the Union Square greenmarket. Basil, rosemary, mint, thyme and parsley. For now they look pretty on my fire escape and it gave me a glimpse of a lush green terrace I might have sometime. Again, we’ll see. I hope I can keep these little guys alive. Tomorrow, when it’s light out, I’ll take a picture.

Dinner with Friends

I’ve been on this train for almost 7 hours now.  It’s amazing how time slips by.  So far I’ve read a book, read a magazine, had a snack in the cafe, sat in the lounge car for a while staring at Wisconsin, went outside to get fresh air in Milwaukee and then Winona, sent some emails and had dinner in the dining car.  I guess that could fill 7 hours, but time seems to effortlessly slip through my fingers on the train — just like sand.  I feel like I need to stay up all night to capture every moment.

Dinner tonight was an experience.  I was sat with 3 male characters who are traveling by themselves.  A jolly black man from NJ who also came to Chicago via DC, an older sparkplug from Minneapolis and a young kid from Toronto.  The older sparkplug told me that he often travels by rail, so I asked him why.  ” I love seeing the country,” he began.  “It’s a lot easier than flying, it costs less than flying, it costs less than flying if you book in advance (he’s obviously not riding in a sleeper car) and I’ve met some pretty interesting people…Plus, you get to eat good, hot meals and stretch your legs and move around — things you can’t do on planes or buses.”

“I think that about sums it up,” said the guy from NJ.  “That and they always seat 2 big guys next to one another on a plane.”

“Yeah. You gotta be resigned to the fact that it takes time to travel by train though,” added the sparkplug.  The way he keeps peppering me with questions and then answering them himself with long, droning answers, I get the sense that he has a lot of time.

“Well, I definitely sat next to an intersting character on my train ride to Chicago,” I began, and tell them the story of Moral Turpitude Boy.  “Ha!” says sparkplug.  “It’s the quiet ones that you have to watch out for.  I once sat down next to what I thought seemed like a nice, quiet chap.  Turns out he’d just gotten out of prison for tax evasion and he was proud of it!” He carried on for a bit about his seatmate’s lawlessness and lack of patriotism, noting that he himself is a staunch Republican and had worked for the government for 37 years.

“Are you or your husband involved in anything glamorous in LA?” he suddenly asked me.

“No. I’m a corporate lawyer by training,” I said with a smile, “but my husband is a filmmaker.”

“Anything I’ve seen — I’m a movie buff,” he pressed, eagerly leaning across the table with wide eyes.

“Well, he made this movie Blue State about a guy who moves to Canada after George Bush gets elected …” I begin, noticing dark clouds starting to cover his eyes. Thankfully our food arrives to save me from the bear trap I’d set for myself.

“I once sat next to the nationally crowned king hobo,” sparkplug prattled away, telling us the difference between “hobos” and “bums” and all about the hobo national convention.

I couldn’t help thinking at the end of the meal, as I struggled to extricate from sparkplug’s conversation and return to my sleeper, that I had to agree with him on most of the benefits that he listed about train travel. When else in my life would I have broken bread with a character like him?  Or picked up golden nuggets like the stories he shared?

Walking back the 6 cars that I had to travel through to get to my sleeper, I passed Amish people, young babies travelling with their mothers, multiple people on crutches or with canes, students doing homework, men and women flirting in the rapidly transforming lounge and a large group travelling to a funeral. A slice of America. Maybe a smarter slice  because they have figured out the benefits of the under-recognized art of train travel.

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DC to Chicago

April 20, 4:05 pm
Leaving DC. It’s funny or strange how I didn’t actualize that I would be present in the cities where I have train stopovers. DC – I’ve barely been back since I left after spending a semester of law school down here. It is a city full of memories for me. Like the cherry blossoms twirling in the wind, memories flood back to me as I stroll around the parks and memorials near the mall. Twice I lived in DC, both at extremely emotional times in my life. A caucaphony of past images comes at me.

I’m a bit relieved to retreat from the intensity of memories to the safety of my first long distance train.  Seventeen hours from DC to Chicago. I was hoping to have two seats to myself but they assign us seats on this train and I have a seatmate for the whole journey.

And he’s chatty. His first words to me are, “I booked my ticket west this morning. I don’t know where I’m going or what I’m going to do. All I know is that I had to flee DC for a few weeks for moral reasons.” Fantastic. I don’t want to know why. I don’t want to know anything about him, but now with his boyish jabber he has pierced my autonomous writing bubble and I feel observed, distracted, monkeymind. Is he going to steal from me while I’m sleeping? I don’t think so, but who knows? I’m still a bit rattled from this morning’s man in Penn Station with the profusely bloody head incident. His shoes are old. They show lots of wear and miles. I feel like he needs to be loved and nurtured but I’m not available to do that for him. I have other priorities.

Despite my best efforts to look busy reading a book, writing, pretending to sleep, Mr. Moral Turpitude is still dropping one line grenades of conversation such as, “I blame all the troubles in my life on my father,” and “It’s a sure sign that something’s wrong when your second word is ‘nintendo’ like mine was.” Tired of the personal space bombardment, I got up to sit in the lounge car.
By this point of the journey we were somewhere in rural Maryland, north of Cumberland. The lounge car on a train is apparently where people go to socialize at night. It’s like happy hour at a bar as we glide by scenic mountain and river scapes. I buy my root beer and happily sit down to watch the raging rivers and streams that we skate by — observers to a nature we had no part in creating. I’m a bit spellbound that a $162.50 ticket buys me a stolen glance into these beauties of nature that I’d never see otherwise.

The river is our patient companion on this train ride, and sleepy rural towns that remind me of a mix between Appalachia and an old western. Little towns, some consisting of a pocket of no more than 7 houses in a mountain bend, secreted away. What do people do in these towns? What secrets are they hiding that they bury themselves, their very existence, so deep in the woods?

Night is falling and I’m mesmerized by the gauze of dusk, my eyes searching for defining figures and lines. Total nightfall is close and so far from the glow of city light pollution it will be charcoal black, blinding soon.

As the darkness set in outside, I turned back to the lounge to take in what was going on around me. Disco lounge. I walked back to my seat past creepy guys gesturing to open seats next to them and offering to share their snack car- purchased booze.

Back at my seat, my seatmate was as eager as ever to share his tales of moral turpitude. So plugging in headphones and sleeping seemed the only escape.

And sleep I did. For 10 hours, basically until we reached Chicago the next morning. Only I woke up with a terrible headache. A hangover from lack of breathing space. Thank god I have my own private sleeper car on the next train leg!

Sister Stations

April 20, NYC, 6:20 a.m.
I’ve never been to Grand Central this early in the morning and as I enter from the buzz and bustle of the Manhattan streets (somehow I exited my prior train directly onto the street even though I want to be in the main part of Grand Central before moving on to Penn Station), pulling the heavy gold-crusted door toward me, Grand Central announces itself. I rush in, powered by the morning energy of the city streets and the desire to set down my increasingly heavy bags. But as the door shuts behind me, the street noise trailing off in a whisper, I hear Grand Central. The squeaky wheel on my roller bag bows in reverence as I slow and then stop at the top of the stairs, looking down into the basin of Grand Central, and I take in its silence. As if the entire city of New York took one long simultaneous inhale and held it — the vacuum, cozy, meditative and robust silence of Grand Central Station at 6:20 a.m. Like a speaker who needs no introduction, a dance exquisite without music, the silence is astounding. I’m hesitant to move and join the crowds below, content to be an observer rather than a participant.

Eventually I have to move on to Penn Station, Grand Central’s wayward sister station. It does not disappoint. Within 5 minutes of my arrival I see a man with blood dripping down his face. Police officers quickly surround him as he explains how a man punched him, then ran away with his bag. I can’t avert my eyes from this scene and most of all it bugs me that 15 minutes later, still no one has addressed his bloody face. Classical music loudly plays over the sound system and it irritates rather than calms me. I want to escape into my Ipad, shopping, reading, anything that doesn’t involve me being present here at Penn Station. I need the train to arrive and ferret me away from this craziness!