Life swap

First of all, know that these sounds are normal: birds very close to the house, the way our cat belts out torch songs of boredom in the middle of the night.

The car horns and sanitation workers you have in New York will be replaced by a throbbing chorus of cicadas. You may call a friend and hold the phone in the air. Just try to imagine, you will say, what I am going through.

When you tell your parents of your plan to take up residence in Alabama for three weeks, as our dogsitter, they fear for your safety in this place where anyone and everyone could be carrying a gun. Manhattan, the devil you know, has its dangers to be sure, but out there, in wild America, you can’t be sure of anything, only that you are an outsider.

Your mother reminds you that you are Jewish, that you might have car trouble, and that this is a place with storms and snakes. Or maybe they don’t know about the snakes. My daughter mentioned the other day that she sees them pop out of holes in the ground on her way to school. I don’t think I will tell you about the snakes.

My husband, who understands what people from New York City can be like, because he is married to one, emphasizes that people in the South are friendly. It is customary to nod or wave as you drive down our street or even speak to people in the supermarket. You ask me about this later and I confirm that it is true. You don’t need an exit strategy.

Even as I tell you that we live on a suburban street, I know that you are picturing a swamp, the only means of escape a rusted out truck with manual ignition. As you pull repeatedly on the clutch the cicadas drown out all other sounds.

As I write the instructions for how to look after the dog and where to find things, you ask questions I hadn’t anticipated. I am trying to tell you how to navigate my life while you are busy inventing your own.

In one email you ask if I own a mandolin and where to go to an open mic night to sing. I know where to find a cigar box banjo, but I am not even sure these are real questions. Since when are you a musician?

You clarify that the mandolin is for slicing cucumbers from the farmers market and that you have a fantasy where you will unleash your inner cabaret persona. You imagine a nearly empty nightclub—I am picturing a raucous table of missile defense engineers drinking Monkeynaut, a local brew, cheering you on. This is not a place where we celebrate loneliness.

You ask what to bring. How can I tell you? A bathing suit. A sweater for the supermarket. But maybe also a cape and a tricornered hat.

What time does the dog go to bed? You ask. Does he like to chase balls? The questions keep coming: ziplining, manicures, health food. I am researching a new life rather than instructing in my own. You are free from the burden of being me. All I ask in return is that you let me know how it goes.

This piece was written last spring in answer to a writing prompt of Operating Instructions. My friend did come here and became good enough friends with some of our friends that she returned. She could have been the only person in all of NYC to visit for New Year’s. She found the experience broadening in some ways and the experience of having to drive everywhere oppressive, which I think very few Americans get. People think cars are freedom, but if you have grown up being able to walk out the door and get anywhere on foot or public transportation a car is a big, needy beast with its own agenda. You have to negotiate with it to get anywhere. You have to pay attention to it and to “the road” first thing in the morning. She has drafted her own version of the experience, which I will share here as a companion piece.

Day 6

It is Thursday morning, Day 6 of the capsule wardrobe, Project 333 experiment. My friends and I are recording the month. Some notes.

Monday evening: Cosmetics are not part of the project, but I go through my box of make-up and am delighted to find an iridescent, electric blue eye shadow that I had totally forgotten about. I will wear this tomorrow.

Tuesday morning: I look for my Cholly earrings and can’t find them. Charles made these for me in high school out of a sheet of metal from his dad’s sequin factory. He experimented with different shapes and sold them at a Soho boutique. Most were round and dramatic with connecting parts, but mine are long and skinny, almost like feathers. Remember feather earrings? Remember buttons? I wore these earrings almost every day in 10th grade. I kept track of them through all of those high school sleepovers, sleepovers after parties, sleepovers after my friend’s play, after Trader Vic’s. Taxicabs, Magic Tree, rain, coffee shops, the quiet key in the door. I picture the glass-topped hotel side tables I might have laid them on in January. I am pretty sure I wore them in Atlanta last month. They are a blackish blue, not shiny, but not dull. They would easily be lost on a reflective surface. The edges are worn, distressed metal from summers of corrosive beach air, 30-plus years of being handled. They are a very physical souvenir of all of these years—of a friend who is still making things, of being a kid in New York in the 80s—and completely irreplaceable, so if I left them in the hotel they are gone. I look in the bags I took. Not there. I say goodbye to them.

Tuesday evening: But I am really good about not losing jewelry. In a hotel, I slip things into my purse rather than leave them on the side table. They are very thin and maybe they are actually in the jewelry box, but I just didn’t see them, but I tell myself this is a vain hope. I take the box into good light and there they are, tucked up against the side. What else is in here?

Technically, for Project 333, you are supposed to include your accessories, even sunglasses, in the 33 items you wear but I’m not doing this. Anyway, I  thought, in terms of making more space in your life, the jewelry box is going to occupy the same space whether it’s full or only has six items in it.

The box has an upper tray, where I keep earrings. This is where I find Charlie’s earrings. Right where they should have been. A reversal of loss. The tray lifts out and underneath is are bracelets and a small green velvet box. But as with so many other things, clothes, recipes, ideas, we keep skimming the same things off the top. We get used to what is there and we stop seeing. This is why supermarkets rearrange the shelves so often. It’s not more efficient all of a sudden for them to put the napkins in the far back corner, it’s that when you walk your route and lob the napkins into your cart without thinking you are not considering other purchases you could be making. You are not looking for the napkins. Once you devise a pattern, they rework the maze.

I never look under the tray. When I get dressed, I reach for the earrings on top. I forget about the necklace I had bought in the Bermondsey Market one dark and early morning. My new, now old, friend had taken me there, back in the days of her introducing me to London. We had eaten breakfast in a caff, English bacon, then new to me and not what I thought of as real bacon, but would come to love, mugs of strong tea, a place filled with mates and geezers, and always a few tourists on a recommendation from their Lonely Planet guide, “off the beaten path,” or from an expatriate women’s club newsletter (see previous post) or word of mouth among expatriate women, or the sheet of recommendations they typed up for visitors, or a blurb in Time Out.

I knew better to think I would be buying antique silver candlesticks for a song. I do not know enough about English china, nor had then logged enough hours of Roadshow to think I would in any way be able to get a bargain. This was the “thieves market,” where anything sold here, under cover of darkness, was fair game.

But I wanted to buy something, at least a souvenir of having come. Had we brought a flashlight? That was part of knowing what to do. I remember driving out we asked someone for directions and as a point of reference, a man actually said, “Do you know the muffin man?”

Inside the green velvet box are a pair of earrings I bought the first fall we had moved to Alabama. We were downtown and A. was visiting. Before we knew she would be coming, I had signed up for a 5K run for cancer research, something I had never tried before, but I was trying to fit in and be part of the community. After the race we went to an antiques store and I bought them. I don’t think they are even particularly old, but they were pretty and different to anything that I had. Not long after, a stone came loose and they joined the endless list of tasks that, when you are new, take longer because you don’t know where to go or who to ask for a recommendation. It was easier to leave them in the box.

I open the box. The stone is fitted back in and I can’t tell where the repair is needed. One back is missing. The post is bent. The box rattles. I shake out a lone earring, whose twin is in the tray, and another pair of earrings that I had forgotten about to such an extent that for a moment I thought they might have come in the box from the antique store. But then I remember them. Why are they in the green box? Had they needed a repair too? Had the earrings mended themselves, left alone in the dark for three years?

There is a lesson here, in this box within a box. Damaged treasures. The friends and places that seem to envelop them, why getting rid of certain clothes or things can be so hard because it’s not the thing itself but all the memories it conjures up.

Wednesday night: Having fewer things forces you to take better care of the things you do have.

Thursday morning: The older daughter is now taking a business and career class, a freshman requirement. One thing they can do for 10% of their grade is wear business clothing one day a week. I lend her a skirt and survey the rest of the clothes I have placed on the other side of the closet and consider what constitutes a business wardrobe for a freshman who has yet to decide upon a career. Will this require the creation of a capsule wardrobe based on anticipating the sartorial standards of a teacher I haven’t met for a career, the idea of which we hope to nurture, but which is hypothetical. For the boys, of course, this will be achieved with khakis and a blazer, whereas for the girls, do I tell her this?, it is much more complicated.

Photo, screenshot of photo of clipping (New York Magazine?) from Jeremiah’s Vanishing New York.

Equality rocks

My friend in New York City called one day last fall to say that she was thinking of moving here. I think it was because of a picture I had posted on Facebook of a local apartment complex: clean, modest and mid-century fabulous.

Why am I taking grief from people in this crazy a place when I could just go somewhere quiet and affordable? is how one’s line of thought goes in NYC. I don’t need this. And so begin the fantasies of cheesemaking in Vermont or moving to a small city in the South.

When we lived in New York, people were always threatening to leave. The irony? I was never one of them.

Two weeks, a family friend said, was how long it would take to reacclimate if we moved back from London. When you were back, people weren’t too concerned about where you’d been (true of people everywhere). The city you returned to, like a self-absorbed friend, had its own issues and needs. Whatever exotic little habits you might have picked up from wherever were swept away by some new trauma about how they didn’t have that same particular muffin/soy drink/bartender at that place you always went to.

My friend is picturing a university town and thinking liberal and I’m saying not so liberal. International, yes. Educated, yes. It’s… conservative, I tell her. I mention one thing that had taken me aback when we arrived, Choose Life car tags. When I had last lived in America, your license plate said your state and maybe the state slogan, but not your college or your social or religious beliefs. Maybe other states all do this now, too, but I hadn’t seen it before. There was a pause. She was like, I’m going to have to think about this.

That pause, that slamming on of mental brakes, told us that one should not rush out of Manhattan. Maybe it was right to toss out something a little scary, like a test, but I reeled back from the force of the detail as it rebounded.

When we were looking at houses here I was shocked by a gun cabinet in the family room. There are a lot of ancient people driving beige Mercury sedans. Our area has a high incidence of tornadoes, low crime, most people own dogs. Do we base our decisions on statistics, observation or anecdote? We say that we have weighed up the pros and cons, but really we liked the way the color of the leaves went with the color of the paint, very Prada, very college housing, and we figure the people that go with this idea must be here, too. And they probably are, but so are people who use their cars to advertise lots of ideas you don’t agree with.

Do you remember the prophets of doom in the NYC subway, in those vast corridors between platforms at the 34th or 42nd Street stations, passing out slips of paper with densely written bits of scripture or poetry. Most of us did not share our beliefs or art so readily. There were men in signboards with the same close text inscribed, back and front, who held megaphones through which they foretold of the apocalypse, of our sins, at busy intersections, so we formed a river of the unrepentant that flowed around them. Your need to use your car to tell me who you voted for and why reminds me of them.

It is easy to imagine your life, simplified, in a bungalow or, as I imagine my friend’s life, minus the expense and hassle of the city, in a river-view apartment, on a floor that is three times higher than any building in this town, with space to think if not to move. There could well be a bicycle on the wall, a too-full closet, or things packed tightly under the bed. But I hear only a charming symphony of horns from overheated taxis and imagine a life decadent with choice and Shakespeare in the Park, overheard gems, parties at restaurants, readings at independent bookstores.

She does not move to Alabama. Not yet. Months go by. A bumper sticker makes me laugh: six zombies—two adults, two children, dog, cat—and the words, “Our family ate your stick family.”

Now come the Supreme Court hearings for the Defense of Marriage Act. A meme strikes. People are changing their avatars to show support for same-sex marriage. I support same-sex marriage, but I have my initial bumper sticker reaction to the avatar change.

In an article in the New Yorker, Malcolm Gladwell is quoted saying Facebook activism is for people who aren’t motivated to make a real sacrifice, on the other hand, the idea with the avatars is to show that there is popular support for equality in marriage and to make the abstract personal. As a person who grew up practically on Christopher Street and then attended college at Ivy League Whorehouse, one would not be surprised to find me sporting the red and pink equal sign avatar but, as a person living in the deep South, it’s more important to represent my region and in this region to stick up for what I believe, if only quietly and abstractly.

Alabama has red dirt and it is an agrarian place where people believe in the land. I placed some pebbles in the tire tracks of a red dirt road and made my own avatar. It’s indigenous. And, like choosing who you love, it’s natural and it’s personal. Like my friend grasping the social significance of the Choose Life car tag, symbols have power. Adopting a meme for your avatar is not much in the face of a much more profound issue, but there is a force in the aggregation of these images. Looks matter. One turquoise wall could contain a portal to a new life. Sitting in our cars, scrolling through Facebook, we notice these things, these small but telling details that could change your mind in an instant.

Cold turkey

On Monday night, Hurricane Sandy blew through my social media newstream.  First people were cooking and preparing for the somewhat unimaginable and then they were sharing reports of the approaching storm, then signing off because the lights were flickering. And then they were gone.

Behind the silence are the stories, a million pieces of experience, that could be expressed, but which won’t be, or only partially, mostly dammed up or shared with random strangers. You are speaking to the people you see face to face, people in your building who have information to share. I am feeling the actual geographical distance.

We see people from school as we trick or treat. Life here is normal. The voices are local. What do you hear from New York? One pip here: cold in New Jersey; another: bored in the Lower East Side; what was that noise? in Greenwich Village; a lot of stairs to climb and a long walk in the dark in Chelsea.

And when the power is restored, the heat back on, toilets flushing, hot water running, the voices will come running back like water out of tunnels, drained, dry land, conversation again with people who aren’t here.

Before the storm hit, the radio ran interviews with people preparing. A young mother in Brooklyn Heights who was stocking up on DVDs to watch with her child on the 9th floor. Obviously not factoring in the possibility of a power outage. “Oh, we’ll be fine, we live on the 9th floor.” Or water pressure, or elevators. Or the fact that it was going to be more than one night without the subway.

It is hard for all of us to imagine consequences of any kind. It’s a human thing. But then once something happens it’s hard to stop from spinning it out to a worst case scenario with looting and zombies. For a while afterwards, you make sure that you are fully stocked up on cash and pet food and medicine and your radio has batteries, but one day you don’t have time to go to the ATM and you spend the emergency money. You’ll always have something to hand when there is an emergency, but you won’t have everything.

Once you have gotten your life and your apartment back to normal, caught up on work and laundry, I would love to hear what it was like. Because the thing that makes your story interesting is the thing you didn’t plan for, which for most of you might have been all of it.

Screenshot of photo by Craig Ruttle, AP.

I ♥ New York

My husband and I are seated separately on the plane but we both end up next to members of the same hunting party. They are natives of our Alabama town, affiliated with the military in some way and headed to Canada to hunt geese. My seat mate and I share a mutual appreciation for the cows in the fields that face the Target mall. He remembers when the roads around the slowly diminishing cattle farm did not exist or were unpaved.

“You’ll laugh,” he says, “but I wish we had a zoo.”

Maybe we can convince the University of North Alabama to contribute their lion, a mascot housed somewhere on the campus in what suggests a sideshow attraction. I imagine him on display in the student center, pacing behind a wall of thick plexiglass in a landscape of ficus trees and stuffed representations of the other teams’ mascots, which he would chew and lick and try to find among them signs of life so that he would not have to be the only one.

In the name of city planning, I propose a public climbing wall and a pavilion with a snack bar to accompany the very nice climbing frame that stands alone on the former airfield. There are bathrooms I think, but no shade.

There are old train tracks, says the hunter, that could be restored and connect the river to the center of town and to the airport. My husband thinks any scheme involving public transport is doomed here because no one will voluntarily leave their cars, but I see potential in this. Young teens, old enough to set forth on their own, but too young to drive, could use them. People could try something different.

He has an idea for a seafood restaurant on the river, by the marina. His retail addition would be a hunting superstore, which makes more sense than a Nordstroms if you are thinking about the people who actually live here, how they live, what they do, and how, as with government surveys on healthy eating, what we say, want and do are often three different things.

Changing planes in the Atlanta airport, we notice youth and old guys in fedoras and adults in mouse ears. One man in particular catches my eye. He is about our age, dressed all in black, hat included, in a long overcoat and turtleneck. He wears a collection of charm necklaces, embedded with rhinestones (surely not diamonds), notably including a microphone and a 45 rpm disc. When he sees me noticing him/them, he flashes me a big smile. He ends up in the seat in front of me and I eavesdrop on his conversation with two guys going to have a baseball weekend. Turns out, he is the (new) lead singer in the Four Tops. He talks about the Temps and the Tops, Michael and Diana. His career is about an era now past. He has professionally assumed the role of a deceased artist. I check him out online later and he is who he says he is.

Lives and layers, past and present, identity and place. If these aren’t already established as the theme of this blog, they are the themes of this post and of this trip.

Throughout the week, as I take my daughters on a tour of my hometown and as my husband and I retrace some of the paths of our former life together, and we reorient ourselves, the past and the present are banging against each other.

We visit the Transit Museum, itself embodying these themes, housed in a defunct station where they filmed The Taking of the Pelham One Two Three. One can walk through subways of yore with the old ads. Where, though, are the Evelyn Wood speedreading ads, the VD Ad Council posters of the 70s, the 7-Up and Dr. Pepper clocks — anyone remember those? Wheels turned inside a lightbox display so that psychedelic rainbow clouds spun colors, water trickled over rocks, and maybe also drinks over ice, scotch even, this being back in the day of cigarette and liquor ads being allowed in all formats, with billboards that blew smoke rings and suave guys in tight turtleneck sweaters with black eyes because they’d rather fight than switch, or drinking a Campari and soda on account of Liza Minnelli. Where, moving on in time, was the 90s AIDS education tragedy of Marisol y Julio? Or the smooth-cheeked dermatologist, Dr. Jonathan Zizmor? The Frutopia cornucopia that filled an entire subway car in the 90s as graffiti once had?

I have come without a book but find, in the apartment we have rented, an anthology of writing about the subway. It’s so good that we order one for ourselves to finish on our return. These themes play out over and over. Leaving, returning, being.

The dominant smell of the city is now strawberry air freshener. The familiar stench of human urine still exists at the corner of my old block, as you approach 6th Avenue, but mostly I’m smelling strawberry, as if the city has installed Air Wick plugins under the subway grates as part of the plan to make itself more attractive to tourists. It’s not a public urinal anymore, but a guest bathroom.

We walk across the Brooklyn Bridge, through throngs of tourists, and up the Highline, through throngs of tourists. In Chinatown, an old woman sits in a darkened storefront window, folding paper flowers.

We go to Newsies, a Disney musical about turn-of-the-century street urchins. It takes a grim slice of urban history and serves it up as a heartwarming victory of the weak over the powerful, sort-of. The bad stuff is alluded to but not dwelt upon. It is a gateway into history and the past that lurks everywhere in the city despite what is referred to as the Disneyfication of it. In which case, this is an actual case of Disneyfication. If we’d had more time, I would have included a visit to the Tenement Museum, which I’ve never been to, but at the very least, we can pull out our copy of How the Other Half Lives and provide the historical context once we’re home. Those real newsies, they were much younger and wouldn’t have had the energy to dance like that.

I photograph the ghosts of old ads painted on the walls of buildings.

We take the bus up to the Met. I check with the driver that this will indeed take us as far uptown as we want to go. You cannot assume things will run as they used to.

“Where are you going?” demands an older man when we take our seats. I had forgotten the indignation New Yorkers feel when they overhear bad advice. I assure him that we have no intention of taking a crosstown bus. Because, I agree, that would be ridiculous.

“I love watching,” he says. “I don’t understand why so many people have their heads down in their Kindles and iPhones. I could never live anywhere else.”

At the Met, we enter the Egyptian tomb that was always one of my favorite places. Maybe somehow the museum had overlooked one passageway that would take you from 81st street and into the ancient past.

“I found what I was looking for my,” husband said of his time in the museum book store, “but it wasn’t what I wanted.”

“Ooh,” I say, taking out my pen.

Fifth Avenue is a spectacle. A storefront is transformed into a wall of moving water, a webcast of the Huntington Sound. Shirtless men in hoodies lurk inside the entrance to Abercrombie. Crowds surge. It feels familiar, the dowdy carpet showrooms, the nothingness of Midtown.

I guess I knew the galleries had left Soho, priced out. It is a nicer version of our local mall with better coffee and a high end soap shop in place of the lurid Bath & Body Works. The familiar green awning of the Vesuvio bakery tricks us. It is no longer Vesuvio. I try on boots that made my feet look like giraffe hooves, that I loved but not quite enough for the money and the realization that they would be impossible to drive in.

My friend and I are trying to teach our daughters how to cross the street and shoulder their way through the crowds. The first time I came home from college was with her. We got a ride from a guy in our dorm. We surprised our parents, slipping back into the city for a quick fix. I was pleased that it still existed and seemed to function as well without me, in the same way that it has done these past decades. “In two weeks,” a family friend had once said re moving back, “people will forget you had ever left.”

On our last day, we go to the gallery of an old friend of my husband’s, an artist whose studio we’d been to 12 years ago. His gallery has moved to Hell’s Kitchen, off the Highline. His subject is the city. When we are leaving, the man at the gallery tells us to go around the corner, to the Marlborough Gallery. There would be a door in the middle of the gallery. You might think it’s not part of the show, or it’s a mistake, but go in and keep going.

We go in. We keep going. It is a journey not unlike the week itself. It is unexpected, delightful, easy, familiar, strange. One scene reveals another. We step through holes in the wall from one display to the next. A bodega-y shop, a plastic surgery clinic, a disused OTB parlor. These, I think, no longer exist, but I remember them as a fixture. Where are the kinds of people who hung out there?

Afterwards, we walk to midtown, through an old housing project. Two cans of College Inn broth prop up a window air conditioning unit.

When we reach 8th Avenue from the west, the older daughter, having stood on the same corner four days earlier, having arrived from the north, says, “We have been here before.”

Fashion Week at Costco

It was my husband who saw it first, digging around on the Costco website. Our local store would be holding a special event for Women’s Fashion Apparel. I know. I had the same thought. But I live in Alabama. We have a lot of things going for us here, but we are not a fashionable place.

I am not a hair and make-up person. I endure high heels in rare and brief bouts of vanity. They really are excruciating. Wedges and platforms I like, but you can’t drive in platforms. I am a disheveled middle-aged quasi-hipster living in a place that values the hair and the face and doesn’t do visual irony.

Last year, I complimented someone on her skirt and it turned out that she had made it at a skirt party. I felt completely out of my depth. It was a great skirt. I wish I could sew or had a seamstress. I wish knew about more stuff. I wish I were the kind of person who could go to a party and, amid glasses of wine and chit-chat, decide a fabric and style that would suit me that well. It makes you realize the importance of dresses in 19th-century novels, of having an eye for color and design, of selecting well, a skill many of us have lost in these days of cheap, mass market clothing, where you won’t be skulking through the season in something unflattering that will diminish all prospects of making a good match. Instead, I can make dozens of small, fairly inconsequential mistakes, or spend an hour looking at the Boden website and not buy anything.

What could a fashion event at Costco possibly entail? Was it a rumor that got started when someone gave a definition of oxymoron? If you look on their website, clothing, apparel, isn’t even a category they mention.

Back in high school in NYC in the early ’80s I would travel 14th Street to get to school. This was before Zeckendorff Towers, before the heroin dealers were pushed out of Union Square by the Farmer’s Market. The smart shopper could find funky, ’60s style, possibly even actual stock from the ’60s, enameled earrings for $1 a pair. And I found opaque black tights, which were not the fashion staple then that they have been these last 30 years. Yes, 14th Street was the place to buy velvet paintings of Elvis or panthers at sunset and sofa throws depicting the Last Supper, but surely, between Wig World and all the children’s zapatos, there would be some finds. I wanted something nobody else had. This was why my friends and I loved thrift shops; what we found was ours alone. Any fool could follow trends. And it is exactly this 15-year-old’s attitude that rises when I hear about Costco’s fashion event. It’s not about buying bulk, or buying cheap, in this instance: it’s about outfoxing the others. Yeah, everyone goes to Costco, but do they know how to shop?

If Costco had a fashion show they could serve little sample glasses of Kirkland cava and paper cups with gravlax on La Brea pumpernickel and one tortilla chip with salsa on it. They could illuminate the runway with the purple LED trees and the Christmas lights that have just made their Labor Day appearance.

But, when I get there, no one at the store knows anything about it. The woman running customer service looks at the store’s calendar bookings. A children’s legging salesperson will be there one day and there is an underwear rep coming another. The faux fur vests featured in the Costco Connections magazine are hanging at the front of the store. I think that is as fashiony as it’s going to get around here

I stalk through the pallets of Kenneth Cole plus size black bootleg trousers and the boysenberry, mint and white fleeces and wonder, were I to be challenged to shop for clothes here, what I would buy. Levis, I think, and a white men’s undershirt or a layering tank with a built in bra and one of those big sherpa blankets you could keep in the trunk in case of emergencies could be a kind of wrap. It would be a failure of imagination. A fashion student might head for the paper and make some intricate and fragile costume out of yellow legal pad paper. Or maybe I would break down and buy the fur vest. There are some printed tops with a sort-of 60s/Ikat design on them. Maybe those. I glance desperately at the children’s clothes. There are some tutus that could be refashioned into a floor-length skirt and sewn onto the modal Ikat shirts to make a kind of Rodarte dress to wear with some olive green Wellington boots. If I were another person entirely.

The vests are reversible. There is something here that threatens to suffocate any creative spirit. Once at a baggage carousel, an older woman described her luggage as being “Costco black” and I knew exactly what she meant: functional and hideous. Here, black clothes are an unfashionable shade of black. I would buy a fake fur coat, but not a reversible, no doubt weatherproof, vest. Whatever women’s fashion apparel means at Costco HQ, it seems to be a mirage. But Costco Fashion Week should mean something more than a snide joke, it should be a challenge to all of us to look for the unusual and the overlooked, as well as a reminder to be realistic about where we are looking. But, I know, you’re thinking that the vest on the left might actually work. And it’s only $39.99.

This is an edited version of a post I wrote for the excellent fashion blog, Forever45. The main photo is one I took in NYC, on 14th Street, in the early 80s. The other two photos were taken at my local warehouse. The chain link is a nice touch. After writing this post, I came across a kiosk of modal/acrylic tops. Perhaps that was the main event? Having already invigilated the customer service desk and left my phone number in case anyone had any information I thought it was best to leave well enough alone, though Kristen, over at Forever45, looked up the Fylo brand and tells me it’s a house brand, lest you had confused it with an actual designer, Greek pastry or a discount airline.

Piano Man

Late in his brief career as a New York City public school teacher, at the end of the school year, there was a change to the schedule that meant my husband had to collect his sixth grade class from the music room, which was in another building, across the street.

He arrived to find them, not standing on risers, but slumped in their seats, some were reading or drawing, not misbehaving but enduring. The class was like a waiting room of the powerless and resigned. Up at the front of the room, their teacher sat in an equally desultory manner at a piano, playing a popular song from 1890s.

The song he sang, “Sidewalks of New York,” describes the growing up and apart of urban youth of the Victorian era, of days gone by and life in the city as it was then. It could have led to an interesting discussion of how children’s lives in the city had changed, or how music was made popular before radio, or how music can engender nostalgia. My husband was then reading Luc Sante’s Low Life, an engaging piece of research on that era, and knew the song from that book. On weekends we strolled the sidewalks of New York looking for glimpses of its former self along the Bowery and among the tenements by the Manhattan Bridge, to spot the windows of illegal sweatshops leaking steam or the ghosts of old signs that indicated dives, flophouses and bunco parlors.

In the same manner of squinting into the past, one might have sought to find vestiges of an alert and engaged teacher somewhere in this music classroom. The fug of boredom, the obsolescence of the song might inspire a Brutalist reposnse. Tear it all down. There is nothing worth saving here.  What had inspired him to start singing this song to his students? Whatever it was, he had long ago given up.

“What was going on in there?” my husband asked one of the students on their way back to class.

“We’ve been singing that song all year,” was the reply. It was by then May or June. They had survived the worst of it.

And maybe the children had been singing it at one point, but they weren’t anymore. The teacher was on his own. His was the only voice lifted in song, if you could say it was lifted. The children were silent. They were neither participants nor an audience, but fellow prisoners assiduously ignoring him while serving time together in the institution he had created in his classroom. When the student said “we” have been singing he was acknowledging that bond.

However good or bad your teacher or school is there will always be moments of institutional tedium. School is about being with other people. It will involve waiting, listening, not running in the halls, and being on a timetable you didn’t create, being part of a group. Some of us are better suited to that than others. But moments are one thing, a year is another.

I was lucky to have had good music teachers. They became the song, each note, each phrase, and the class flowed. You sang, you mastered songs, new songs were introduced, you filed onto the risers, you performed. Over the years, we sang a lot of show tunes, a lot of Beatles, some traditional, one by e. e. cummings, which if you get a couple of us together, I bet we could sing for you, remembering the way that Mr. Davis enunciated, “A wistful LiTT-Le clowN/whoM SomeBoD-Y burie-D/upsideDowN/in an ash….baR-ELL…” stamping the time in pointy shoes. He was fierce and intense. Each breath mattered.

In the spring, faculty and staff where I have worked are invited to join the choir to sing at commencement. I should do that, I would always think, and finally last spring I did. At school and as parents, we are always encouraging children to step outside of their comfort zones, take risks, try new things. If you don’t ever do it yourself, the words will start to ring hollow.

I had forgotten how hard it is to learn a piece of music. Our piece was “Things that Never Die,” with lyrics by Charles Dickens that do not rhyme and an alto part that is hard and high. The director provides the song in a series of MP3 files that isolate each part. I listen in the car and sing along when I am alone. We have only four rehearsals. What if I forget the lyrics or miss the cue to join or to fade? Fear adds drama to the proceedings.

I have not stretched my voice in a long time, but at the same time I record some readings (from this blog) for the radio. I am a person who shies away from the sound of her own voice, but I am learning to slow down and breathe, to focus on the timing. One page of text becomes a lot of ground to cover.

Singing takes more concentration than I had imagined. This was how the time flew by in chorus. Some days you pick up in the middle of the song or at the end. You seldom work through it start to finish. Not the same way every time, for a year. When you read for the radio, you slow down at the last line to let it sink in. It might be the only thing that people really hear.

Think of a man who sings the same song every day, who used to love to sing. His voice, his fingers on the keys, the ideas that flow, the memories of a time the song describes. How had he settled on this song, of all the songs, not “American Pie,” rich with history and code, which an older boy had explained to us in our Middle School chorus, or a song of his own youth, whenever that had been.

What is the sound of a voice falling on deaf ears? A nostalgia for nothing, not even a desire to escape, just waiting like 30 children trapped in a room or a man trapped in a job.

Writing can be like all of these things: solitary, pointless or giving voice. But as I slow down here at the end what should I leave with you with? A warning against stagnation, the cautionary tale of a burned out hack, a boast that I conquered a fear, or just a note of thanks? Thank you for listening.

Image: Cover from sheet music of “The Sidewalks of New York”, by Charles B. Lawlor and James W. Blake. New York: Richmond-Robbins, Inc., 1914

Cult fiction: Exclusive interview with reclusive authoress

The Wertis is delighted to present an exclusive interview with author Rebecca Moore, who after publishing a number of stories in alternative teen magazine Sassy and getting taken to a few lunches and coffees with editors, disappeared off the face of the earth, never to be heard from again. Until now.

We meet for a casual breakfast of homemade waffles. We are intermittently interrupted by the dog ringing his bell to go outside and the low hum of ongoing demands of morning in a household with children, hers, mine.

Moore published Lunch in Brooklyn, a novel she wrote as her MFA thesis at Columbia University.  The novel was excerpted in a three-part serial in Sassy in 1993-94. Moore was thrilled to receive letters from readers who had connected with the stories.

“As a writer,” she says, “it is an amazing feeling to connect with readers, even more amazing when your readers are writing for permission to reprint your words on a T-shirt.”

Moore was initially hopeful that the book would find a publisher, but it did not, which was sad.

A year later, Moore and her husband moved to London. Her life shifted, she lost confidence in her voice, had children, lacked time. But over the past few years, Moore has discovered online queries, including this blog post, and has been contacted by other Sassy readers as to the fate and availability of the book. She decided to shake the dust off the manuscript and toss it out into the world.

“With the emergence of online publishing, I thought it was better for the book to become available than for it to continue to languish in a box, just another mystery for my daughters to contemplate after my eventual demise.”

That was cheerful. Thanks. What inspired the book?

“The book started out as a couple of different stories,” she says. “One was entitled ‘8th Grade’ about girls behaving badly over the course of an unsupervised weekend, which is now the chapter of the book called Fifth Hex. I was trying to capture that weird edge of pushing against the boundaries of what you could do in the absence of parental supervision, a brush with danger, the sense girls that age have of wanting to be noticed and that feeling of immunity to real danger, the way you do things just to have done them.

“Another story was based on a tradition we had in middle school where at the end of the year the 8th graders would write a last will and testament and hand something down to a 7th grader to have in 8th grade. My friend who was moving up bequeathed me her bubblegum chain, which was something like 10 feet long and had in it gum wrappers that probably went back to when we were in lower school. There was a poignancy in that that I wanted to express, how we were shedding our childhoods and stepping forward into adolescence.

“The strange thing about the late 70s,” she continues, “was that it was a time when all of the grown-ups were having a second adolescence. Popular culture was rife with sex and drug jokes and self-actualization. It was like massive sort-of California-oriented era. Another thing I wanted to capture was the disconnect between the nurturing, empathic quality of my school with the snake-pit atmosphere we students could impose on each other. What was up with that? I thought I was the only one who felt that way, but when Facebook came along people shared all sorts of memories and reactions to those days that surprised me.”

What were you like in Middle School? Were you like Kate?

“I was sensitive to other people’s opinions of me, but less concerned with the idea of popularity, and less popular in the click-y sense, but I also had a more diverse and interesting group of friends. I don’t think I categorized people the way she did. But I do remember being kind of down in 8th grade and not feeling particularly connected.

“I reconnected with a middle school friend a few years ago. In the exchange of life stories she said that she had thought of me recently because her son, then a 9th grader ‘had writing on his shoes – messages from friends – and I was recalling that I had this friend in Middle School who wrote on her jeans; that it was kind of a thing to do then … You wrote this thing I have thought about a few times over the years, don’t know why: God is alive and well and signing bibles at Brentano’s. Pretty advanced for an 8th grader!'”

Moore laughs. “It’s funny because of all the stuff I dredged out of my memory about the kinds of stuff we did, I had forgotten about writing on jeans. I don’t even remember that as the kind of thing I would have written. When I think of myself at that age I feel a general sense of ugh. Even when we think of ourselves at that age we lack some kind of basic perspective that I hope we all gain as we get older, but maybe not about our young teen selves. We have this rigid way of perceiving ourselves, even in retrospect, that does not take into account other viewpoints or possibilities and so does not allow us the sense of capacity for change, which of course is tragic and ridiculous. We see what matters most at that moment. That was the sense I trying to convey at the end of the book, when Kate leaves school for the last time, she has the idea that memories solidify into something fossilized.”

It is time to drive the younger daughter to the pool so we conclude our interview. Moore says that she would be happy to continue the conversation another time. You can find her at her blog, Lunch in Brooklyn. The book is published in a variety of digital formats and can be purchased on Amazon, Smashwords or itunes.

Lucky

St. Patrick’s Day is an American holiday, but I’m not sure what it’s about. It is about the color green to be sure, with cupcakes stuck with plastic shamrocks and foil-wrapped coins, a string of green Mardi Gras beads to ward off pinchers and/or wearing a green shirt. It is not about Ireland. It is not about religion or politics or being Irish.

We’re at the outside mall yesterday and nearly everyone is in green. It was like stepping into a movie set, a sensation that was only enhanced by the gigantic synthetic stone horse in front of an upscale chain Chinese restaurant and the buskers and the early summer weather.

St. Patrick’s Day in NYC was about jubilance, police barriers, green beer and Kiss Me pins, it was about Irishness in a city then full of Blarney Stone bars. In London, it was a theme in pubs and, with the city still in the clutch of winter bleakness, offered a reason to drink Guinness or Harp.

Here, in Alabama, or at least in our town, it seems to be a symbolic thing about a color. What’s striking about the green shirts that everyone’s wearing is that they are just that: green shirts. There are no slogans on them. Normally, on a Saturday at the mall, you would see people in team colors, commemorative National Championship jerseys, crimson, orange, navy, purple. And T-shirts, athletic or otherwise, normally are about something, teams or 5K charity runs. There is restraint and unity in so many plain green shirts. And the fact that they are in so many shades and styles have a charm almost akin to a homemade Halloween costume.

I had worn a green, more of a teal, shirt by accident, but out there in the agora, I blended in. Lucky accident, I thought, but why? Because I resembled a person who was sharing a rare moment of zeitgeist? If I had worn pink, would I be making a statement against the idea of green? Why did the Japanese couple we recognized from my daughter’s school wear green?  Did they discuss it that morning? Had someone told them it was an American tradition? So for them maybe green was worn out of respect for local culture?

The unadorned shirts surely are imprinted with an invisible ink message, but I have left my decoder pen in my other bag. We leave the mall, having this day fulfilled the societal obligations of sports and shopping, as well as an inadvertent participation in something that unifies a diverse group of people with a range of national origins and beliefs.

“A garage so nice you could serve drinks in it”

My first visit to Alabama was in college with my boyfriend to visit his great-aunt in the town where his mother had grown up. We drove from Chicago in his mother’s alligator green Buick convertible. Or, technically, he drove, because I did not have my license. Remember the movie Diner and the football test? That was kind of like me getting my driver’s license at age 25, just before the wedding.

Which is totally within the bounds of normal if you’re from NYC, unless you spend summers somewhere with cars. In fact, I ran into my K/1 best friend at the DMV when we were getting our photos taken. She was only doing it so she could use her dad’s house in the Hamptons.

Seinfeld is New York City told from the point of view of a person who lives in the city but did not grow up there. Cars play too big a role in the lives of the characters. They have not resigned themselves to the folly of urban car ownership, indignant to be hindered by crosstown traffic and lack of parking. Hookers are using my car. Paranoid suburban fantasy. Growing up, a car was a show-offy extra, like skiing; driving was a vacation skill, something I dabbled in, but frankly it was never going to come in handy.

The older I get the more I realize that life is like a 12-part novel cycle, with recurrent themes and characters who disappear only to turn up years later when you least expect them. Running into A. at the DMV, for instance. A college road trip that ends up laying down tracks for future life experiences.

The boyfriend, now husband (I passed my road test), would drive and drive, and the drive through Indiana is flat and boring, and we would stop at Cracker Barrel and guess what he would do? He would play an arcade driving game. I remember these paper placemats advertising bee pollen with testimonials from Nancy Reagan, who was then the First Lady.  I would read about the miracle benefits of bee pollen and he would drive a pretend car and then we were back on the road. It was the summer of the Ollie North hearings and of Tammy Faye Bakker. The world was a mad place. Mad and hilarious if only you didn’t have to believe any of it.

What would we do in Alabama for a week in June? It would be hot. It is a town of 3,000. You could go swimming at Mrs. X’s house. She has a nice pool. And then would come a description of the house, the work Mrs. X had done, the garage so nice you could serve drinks in it. We loved that line.

We have been using it ever since, with all its nuances.

We said it sometimes when we were househunting.

In the time we have lived here, I have been to two parties in garages. One was on Halloween, a party with folding chairs, beer and crockpots of chili. The other was a half-saree, a coming-of-age party for my younger daughter’s friend to which all of the girls and female teachers of the grade had been invited. A mural had been painted on the wall of the garage and there was a buffet table. There were white fairy lights in the greenery and the effect was transformational rather than the rather dire image of the original party we had imagined, or the lives that might be lived there, even ours.

I read a version of this post on WLRH (my first piece for the Sundial Writer’s Corner.) You can listen here.