Happy year-end

by admin Posted on December 20, 2012

I’d be alone in the backseat of her Geo Tracker, but surrounded by stuff – Beastie Boys cassette holders, pom poms, duffel bags, water bottles. A stray pair of sunglasses. A scrunchie. I’d be alone, because even though the driver’s and front passenger’s seats were filled, the air would whip through the Tracker so fast it would build a wall between us, rendering me deaf in the backseat. And I would look out the windows and stare, and think.

It doesn’t happen too often, but sometimes, these memories of high school flood my canals. Today it’s of a fall day, junior year; of my best friend’s first car; of the country music I didn’t listen to. Of slurpees and study halls, coasting down the pine tree roads. Of a promise of more, more, more; so much more than Jersey offered.

I make fun of it all the time, and I’m allowed to, but the truth is there’s something about southern coastal Jersey that is overly formative. I am sure you can all say that about your hometowns, whether they are Midwestern or Californian or Canadian. I am sure you are feeling a pinch inside as I imply here that mine was different, special. I don’t blame you.

But there is something to a hard blue sky and a horizon of deep green pine trees. There is something to a Jersey Devil legend and unblemished, near-empty beaches. There is something to the cranberry bogs, the duck crossings, the grainy, sandy dirt that blows across empty football fields.

There is something to being a teenage girl riding alone in the raised backseat of her best friend’s car on her way to cheerleading practice, eating her fruit lip gloss off her mouth and wondering what on earth is in store for her.

I haven’t been to my hometown in nearly three months, and since then there’s been a hurricane that ruined some of my favorite places, a couple of holidays, an engagement. This weekend I’ll hitch a ride down the Garden State Parkway and keep my eyes open for the memories I hadn’t realized I’d forgotten.

 

image via

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Edna or Millie or Grace or Anne

by admin Posted on December 5, 2012

When I leave for work at a particularly late time in the morning I’m almost certain to pass by a wonderfully gray old lady who stands on a corner, resting on her walker, taking her time to get to the small bus that picks her up and, I assume, drives her to some glorious amusement park for seniors.

Today an ambulance came rushing past me as I left my apartment, so much noise, and when I turned onto the old lady’s block it had stopped there, right in front of her waiting spot, and I thought, oh, no. The EMTs were out, organizing stretchers and talking to a woman I didn’t recognize. I tried not to look, but I am human, and when the stranger-woman pointed the EMTs in a direction I followed their gaze and saw my little old lady sprawled out flat on her back in the doorway of her building, the walker cast aside and upended. She was awake, though, and talking.

In cities we are so often dependent on neighbors, on strangers, on services we never think we’ll need until the moment right before we realize we do. Over the weekend I was violently ill and B. still has his broken foot and I thought, the night I couldn’t sleep from delirium and dehydration, we have never been more vulnerable than we are right now.

I like to think my lady’s name is Edna or Millie or Grace or Anne, and that her great grand children are with her at her hospital bed right now, and that her own children are at home cooking her favorite meal, and that there are flowers waiting for her. But of course she has her own name and family and has lived more lives than I can imagine and probably hates flowers and would likely scorn me for making up stories about her. I hope she knows I do it out of love. I hope she knows we have all been more vulnerable than we care to remember, and that it’s that shared experience that binds us.

 

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A world of certain difference

by admin Posted on November 7, 2012
Voting line.

“America will soon belong to the men and women — white and black and Latino and Asian, Christian and Jew and Muslim and atheist, gay and straight — who can comfortably walk into a room and accept with real comfort the sensation that they are in a world of certain difference, that there are no real majorities, only pluralities and coalitions.” – David Simon

In my last post I whined about change being hard, but what’s funny is that the large-scale changes, the big structural stuff that people vote for or against, has never scared me. I am honored to bear witness to such change, in fact. Whether those big changes ultimately end up being good or bad, they are almost always a sign of progress, and almost always the result of good intentions. And I get to watch them happen. I get to say, I was there when that happened. I remember what I was wearing. I remember the toast we made.

I spent years being afraid of the smaller changes, the graduations and relationships and walks outside in daylight. One day I was grilling eggplant for my dinner and a fleet of butterflies rose up outside my third floor window and poof, my fears flew away, smoking up into a gray plume disappearing. The oil sizzled and cleared and I wondered what I had been holding on to and why.

I learned, worked, to find my fears’ roots and dig them out on spring days. I am lucky I had the space and tools to do that. I wish we all did, so our fears, large or small, could be dissected enough for us to realize there’s some bit of beauty, of freedom, in them. In realizing that part of what we do here, all of us, is just swim along in the current of changes we never thought we wanted, trying to find our own air.

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In between

by admin Posted on November 1, 2012

After dipping into canned hurricane provisions for lunch today I realized it was time to go to the grocery store. And not the bodegas across the street, which, while lovely and have served me many a pint of ice cream in times of need, only offer so much (and little to no fruits or veggies).

The neighborhood is weird today, three days after the storm, like I’m looking at it through a wobbly plastic filter that’s making everything seem slightly off-color. The grocery store was crowded but poorly stocked, missing things I didn’t expect — cheeses and black beans and eggs. I am not complaining; just observing. An old 90′s Gin Blossoms song was playing and I started to tweet “Grocery stores always play Gin Blossoms. #notcomplaining” but I stopped myself, feeling too frivolous.

Yesterday was the first day I really left my apartment, going for a long walk along the East River and up through Brooklyn Heights, bolstered by the rescue mission of my sister out of Hoboken, a town still in desperate need of help and evacuations. I felt positive yesterday, now that she was safe, like we were through the worst and things were back on the “normal” meter.

Today is different. It’s November 1st and my concerns have shifted. I am worried about the fact that “normal” is gone, replaced by something new. I’m anxious about the election; that many people who would have voted can no longer, or that it will no longer be a priority. I’m worried, selfishly, about how I’m going to get to work once power is back on. And I’m thinking about my hometown of Long Beach Island, and the city I lived in for a decade, Hoboken, and the city I live in now, New York. And how all of them will be different now. And how change is hard.

Everyone’s talking about rebuilding better than ever and how we’ll get through it and sure, all of that is true, no doubt. But just once I’d like us to be allowed to mourn for a while, to at least acknowledge the sheer weight of what is now different, before we have to “be strong.” I don’t know the state of my family’s house on Long Beach Island — the home in which I grew up; the home my ancestors built in 1921. I’ve only been able to see its rooftop, taken from an aerial photo. At least it is still standing, I told myself. At least there is still a roof to be seen.

And they are just houses, a part of me knows. But most of me knows they are more than that. That house is love and history and family. That house is a front porch and an outside shower and the attic stairs where my boyfriend fell down and fractured his foot just last month. That house is gin & tonics and friendly ghosts and a secret closet I’ve never even seen inside. That house is news of my baby brother’s arrival and a recurring nightmare I had as a kid and Cabbage Patch Dolls under a Christmas tree.

We are all safe and lucky, always, just by sheer nature of being born Americans, where we have things like FEMA and insurance and a general, collective agreement that destruction like this cannot stand. I know all this, and you do too, but still, we’re caught in between normalcy and non-normalcy, and I’ve always been bad with in-betweens.

 

 

 

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Sandy

by admin Posted on October 29, 2012

There are risks no matter where you live, and this week I’m thinking about my island hometown, which is currently underwater. Living on the sea is always a gamble. Today, on LBI, the bay has met the ocean. It’s not the first time and it won’t be the last, but it always breaks off something inside me.

When I was in middle school a(nother) big storm hit my town. My family lived on the lagoon for a few years, in a rental on a quiet street way at the edge of town, where you could see the Atlantic City casino skyline on clear days. We watched the water breach the lagoons, creeping up our backyard. We were so busy watching the back I think we forgot to watch the front, where the water surprised us, dribbling under the storm door, turning into a river.

About six or so inches came in that day. I remember leaving for higher ground — our neighbor, just a few houses down, wasn’t flooded, so we hung with her, eating weird canned soup with a metallic aftertaste and trying to keep ourselves occupied. We lost photos, but nothing else irreplacable.

A few years later, the island flooded again and lost power. I was at my summer job at Fantasy Island. We all got to leave and I joined the gang of 14-year-olds tramping through thigh-high water to the 7-11 where we could get Slurpees, because priorities. That day felt wild and free; it felt like being 14.

Now my grandmother has left our island home; my parents on the mainland have been evacuated, and people are tweeting pictures of my beloved hometown streets — the mini golf courses, the closed seasonal shops, the restaurants and dunes, covered in a mix of ocean and bay, waves overlapping.

So, yes, the sea is always a risk, but is it wrong that I find it a preferable one to anything else? I can’t imagine a tornado; I don’t want a basement to hide in; the fault lines in California make me nervous every time I’m there and it’s too quiet. No, I’ll take a sea any time. The water always recedes.

 

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On this rainy Friday

by admin Posted on October 19, 2012

I dreamt of lying on benches, waiting for trains, with quotes circling the air like thought bubbles I could reach out and touch. I fell asleep feeling guilty about how the days pass so quickly; sometimes it will be dinnertime before I know it, and I’ve spent an entire day only talking about work, and there are never enough hours to call my mom. But I woke up to rain and a new attitude, humming the Demi Lovato song I haven’t been able to get out of my head.

Several months ago I told my sister about a book she should read, only I got the title wrong — I was supposed to say The Age of Desire and instead I said The Age of Miracles. And it’s a good thing I forget titles as often as I do, because she then read The Age of Miracles and said, “Morg, it’s not about Edith Wharton like you said it was, but I think you should read it anyway.”

I finished it last night on the train home, savoring every moment. (And then I read the acknowledgements, where the author thanks people I know, and I was reminded again how small this planet is.)

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I can’t stop singing Tori

by admin Posted on October 4, 2012

A few weeks ago my friend Joe, for whom I was wearing my favorite Tori Amos concert tee back when we first met when I was a mere 18, asked me to contribute an article about my relationship with feminism and Tori’s intersections of it for PopMatters.com. (Talk about full circle.)

PopMatters has been running a Tori spotlight all week, and today my post, “Reflections on Tori Amos and the Feminist Movement,” went live. In the few weeks I spent writing the piece, I’ve reverted, hearing Tori lyrics whispering to me every part of every day. I’ve been YouTubing old videos and live performances, hitting repeat on my “best of Tori” playlist, and generally just enjoying my renewed Tori love.

Hope you enjoy, too. And here’s a song for today. (It’s humid and rainy here in New York, and my body feels gummy, and I’m having hankerings for Londontown, so this felt appropriate.)

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90

by admin Posted on September 17, 2012

Her earrings sparkled, hanging from droopy lobes in a way that felt like a risk. He wore a cowboy hat, which I’m told was out of character, but then so too was the restaurant, all fake western memorabilia and country music, and besides, people change. I watched the Pistol Annies on the television; I can get a little bluegrass myself, and I still remember the country line dancing we did in high school, the day my trig teacher cleared out the cafeteria and showed us the moves, her tight jeans secure under a belt with a big brass buckle.

It was a surprise party. He moved well but slowly, overwhelmed by so many faces. This one, though, he knew: the old woman with the earrings, with the curated lips,  with the silver hair piled high like a movie star. The one who said “I love you” to him over and over, her hands grasping his cheeks, and his hers, and they stood like that for minutes, whispering 90 years of life to each other, while the party turned into a reunion around them. I don’t know who she was, and I can’t even imagine what that age must feel like.

I have grown short of grandparents of my own. Tell me, what does 90 mean when you were born in the midst of the Great Depression? When you lived through world wars and civil rights and moon landings and a technological shift that changed the world so immensely? Is it an accomplishment or a curse? Maybe when I’m 90, if, I’ll be wishing for things I used to have, or mourning the things I’ll never see. Like my parents versus my great great grandkids; like the Mars rover versus a colony on Mars. Like another night with my lover, or another piece of pie. There is so much to miss, both forward and backward.

I can’t get their moment out of my mind.

The drive home felt like big sky and autumn, like pumpkins and apple picking. There was green and blue everywhere, so bright it hurt to look, with clouds we’ll never see again. And still I thought of the two of them, the way they held on to each other, and the sound a life makes when people pause to mark it on a clean fall day.

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Gimme a…

by admin Posted on August 23, 2012

“Where’d that world go, that world where you’re a kid, and now I can’t remember noticing anything, not the smell of the leaves or the sharp curl of a dried maple on your ankles, walking? I live in cars now, and my own bedroom, the windows sealed shut, my mouth to my phone, hand slick around its neon jelly case, face closed to the world, heart closed to everything.”

There is something wrong with the F train these days, and some nights it actually leaves me near tears, because we all just want to get home, presumably, and we never can, at least not in the time we thought we’d be able to. So last night I’m waiting, and waiting more, and brushing condensation off my forehead, which is just another way of saying I was sweating like crazy, because everyone knows Broadway-Lafayette is the hottest subway station in the world, and did I mention I am ready for summer to be over?

And I’m waiting, in a rush, but no F trains come and when two finally do, they’re so bursting with people that none of us can get on without risking our lives. And even though I desperately want to get on, I enjoy my life a lot, so I don’t push myself in, I don’t make the other sweating, smushed people hate me for smushing them in even tighter.

So I read. I read to distract myself from the heat and the anger and the near-tears.

And then I read that passage above, from Megan Abbott’s Dare Me, and just like that, there is no subway station, there is no New York, there is no long work day and no jerks leering at me and no exhausted pregnant lady next to me (won’t someone just give her their seat already), there is just me and a book, me and my own memories of high school cheerleading, where a new coach came and tried to whip us into better shape, just like in the book; where I took my varsity captainship and shoved it because I had my own awakening at the start of senior year that, wow, I actually hated almost everything that squad had become, and even though I missed the competitions, I missed the lights on my face during pep rallies, my senior year became more about me.

The myth of the cheerleader so often misses the mark — there are complicated layers to cheering, at least to me — the power and the flounce and the ponytails all swirl into something kind of dangerous for a lot of us. We start thinking we’re invincible.

Dare Me is the first book I’ve read where the author gets it. She gets what the cheering is all about, what it’s for. And who.

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August memorials and memories

by admin Posted on August 18, 2012

This week the shadows changed. I saw it on my street this morning, walking to the F train, the very one that’s made me miss two yoga classes this week. Augusts are funny — still sticky, but there’s a cool tone to the air that wasn’t there before, and everything feels just a little off center.

One summer in college when I worked at a jewelry store on the island I tried to explain to my dear friend, the store’s owner, how easy it was to squint just the right way so that everything looked as rosy and fresh as it did in May and June. I never wanted summers to end back then, only that’s not entirely true; I think I mostly just wanted to make sure I captured them.

Anyway, my friend told me there was no way August could look anything like June, because the shadows always gave it away. They’ve moved a few degrees, a move that can’t be hidden by a squint.

I know she’s right, and I see it now. The island would always clear out in August, but we’d still be there, singing to the Indigo Girls behind closed doors, watching the sand blow by, waiting for school to start. Now, even in New York, August feels still to me, frozen. It feels weirdly quiet. The interns at work have left. It’s cool enough for sweaters on early mornings.

Today B. and I went to pick up our friend’s CSA share while he’s out of town and passed a group of people holding a makeshift memorial service on the front stoop of a brownstone. One stumbles upon many things in front of Brooklyn brownstones — free books from people cleaning out their shelves, old toasters and printers that say “Take me! I work!” in wobbly handwriting — like this whole borough is hosting a neverending garage sale. But I’ve never seen a memorial service.

They each had fold-up chairs and there was one empty one, on the top step, with a photo and “1953-2012″ printed on it. It wasn’t sad. Everyone there seemed joyous, and I thought, that’s the way to do those things. On a stoop in August in Brooklyn, watching the world and the weather pass by.

I guess I can’t trick myself out of August by squinting. It’s here, and just like that, it’ll be gone.

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