Confessions from the new New Frontier

I was standing in the pizza place near my school in the Bronx, having just accepted a paper plate full of bubbling cheese. The voice belonged to Astrid, one of my classroommate Vanessa’s advisees. Astrid is a recent NYC transplant from California, and I understood immediately the purpose of her question, which essentially asks, “Are you a New Yorker? And if you aren’t, have you been assimilated?”

My immediate, gut reaction to the first question is no, but the second requires a bit more thought. My writing shows that I set myself against New York when I lived here, but began associating with it and longing for it almost as soon as I left. My reasons for leaving New York in the summer of 2008 are well-documented on this website and in countless conversations with family and friends. I have made dramatic pronouncements such as that New York teems with humans but doesn’t have enough space for humanity, and that it is not the dwelling place of my soul. Such things are dramatic, but many of the things I remember from those five years have to do with how I fashioned myself as a Mainer in exile. I loved it when people assumed I wasn’t a native and asked me where I was from, and was even more delighted if they said something like, “Oh, Maine’s so beautiful–what are you doing here?” which they often did. Unquestionably, I considered Portland not only my home, but the geographic source of everything real and good and true about me, and about everything else, too.

But if that sign with the picture of a lobster and the words “Welcome Home” in the Portland airport tugs at my heart, it is equally true that that same heart swells at the first sight of signs advertising SCRAP METAL off the Cross Bronx Expressway as I head south from New England. Swaying into the left lane to merge onto 278? Forget it. I’ve been misty-eyed since the exit for Co-op City Blvd. During my two year hiatus in Boston, a city which never charmed me despite meeting some great friends, from 2008-10, this divided loyalty had even more opportunity to demonstrate itself. I loved that Portland felt closer, not just because it was easier to visit, because the people I met recognized it as an actual place unto itself, not just as yet another place people leave to move to New York. But I also spent a lot of the first year dating a guy in Brooklyn, and when that ended, I still allied myself with New York and luxuriated in the cool cred that was granted to me for saying flip things like that Boston’s blandness made me worry that I was going soft.

Among my 2003 Teaching Fellows cohort, there were a lot of us who came to New York for an adventure. We had heard that you should live here for a while when you’re young so you’ll be more cultured and interesting later in life. I was in New York indefinitely–retirement plan and all–but I never stopped thinking of it something temporary and experimental. I watched my new friends dig into the New York experience–taking swing lessons at Lincoln Center, photographing each other walking the Brooklyn Bridge, poring over reviews and going to off-Broadway shows–and wondered why I wasn’t doing those things, why I never seemed to know what movie was showing for free in Battery Park. And mostly, I wondered why I couldn’t really seem to care, not in any sustained way, anyway.

I don’t mean to suggest that the city didn’t or doesn’t impress me, or that I haven’t spent a fair amount of time playing in it. And I was doing a lot more of those New York-y things than I thought I was at the time.  But those memories don’t overlap much with the more visceral snapshots of moments when I’ve felt a real sense of belonging. Those bits aren’t about having a fabulous time at all; in fact, they are utterly mundane, like a brief shared eye-roll with a stranger on the subway when something mildly outrageous has happened, or realizing that it is surprisingly hard to find an ATM in Chinatown and recalling that I have already noted that, or anytime I’m walking on the street by myself, where I know I look like I’ve got business, even when I’m not 100% sure where I’m going.

But I never feel more like a real New Yorker than when I’m in Maine, where someone need only say something like, “The traffic on 302 is terrible!” or express the deeply held belief that it is absolutely necessary to own real estate before getting married or having a baby, to make me feel impatient, foreign, and profoundly connected to New York. At these moments, I am forced to contend with the fact that it is the place where I became an adult. The place that made me an adult. It was here that I learned things like how to pick a restaurant, how to be in bars, what is reasonable behavior at work and on a date, and living here is what made it important to know those things in the first place. I can’t change the set of priorities and sensibilities I have, at least not quickly, and more importantly, I don’t want to. I can’t deny the fact that I do think I’m more cultured and interesting from living in New York, even if I thought I was putting up a fight.

But the putting up a fight is, I think, the secret to all the city’s magic to me. Perhaps it is different for natives, but for a transplant to teach in public schools, to make friends, to find love, even to grocery shop or fill a prescription, require psychological and emotional fitness and physical effort. There is nothing to default to, no foolproof routine. Living that way can get the better of you because it demands the best of you. But what’s better than your best?

Back in New York for another round, I notice that people have stopped assuming that I’m from somewhere else. So it wasn’t the dimples, then, or the function over form footwear. At Vanessa’s wedding recently, someone insisted that I have a New York accent. I don’t, but nothing about my speech (except for a stray “wicked” that I have carefully preserved) suggests that I’m from Maine either. Over dinner one night this spring, my roommate’s friend Peter, a Brooklyn native, asked what my Bulldogs sweatshirt was about and when I told him it was from my high school in Portland, Maine, he gasped, “Oh! I was sure you were a New York girl! You’ve got the attitude.” I have to admit that I liked it. I can’t quite explain how, but it made me feel like I am still young, still strong, still capable of being both exciting and excited.

I love Portland, and I’m always proud to tell people where I’m from. I can get into any hard shell lobster, I wince when people pronounce Maine’s second largest city “Bang’er,” and I know that a summer residence, no matter its size, is a camp, not a lakehouse or a cottage or something uppity like that. But like knowing what movie is showing in Battery Park, those are basically superficial things that don’t have much to do with what it takes or what it means to live in Maine. If I decide to move to Portland, which I still fantasize about doing, I will have to endure a version of the period of loneliness and homesickness that any transplant endures.

But, for the record: no, I don’t fold pizza. Astrid, I hope this answers your question.

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[NB: This post is a scan of my brain that I don't expect will make sense to anyone who doesn't feel exactly the way I feel and like exactly the same things I like.]

Unabashedly, I mostly turn to pop music when faced with life’s most emotional questions. Maybe that is only because my favorite authors are often so obviously not the types you want to get advice about dudes from. I mean, Orwell, both in public and private, and in fiction and nonfiction, writes with sparkling clarity and confidence about by which processes power is consolidated, say, or how the upper classes perform their status, but his romance/sex scenes kind of suck, and his diaries and letters suggest that among the reasons that his novels aren’t sexy is that he just doesn’t get it. You can almost see him straightening an already straight tie and coughing awkwardly. As a woman myself, I think we’re worth getting at least as excited about as infringement on civil liberties and the household habits of the working class.

I could read other authors (I do, in fact), but I started thinking about how men and women should act in relationships and what constitutes real or ideal love (funny how those terms often refer to the same thing even though they certainly shouldn’t) before I read serious literature with skill and regularity, and pop music isn’t something I feel responsible for being scholarly about or sophisticatedly detached from. The Cure’s Robert Smith and Orwell aren’t so different anyway, maybe. Both were raised as nice middle-class boys in good enough English towns who made careers out of being (perhaps) disproportionately miserable about one thing or another. Yet it is Robert Smith, not Winston Smith, from whom I draw much of my sense of what it means to experience the romantic and the erotic, and more specifically, how men you’d want to have those experiences with feel and behave while under the influence of love.

The sound and feel of Cure songs fall into two or three categories easily identified by anyone, serious fan or not, because its bipolarity is so frickin’ pronounced. No one can write a pop gem with bounce and frantic chirp better than Robert Smith, and if you happen to be a particular kind of dreamy coed, the manic ecstasy of a song like “The Lovecats” can push your hopeful heart to the point of bursting. And it goes without saying that playful innuendo of lines like, “We should have each other for tea, huh?/We should have each other with cream” is more than enough to cause swelling.  Smith is never shy about referring to a lover or a moment or a feeling as perfect–“You’re so perfect, you’re so right as rain/You make me make me make me hungry again,” in the breathlessly paced “Why Can’t I Be You?” Even in the comparatively mellow radio favorite “Just Like Heaven,” the bliss of a sexual encounter (and maybe even just an anticipated one) with his beloved has him “spinning on that dizzy edge.”

There are dozens of other examples: the childlike “Caterpillar Girl” (especially “flowing in and filling up my hopeless heart…”), the muted claustrophobia of “Close To Me,” even the terrified longing of “A Forest.” According to this canon, the desire and longing associated with passionate love amount to a kind of gorgeous panic. It is all-consuming and mercilessly kinetic, but worth it because to have such feelings is also to be granted access to purity and beauty. “Perfect” love is the ultimate balm for all wounds (“Whenever I’m alone with you…you make me like I am clean again,” in “Lovesong,” which RS wrote as a wedding gift to his wife.) This version of love combines the sickness and anxiety of courtly love (one easily recalls Troilus, once a man’s man, hypnotically rocking back and forth in his bed, weak from sleeplessness and lack of appetite) with the transformative powers of divine love.

I am much more a scholar of Christianity than a believer, but I know that the trade off with divine love is that once you seek it, you can’t lose it. God’s interest in you and ability to forgive you is guaranteed inexhaustible. But no matter how intense, earthly human-on-human love offers no such promises. So if you’ve been counting on the sweaty sugar high of a new romance becoming a permanent fixture that will redeem you and make you whole, well, there are going to be some tears.

Which brings me to the other category of Cure songs, the ones about disappointment and despair. Despite the fact that a majority of the band’s singles are the upbeat, hyperactive ones, Robert Smith is certainly better known for singing about being sad. I think that may be because his kind of bliss is inextricably linked to experiencing loss. Even if the letdown is completely outside the song, extreme highs suggest extreme lows. These songs range from frenzy to mend damage done so perfection can survive (“I’m coming to find you if it takes me all night…’cuz always and ever is only for you”) to total resignation (“It was the sweetness of your skin/It was the hope of all we might have been/That filled me with the hope to wish impossible things”). Whatever the case, if it was real love, which it always was in Cure songs, once it’s gone, the feeling of loss and accompanying misery are forever. Compounding the difficulty of navigating the world of romance is the fact even in perfect relationships, a false move in a single conversation can sentence you to a lifetime of loneliness (“If only I’d thought of the right words/I could’ve held onto your heart.”) Tough break.

In short, the version of romantic relationships this songbook establishes makes perfection both absolutely necessary and absolutely impossible to hang on to. And maybe this line of thought isn’t as antischolastic as I think, because, again, the readiest example of what I mean  is a 14th century literary one: the climatic moment in the dream-vision Pearl, when the dreamer, filled with desire (“luf-longyng”), tries to cross the river into the New Jersusalem to be with the object of that desire and finds himself fallen back to earth, wide awake, and heart-broken. The lesson is, I suppose, that mixing courtly love (with its filthy focus on reproducing and having a fair amount of fun doing it) with divine love is a sinful mismatch. You don’t get closer that kind of light and purity just because you want to, even if its physical embodiment has the best cleavage ever. The Medievals were big on this point. The other major contribution from Pearl‘s anonymous poet, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, gives us a knight whose real troubles begin when he ceases to be Mary’s knight and begins to devote himself his host’s lovely wife.

Okay, so now for the autobiographical bit. Early this spring, I met someone with whom I shared exactly the kind of giddiness of which a Cure song that will get radio play is made. He did things like ride his bike over in the rain to hand deliver a love letter enclosed  in an envelope he’d made out of a map of a place he wanted to take me to someday. Seriously. Nearly immediately after we confessed attraction and the intent to date each other, he began to talk about our relationship as the one he had suspended his life while he waited for. I know better than that one true soulmate stuff, but this guy didn’t sound like your grandmother did when she assured you that every pot had a lid. The dreamy coed several paragraphs above still lives inside me, and these were words I’d been waiting more than a decade for a man to adore me enough to say. There was never enough time to spend together, even when we weren’t apart for days on end, and no way to be physically close enough. Since we all have a finite amount of time and energy to spend, I surely gave more of myself than I could really afford, but it’s easy enough to justify letting a few of life’s details slip when you are busy establishing the gold standard of perfect romance.

The problem, of course, is that once you’ve decided that a person, and, by extension, your relationship, is perfect, there is less and less air to breathe. Necessary conversations about compromise really can’t happen because the stakes are so high. I mean, things are either perfect or they aren’t, right? So maintaining perfect love often means suppressing dissent at the same time you are insisting that dissent is impossible. (Orwell always creeps in…what I mean is exactly covered by ‘doublethink,’ of course.) It’s possible to keep practicing that trick of the brain for a while, but no matter how invested you are in the ideal being real, forever is actually a wicked long time–much longer than it seems  in your beloved’s arms those first few whispery nights–and keeping a myth aloft indefinitely is a lot harder than it sounds when it has a melody to go with it.

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My parents joke that when I was born in the summer of 1980, I joined my childhood already ten or fifteen years in progress. Like everything really funny, there is a lot of truth to it. In elementary school, for example, I listened to Billy Joel instead of New Kids on the Block and my favorite TV show was “Cheers.” At gatherings of family friends, I preferred salmon and adult conversation to hot dogs and after dinner freeze tag. (Among my first lessons that you can’t always get what you want.) Perhaps the directive, “Go play with the kids” is a bit baffling to all only children, but I was probably exceptionally serious and sensitive. I had a premature sense of irony and the gravity of existence which is basically unchanged from memories of myself early in life.

My outlook and sensibilities have always put me somewhat at odds with my generation. I have usually preferred the company of older people, and I will admit that also unchanged from those early memories of myself is a delight in being considered cutely precocious. To those who have known me for any length of time, it can hardly be a surprise that I’m as happy as I am in a relationship with someone 17 years older. My generational ambiguity means that we don’t have those knee-jerk moments of “Oh God, you’re so old/young” that separate people by age group. It’s true that I can’t help but know most of the words to most of what was on the radio in the late 80s and90s, but those aren’t the songs that define me. Mostly, my own biological generation, with its isolating earbuds and failure to launch cases, has been a mystery, something I assumed I would just have to wait out until everyone was older and more interesting (which, I confess, is to say, more like me.)

But the conversations that began and sustain this new bigenerational relationship have revealed a stamp on my understanding of the world that betrays the time and place I grew up in, and it makes me think that I may have been serious and sensitive because of the culture of 80s America,  not just alongside it. We late Gen-Xers and early Millenials grew up with crack and AIDS, with the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer  and skyrocketing rates of violent crime and unemployment. The news (in my outraged liberal household, anyway) depicted a world were things were not getting better and weren’t going to get better. We were filled to the brim with the idea that nothing was certain in the serious matters of life, but that fun had a price, too. I have a vivid memory of standing over the garbage can in the cafeteria the day after the ’88 election and registering real despair as I threw my tray away that I would have to live my life half again before we would have chance to elect a president who would do things differently. If the fashion and synth pop of the 80s seem a little frivolous, I think we earned it, because nothing else was. We were offered no innocence, no comfort that things would work out for the best, no moon landing.

I know that my individual experience is little more than anecdote, and that, since I was actually a child, there are holes in my memories and gaps in my understanding. Still, I see myself more clearly now as part of a generation that was introduced to the world as an uncertain, hostile place and it helps me to better understand and appreciate why we act the ways we do. Not every third grader that lunch period 22 years ago was fretting about the election outcome, but perhaps, by some subtle resignation,  I’m more like the rest of that cafeteria table than I think. And maybe that’s okay.

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‘We were producing a definitive edition of the poems of Kipling. I allowed the word “God” to remain at the end of a line. I could not help it!’ he added almost indignantly, raising his face to look at Winston. ‘It was impossible to change the line. The rhyme was “rod”. Do you realize that there are only twelve rhymes to “rod” in the entire language? For days I had racked my brains. There was no other rhyme…Has it ever occurred to you that the whole history of English poetry has been determined by the fact that the English language lacks rhymes?’  –Part 3, Chapter 1, Nineteen Eighty-Four

Passages like these are throwaway gems in Orwell’s work, the literary equivalent of the breezy, effortless melodiousness of a McCartney-penned B-side. It’s rich in a few ways. The speaker is Ampleforth, a poet Winston meets in a squalid cell in the bowels of the Ministry of Love. Clearly, he functions to demonstrate what Orwell had written nearly nine years earlier, in ‘Literature and Totalitarianism,’ that art, which is elementally an expression of an individual’s emotional life, cannot exist under the kind of regime Nineteen Eighty-Four imagines. In Oceania, the ‘art’ is either intended to pacify (the music and porn novels churned out literally by machines to keep the proles happy), or to promote the Party’s ideology (the grand anthems and Newspeak ‘scholarship’). It’s also worth pointing out the intertextual reference to Kipling, since Orwell wrote so extensively about his experiences with British Imperialism and is considered by some among the very first postcolonial theorists.

Obviously. But this passage is also a kind of Valentine to English, and I confess that that is why I have always liked it.  Something in me swells with irrational pride at the idea that English is an unyielding language that can only be tamed, molded, and elevated to beauty by the most talented and committed among us. It’s little wonder why Orwell, who wrote against the long odds of poverty, war, chronic illness, and hunger, and railed against the muddying of English with ugly jargon and purple, meaningless Latinate words, is among my very favorite writers. His passion, at least as I understand it (or imagine it, but it comes to the same thing)–to keep English the sort of language one can tell important truths in with style and grace–is the soul of my literary conscience.

As an ESL teacher, I did not enjoy watching my students struggle with silent letters and irregular verbs. I know that English would be easier to learn if there weren’t so many vowel sounds (15 or more, including diphthongs). Still, I think English gives as good as it gets. Once mastered, it offers a massive, grand vocabulary which is constantly being infused with apt words from other languages (and its own dialects) and the ideas that go with them. English has a tremendous capacity for clever euphemism and register shift. In English, you can produce stirring rhetoric that doesn’t sound over-the-top, express dissatisfaction without sounding like you’re going to kill someone, and say sweet things to someone special without sleaze or cheese. 

In Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell’s invented language–Newspeak–seeks to restrict people by taking away these latent expressive powers in English. The ending of the novel is devastating, but, having read it over and over, I can say that it makes me feel absolutely alive. A bit of that aliveness rushes to the surface every time I reflect on the messy weirdness of a word like “enough,” or a resolutely irregular plural like “children,” or the counterintuitive “had had” verb construction. (The children had had enough!) 

So, rock on Ampleforth. It’s almost Valentine’s Day.

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I come from a very close-knit family, and when I left Maine and moved to New York, it was a big deal. Pestering me about coming home became part of the routine on holidays, a campaign headed up by my grandmother. “Why do you want to be down there, so far from everything?” she would ask. Apparently, those who think New York is the capital of the world have another thing coming––the epicenter of the universe is, in fact, Portland, Maine.

I stayed in New York for five years, a long time to stay somewhere where I never intended to live permanently. There is certainly more than one truth about why this was so, but one controlling reason was that I wanted to be able to set stories there. A place so soaked in art, so packed with people from everywhere doing everything imaginable, and so rife with the issues, and the possibilities, of urbanization seems ideal for a writer. Something about a big city, with all its grit and glamour, is just more exciting and more worthy.

Two years ago, my school participated in a program called “Writing the City,” which was a partnership between the NYC Department of Education and New York University. Writers from the university came into our classrooms to do activities with students to get them to use the city they know–their city–to generate original, authentic writing. One thing students did was draw a map of a part of the city they thought was important as a pre-writing exercise to getting them thinking about community as a physical place. At first, several students wanted to map places like Times Sq, Central Park, and the financial district around Wall St. When I saw that they were having a hard time getting started, I intervened. 

Quickly, the source of the trouble became clear. They couldn’t draw a map of a Manhattan neighborhood from memory because they had no memories. By subway, you can get from Bushwick to Manhattan in under fifteen minutes, but your life has to take you there. Once they started mapping places they knew, labeling favorite hangouts, restaurants, friends’ houses, churches–personal landmarks that were directly connected to their lives–they became engaged and finished the assignment easily, full of things to write about.

I wasn’t asked to create a map myself, but I thought about how I would and realized that it wouldn’t be easy. I could certainly have recreated the streets around my apartment with accuracy––the grocery store, the subway station, the pizzeria––but it wouldn’t have meant what my students’ maps did at all. I cared about my neighborhood, and had many fond memories of people and places, but it was still a far cry from being home, literally or spiritually. 

That lack of home showed in my writing, too. Amid many points that could stand improvement, one aspect of my fiction writing that I think is consistently good is that it reads easily and doesn’t feel contrived. When I tried to set stories in New York, I struggled to find that ease, and never really did. I was too focused on the geography, exactly where characters were going and how they were going to get there, and logistical issues, like (I wish I were making this up) recycling rules and how to avoid parking tickets. I could write dialogue that sounded like the people around me, but it didn’t feel genuine. I had looked at and listened to New York as a writer, but I could only write about my New York experience as “I,” I couldn’t generalize, couldn’t become someone else and see life in New York from a different perspective. I couldn’t make it literature.

“Write what you know” is a truism every writer has heard, and it is true as far as it goes. I thought I could know New York just by knowing a lot about it, that there was some point at which the things I knew about it would reach critical mass. It doesn’t work that way though, any more than knowing biographical facts about someone means you understand him as a friend does. 

My writing mentor from college, by way of encouragement, suggested that maybe just living in a place like New York is so much work that you can’t pull back enough to write it while it’s happening around you. Over time, he said, those details of survival will be cast into softer focus, and what is literary and universal about the place will emerge. Maybe, but this wisdom is coming from an author who only sets his novels in Worcester, his hometown, so this theory hasn’t been tested.

My memories of New York are still sharp, and if they become fiction at some point, it will be gratifying. If they don’t, well, that’s okay, too. I know what place my map shows. And it just so happens that it’s the epicenter of the universe.

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A recent move to Boston has given me, among other things, a new fickle friend: the T. 

I think that “the T” refers only to the subway system. People don’t “get on the T” and head for the bus. But as I haven’t found a name that encompasses the whole Boston area transit system (besides MBTA, which I know is uncool), T will have to do.

When you use public transportation all the time, when it is, in fact, your connection to the world, you begin to notice patterns. For example, in Brooklyn, I never once saw a lone B38 bus. The drivers have never quite figured out how to stagger themselves throughout the route, so instead of one bus coming every five minutes, you have to wait 15 minutes for three buses. Mind you, not all three buses will stop. How do the other two buses not get ahead, thus spreading out? I don’t know, but they don’t.

Below ground in New York, there is also plenty to go amiss and delay you for reasons you are unlikely to ever understand. It’s hard not to take it personally when service on your train to work or home is interrupted or changed. It’s bad enough when you are informed of such a change on the platform by one of those irritating chirpy signs, or by a lately probationed MTA employee, who tells you, as though you could possibly have known, that you wait in vain. It’s far worse though, when you are already on the train and a crackly voice comes from nowhere, telling you with far more relish than regret, that he or she is sorry, but this train is going express, and your stop didn’t make the cut.

It’s easy enough to complain about NYC transit, but it’s like a good friend who sometimes takes a while to call you back but always eventually does. You need to get from Washington Heights to Sheepshead Bay at 3:45 on Christmas morning? Bring something to read, but you’ll get there. 

The Boston T is a different kind of friend. This is the friend who sometimes doesn’t call back, but when you run into her a week later at happy hour, she is so happy to see you, full of apologies which seem sincere, and simply insists on buying you a drink. The fact of the matter is that there are lots of times in Boston when public transportation is simply not available. When it is running, you can’t always be sure which track your train is going to come on or if you will mysteriously have to come back above ground and take a shuttle for part of your route. Still, that platform, whether or not it’s the one you want, is sure to be expansive and clean, and when you do get on the train, you can settle into a padded seat which is almost sure to be available. I waited for the bus for more than 15 minutes today, but when I finally got on, the bus driver told me she liked my necklace. 

The NYC transit system is technically always there for you, but it doesn’t care much if you are inconvenienced. It’s doing what it said it would do, and wonders disinterestedly what you are complaining about. The Boston transit system won’t take you from Malden to Mattapan at 3:45 on Christmas morning, but it feels bad about it and got you a gift.

I suppose I may get tired of this slower pace of life, but, for now, I’ll accept the apology and the gift.

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Just to gaze upon its placid surface, this is relaxing summer. Without work or any significant responsibilities, my days are filled with luxury problems like trying to be in bed by one so I don’t sleep past nine or having to decide if I should read and doze in bed, on the couch, or in the chaise lounge out by the pool. Given the chance, anyone can fill up his time with little walks, leisurely reading, cups of coffee in pajamas, and afternoons of sunning and swimming which become cookouts. 

My intention here is not complain. After all, summer is perhaps the one real privilege society is still willing to grant to teachers, and like all teachers, I’m enjoying it. Nearly ten months of our year is spent defending ourselves against administrators with clipboards, and parents who don’t see why they should be responsible for their own children, and colleagues who steal staplers and markers, and that daily look of surprise, mild disgust but mostly surprise, from students when you ask them to produce a pencil at the beginning of class. As a teacher, it’s forgivable and even necessary to squander July and August. 

The question, though, is whether or not it is forgivable, or necessary, if one is not returning to a world of close supervision, apathy, deceit, and boredom. The truth is that I can’t imagine not returning to IS 162. I know that I won’t be, but I don’t really believe it. Whatever it is that happens inside you when you stop believing one thing and start believing something else, it hasn’t happened yet. 

It takes a few years of teaching before you are really able to believe that any lesson you plan will come off more or less the way you planned it, and that, even in darkest March, the school year really will end and there will be summer and then another. Like all cycles, the cycles of teaching have to repeat themselves a few times before they become recognizable as such. Like all cycles, they come to seem normal, organic, and permanent. On a swing, after a little work pumping with your legs to get off the ground, it takes much less effort and you feel like you could swing, back and forth, up and down, forever. 

I suppose I’ve stumbled upon a cliche. Forgive me. That image is certainly what is meant by “getting into the swing of things,” but it’s a good image, even if I didn’t think of it.

Here’s where that image breaks down, at least for my purposes. That feeling that you could swing for hours, days, possibly the rest of your life, is really quite fleeting. After a while, your legs stop pumping and you get closer and closer to the ground, maybe even dragging your feet through the gravel to stop yourself faster. When the swing stops, you stand up and walk away. In the literal sense, that is how you get “out of the swing.” But when you decide, for whatever reason, that you aren’t going to teach forever, you have to walk away when the swing is at its highest point: that moment when the last bell on the last day rings and it’s summer vacation. In swinging terms, that means you have to work your legs and get as high as you can go, then jump.

I jumped. And in the meantime, I’m not complaining about the weightlessness, or the blue sky, or the warmth of the air. I’m just a little nervous about landing.

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“What is this?” Mom asked, holding up a round black and orange baking dish.

No pause. “That’s what I use for artichoke dip. I need that.”

Blink. “Oh.”

I leave New York today, my 28th birthday, having moved here just before my 23rd. A lot of the stuff I’ve been packing up this past week came down with me, but somewhere along the way, things found purposes. The artichoke dip dish is just the beginning. There’s the electric mixer. The preferred corkscrew.

Somewhere along the way, I became someone with tastes and preferences and specialities. This stuff became my stuff, the things necessary to live the way I have chosen to. 

Closing up and taping and lugging and loading endless boxes doesn’t seem like the best way to spend your birthday. But all these boxes of all these things remind me that this adventure has been worth it. It’s been a good way to grow up. 

So, happy birthday to me.

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One week from today, my parents will appear on the curb outside my Brooklyn apartment. We will load up the artifacts of my adult life and drive back to Portland. My stuff will sit in the garage for a few days while I sort and organize and consider. Several weeks later, it will be back in the garage, as I get ready to settle in Boston. In between will be a summer in limbo.

It seems significant that this year is the 10th anniversary of my high school graduation, since that means it is also the 10th anniversary of that long, weird summer between high school and college. And tonight, I feel very aware that my eighteen year-old self lives inside of me.

At eighteen, I unfortunately had bangs and had tampered with my hair color such that pictures reveal it was kind of yellow. My clothes were sort of deliberately unfashionable. I was prone to viewing any conflict or transition as an identity crisis, and certainly saw myself as a tortured soul. A lot of the time, though, I was quite cheerful. I found that people laughed easily around me, which I liked from the time I was very young. My greatest comforts were in writing, pleasing adults, and expanding my encyclopedic knowledge of the two most important four-piece bands ever: the Beatles and U2.

That summer, I remember walking around Portland, passing by high school haunts like Bagel Works, Java Joe’s and One City Center. I sat in Monument Square and watched people and seagulls go about their business, somewhat disbelieving that the city—my city—would go on without me. I specifically remember being astonished that the Portland Public School system was done with me, that I had completed everything it had to offer, everything it was supposed to offer. At home, I know I bickered with my mother a lot, a lot more than ever before or since. Now I suspect it was because neither of us wanted me held back, but neither of us really wanted me to go, either.

I recognize that girl, and I confess that a few of the small hurts she carried I have not completely put down. At the risk of being writerly: She is me, but I am not her. Not only her, anyway.

I also recognize that this summer will have some things in common with the summer of ’98. I was an ill fit for high school, but, to paraphrase Orwell, I can’t say that I was altogether unhappy. Now, the most important reason I am moving is because I am an ill fit for New York, though that doesn’t mean it will be easy to drive away from that curb and wait for the unknown. As in high school, I made the most lasting friend with under a year to go. Again, I am forced to deal with the reality that a school system can, and must, function without me. Again, I feel like I’ve been unlucky in love, but part of being me is an openness and optimism that that XY set won’t always disappoint. I’m grateful for that hope, even if I can’t explain it.

One thing I know will be different is my relationship with my mother. We have the same bond we have always had, but it has already been tested. We have already come out the other side. She ceases to really care about the status of my laundry (I hope) and I cease to expect her to tell me I can’t wear ripped jeans or have to be home by midnight.

Basically, I have the rare chance to do something again, as an adult. I will spend the summer waiting, and then it will be time to pack up the car and head for another new life, again in Massachusetts. But I can’t swear I won’t sit in Monument Square a little first. And, quite possibly, brood over seagulls.

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Older people (my beloved grandmother, for example) are often fond of saying that any day spent on the right side of the grass (that is, over it instead of under it) is a good day. At 27 going on 28, I’m not so conscious of the Fates cutting my thread, but as a middle school teacher, I’m constantly reminded of my own version: any day spent on the right side of seventh grade (that is having it in your past rather than your present or future) is a good day.

In the brutal heat a couple weeks ago, the principal of my decidedly unair-conditioned school was forced to amend the usual no drinks in class policy and allow students to have water bottles. It is much cooler now, but the water is one more thing to ask for, another concern to be addressed, so they are still on a Death Valley-level hydration regimen. Just the idea that they can have water apparently engenders a bottomless thirst.

So, this morning then, I was not surprised to see a water bottle on nearly every desk. Except one. Karen had pushed hers so far away from her that it was balancing on the crack between her desk and the next one. If she moved it any further, it would technically be on someone else’s desk, and five years of teaching is long enough to know that that would be a scene. “Miiiiissss! I can’t do my work…Karen put something in my area!” Not good.

“Karen,” I asked gently, “what’s up with your water bottle?” One doesn’t expect water drinking to be a hot button issue, so I was surprised when she turned crimson and wouldn’t even look up.

“I know what happened!” a neighboring student said with more glee than was sympathetic, strictly speaking.

“And?” I queried, tilting my head to listen.

“Miss, one of the boys, he rubbed it on his, you know, the male part.” She blushed and added quickly, “You know what I mean, miss.”

Indeed, I did.

Confident that I understood, the glee returned and Yuleisy pressed on. “And she’s been drinking out of it! That’s like giving a blow job!”

Well, in the real world, no, it isn’t. But in the real world, people don’t go to third base with water bottles, either. Seventh grade is its own jungle, and teaching is a bit like going on a safari (except much, much less of a vacation). It’s interesting to observe the animals in their natural habitat, but it’s comforting to know you can get back in the Jeep (isn’t that the official vehicle of safariing?) and go home.

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