December 30, 2007

New Year(s).

What is it about New Years that always leaves me feeling as though things simply aren’t as they should be? I guess when you place too much expectation on anything you’re bound to be disappointed - but I think with New Years it’s just that we’re all so ready for something new, for a fresh start where we can erase all the mistakes gone by (for there are several) and escape the regrets (for there are many) and the things that slipped through our fingers (too many to count) that we’re now so hopeful we’ll grasp them and get it right this time around.

We are eager, I think, to start over, to wipe the slate clean, because there is no other time in the year that has a change so large (we think), so significant as New Years, one year rolling into the next, to make us realize the things we’ve yet to realize, to look at the passage of time as something that doesn’t slow down for anyone. And in the time it takes for 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 to flash past you, you think you’ve been given back your chance to change the things that aren’t as they should be.

It is hope, I think, that we’re eager for, swilling champagne at over-priced bars with people we don’t know, or in a sea of thousands in Times Square, (cold and with a full bladder), just because we think we should, all to watch a ball drop from the top of a pole to the bottom.

And in the time it takes for 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1...I’d like to think that all that matters is who is standing next to you when one year rolls into the next. Because you never do know, (do you?) what will happen between that exact moment after you count out 1 this year and before you start over again with 10 the next.

New years aren’t always so happy as we’d like them to be, but it’s hope after we count down that makes us yell it, scream it from the top of our lungs, happy, happy, happy (!) because we’re longing for it, crossing our fingers for it, praying for it under our breath. Please, please, please.

So Auld Lang Syne and raise your glass to hope and the eight-thousand-and-a-half hours between now, and when the countdown will inevitably (hopefully) begin again.

December 22, 2007

All that I want.

It is raining, turning the snow into melting piles of slush. There is white covering the ground all around and as the fog thickens and the rain falls harder it slowly begins to fade away.

The untainted purity of it is slowly becoming tainted the way the harsh realities of life can cloud up the sweet memories of yesteryear. It’s funny what you miss - simple smiles and the sound of a voice that suddenly become so distant that you struggle to reach out into the void of all they’ve left behind to get even just a small piece of it back.

Growing up you want to ask for all the impossible things for Christmas – all that you want is what you know you cannot get - like more time. All I would have wanted was more time before the snow (and everything) all melted away too soon.

December 19, 2007

Christmas in New York.

There is something about this city at this time of year that makes me feel hopeful. It’s the subways and sidewalks packed with people of all walks of life trying to budget the best ways to make the people in their lives happy.

I have bags packed with gifts and I’ll be bringing them away from the city and its hopeful lights to recognize that love can’t be bought, wrapped or returned.

Because time goes to show you that no matter how much things change (and they always do), life keeps moving forward as though nothing has changed at all.

Christmas with its cards and trees and packages is predictable, along with the New Year marking all that’s happened (how much!) and so quickly (how fast!).

When everything changes, I suppose that means we have no choice but to change with it, and maybe recognize that the hopeful lights of Manhattan (if you’re lucky) can follow you home.

December 12, 2007

Tangled up in blue, indeed.

On the bus this morning a woman, middle-aged yelled at the driver calling him an "insensitive man," because he failed to let her in at the stop light a block earlier, therefore making her run to the next stop. "You’re an insensitive man!" she yelled as she boarded, breathing hard from the one block run. As another passenger "Shhh’d" her the driver simply responded, "Well, you crazy, lady."

On the other side of town a cell phone that had started ringing somewhere in the bus behind me still wasn’t stopping. Finally someone said "Is that yours?" another said, "No." Then someone else asked, "Well is it yours?" to someone else. They said no. By Central Park West the entire bus came to the realization that someone had left it behind. The woman sitting across from me took it upon herself to pick it up when it rang again. "Well I don’t know who your boyfriend Rob is but he seems to have left his phone on our bus." The woman told Rob’s girlfriend that she lived at 77th and 2nd and would leave the phone with her doorman within the hour. "You tell Rob he’s lucky I’m so nice."

On the downtown 1 train the little girl sitting next to me lost her earring. She asked her mother where it went, repeatedly. "Do you see it?" she asked her. "Do you know where it is?" The girl was devastated. She was about nine and she said it was a Minnie Mouse earring. I tried my hardest not to get involved, seriously concentrating on my book until the girl literally got down on the floor of the train and started looking under my legs. "Excuse me?" I asked. "But my Minnie earring," she said looking up at me desperately. Her eyes were pleading and her mother, who seemed only willing to keep asking things like, "Well are you even sure you put them on this morning?" obviously wasn’t going to help. I’ve lost so many things that the sadness in her face over this one little thing made my feel obligated to help. So there we were, me in my skirt and her in her jeans, kneeling down on the floor of the downtown 1 train looking under people’s legs.

We finally found it right before she got off the train at 28th street. "Thank you so so so so so much," she said, and I just smiled and thought that it was nice to know that sometimes not everything get lost forever.

On the way home I got off the 6 train (how many trains in one day!) at 68th street and the guy behind me was singing. I had already been wedged into the train, pushed in really, at 51st street next to a man in a dark blue pin striped suit who overtly placed his entire right hand over half of my backside with a feeble excuse of, "Oh, sorry," as though it was a mutual understanding that in crowded situations something like that was bound to happen by accident. I gave him an oh-sure-save-it-for-your-wife eye roll before we parted ways.

But as soon as I hit the stairs on the way up towards the fresh cold air of Lexington Avenue, I heard it begin. It was a little screechy and totally out of key,
She was workin' in a topless place, and I stopped in for a beer. I just kept lookin' at the side of her face in the spotlight so clear...

And so he sang Bob Dylan, poorly, and was of course going my way. Everyone who passed us couldn’t help but laugh at his horrible voice, obnoxiously loud and blatantly butchering a classic as he trailed behind me.

And later on as the crowd thinned out, it's just about to do the same. She was standing there in back of my chair said to me, "Don't I know your name?"

I turned around, exasperated, wanting to gauge exactly how much longer this was going to go on for. At which point he smiled, stopping singing and said, "Muttered somethin' underneath my breath, she studied the lines on my face. I must admit I felt a little uneasy when she bent down to tie the laces of my shoe..."

After a yelling woman and ringing cell phone and lost earrings, I wasn’t at all in the mood to be tangled up in blue.

"Maybe some other time," I said (and he laughed) because commuting today had been enough.

December 9, 2007

“I never thought it was such a bad little tree. Maybe it just needs a little love.”

It seems almost ridiculous now, buying a tree just to put it in your living room. Those things that are rooted to the ground are supposed to stay that way, surely.

Each year the tree in Rockefeller Center still seems too large to be real (much like the city itself), but there it stands regardless, and when I make a quick stop to 49th street and 5th to pick something up after work I can see all the people standing and looking up in awe, and I can’t help but turn my head as I pass too, letting its light reflect back on me.

Every street corner in Manhattan is adorned with tree stands, tall and green leaning against buildings, and as I walk by and breathe in deep the scent of pine I note that the uprooted trees have taken up a new and foreign home on the pavement of New York, (much like the people who pay far too much for them).

What must it be like to grow so much and for such a short time (too short, really) only to be cut down in the prime of life? (We all have our purposes in life, I suppose). And it means so much every year to pass the apartment windows of Manhattan and see the lights emanating from within. What would 49th street in December be without them? Each tree (little or big) serves its duty (and means different things to different people) until in the new year the streets are filled with the fond and dying memories of a job well done.

So we chop them down and put them up in our living rooms because the world and us in it are getting older every day, and all that we ever really want for Christmas, all that we ever really need, are roots of our own.

December 6, 2007

Check, please.

They're just not right when:
you’re sitting across from them at dinner,
packed in like sardines

and they're talking talking talking and you can’t,
(for the life of you),
stop paying attention to the conversation
that’s happening at the table next to you.


Surely love is more (interesting) than, say,
two twenty-five-year-old-boys talking
about booze, baseball and babes
over spicy coconut chicken.

December 2, 2007

Snow.

New York is cold. Getting out of the subway at nearly seven the sky is still almost light (as it’s never entirely dark here) because of the city’s life and the fog that has crept in making it a soft grey, the kind that encompasses you right before a snowfall. Walking down Lexington towards home it’s easy to still feel like this place isn’t really home at all.

There are of course the same buildings and the same street corners and the same kinds of people that I pass just to make it through those blocks, all those long stretches of pavement so I can climb the stairs and open the door to the place that’s supposed to make me feel safe. The place that has all of my books and clothes and shoes I can’t really afford. It has my computer and photographs and records. But what does that even mean? Can home really just be the place where the tangible objects of your life are? Can it just mean to be walls and a roof and a place to rest your head?

Certainly, (I thought as I walked closer to the place that had been mine for nearly two years now), certainly it must mean more.

For the beginning of December the air is chill and the snow is falling softly. I dig my hands deeper into my pockets as I walk, (a gesture being recreated all over this city) passing people together holding hands or walking dogs or pushing strollers. They have all come from somewhere and are going towards somewhere else. Eventually, as the hour inches later, (past dinner time coffee and cocktails), they’ll all be wanting the same thing - they’ll all be wanting home.

Seasons are strange, aren’t they? In summer it’s never hot enough until is, and then it’s unbearable. In winter it’s always just too cold, a chill that seeps deep into your bones and doesn’t leave ‘til spring. But not now. Now as I walk towards nowhere in particular it feels like the change of the seasons and their inevitable inability to never be what you want them to be at the exact moment you think do - reminds me of home.

Home is the most important place in the world, but its an ever-changing place on unstable ground, and its meaning shifts with the passing of time. (Could it be?) every second of every minute of every day what happens and what decisions are made, (the verdict of luck that is drawn with or without our approval), all take part in taking the definition of the one place that is supposed to make the most sense in our lives, and forces it to take on an entirely new and unrecognizable shape.


I’m not ready for snow. As a kid you always were and knew when it was going to strike, an ability of detection that was inherent. It was a sixth sense of internal excitement because snow meant then so much more than it could ever mean now. Then, it was snow without jobs without stress without bills without rent. It was snow without heartache without loss without loneliness without pain.

Now its whiteness falls on to our tainted grown-up world and rests there as a mere memory of all that we can’t get back, of all that we’ve lost. If only, snow makes us think now. If only, if only, if only.

Snow now, I suppose (no matter where you end up at the end of the day), is hope.