Adam's Rib

For years we had this conversation:

"Should we?"

"Nah."

"Okay."

And then one day it was:

"Let's do it."

"Okay, let's do it."

And so we got married.

At least that's the Reader's Digest version of the story. I've been trying to come up with one ever since the day two weeks ago when we stood barefoot on a beach in Provincetown, Massachusetts, just us and the justice of the peace and seagulls for witnesses, and said, "I will."

Reactions from family and friends had a theme: "You're kidding!" "You did WHAT?" "No way!" "You?" And various stories of falling off pieces of furniture when they heard the news.

My friend Lauren said, “I thought it was illegal for heterosexual couples to get married in Provincetown.”

And from my friend Gary: “I like that you call him 'My Beloved.' Now that you're married, will he be demoted to ‘Husband’?”

And everyone's inevitable question: “Had you planned this, or did you decide on the spur of the moment?”

We've been together for almost 10 years, so obviously the subject has come up. We didn't shudder at the idea, but we didn't feel incomplete without it. There were no when-will-you-make-an-honest-woman-of-my-daughter discussions, although seriously, that would have been darn cute.

Occasionally since leaving L.A. and moving to New York full time, my Beloved and I talked about logistics—like how much easier it is to own property together if you're married. But also about finances—like how there could be negative tax implications if we got married. We'd shrug and drop the topic.

Then there we were one Saturday watching The Bourne Ultimatum when I went over and gave my Beloved a hug. He looked at me and said, "Screw the finances. Let's do it," and I said, "Okay, let's do it."

And there you have it. Two lives changed in the span of a commercial break.

Four weeks later, we drove to the Provincetown Town Hall—rather, its temporary headquarters in a trailer up next to the cemetery—and applied for our marriage license. It was a pretty straightforward process; I think they asked for our first and last names. And we skirted the three-day waiting period by driving down to the Barnstable Family and Probate Court to apply for a waiver.

That process involved filling out a “Marriage Without Delay” form, forking over $65, and spending the 10-minute wait watching divorce proceedings in the courtroom. Clever ploy, Massachusetts! But ha ha—we were not deterred! The judge signed our waiver and the jovial Irish bailiff handed it over to us…after extracting a pledge that we weren't Yankees fans.

On the night before the big day, I sat on the bed in our rented Provincetown condo and called The Child at college to let her in on the secret—the only person to know ahead of time. She offered us her good wishes, said she was happy we were doing this, and gave us her blessing: "Finally, you're respectable!"

All that night, I listened to the rain and the wind rattle the windows. I wondered if I was brave enough to get married on the beach in a downpour. And we woke up to the sun blazing in an intensely blue sky. Thank you, universe.

At noon, we stood on the beach in that magic Cape light, looking across the bay at the lighthouse and Pilgrim Monument and MacMillan Wharf, I in my thrift shop dress and Stan in his Old Navy shirt. Before us stood the kind, warm, funny, compassionate justice of the peace, Susan Marcus, whom fate and Google had brought our way.

A wild wind swirled around us, so strong that we could barely hear our own words as Stan and I read aloud the poetry we'd chosen for the occasion—Stan from Walt Whitman:
...Will you give me yourself?
Will you come travel with me?
Shall we stick by each other as long as we live?

...and me from Shakespeare:
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds...

We read our vows to each other, comic yet sincere. We picked up fistfuls of sand and symbolically poured them together into one glass container—an olive oil cruet we bought at the Brewster General Store. We shared a glass of red wine, sweet and bitter. Tears streamed from my eyes, whether from emotion or wind.

And then it was done. We were married. He was my "husband." I was his "wife." Such odd words. We played with them like Play-Dough, rolling them around to see what we made of them. We wondered if we felt different. We don't, and we do.

"How's married life?" everyone asks now.

"It's superb," I say. "It's sweet."

And I believe my husband—still My Beloved—feels the same.

Keeper of the Flame

Shortly after she left Bryn Mawr college, Katharine Hepburn moved to New York City to pursue her acting career. She got a job as understudy for the lead in a play called, appropriately, The Big Pond.

"I learned the part and sat on the sidelines quite convinced that I would be far superior to the leading lady I was watching, Lucile Nikolas," she wrote in her autobiography, Me. "She was a very competent actress who did not have the advantage of being very young and absolutely outrageous and full of a sort of wild confidence based on nothing but energy and ego. Of course I thought I was scared to death, but all I can say now, looking back, is that I was not scared enough. Open a door, I'd go through. Even if the room I was entering was on fire."

This is who I should have been. At least, this is who I thought for years I should have been, back before I stopped second-guessing my 21-year-old self. Before I realized that all my choices—as safe and un-outrageous as they may have been—brought me here, to a place I'm happy to be.

But for many, many years, I berated myself for my Hepburn Deficit Disorder. Why couldn't I have had that energy and ego? Why didn't I assume that I was better, more talented and capable than the next woman—instead of what I did assume, which was that pretty much anyone else on the planet was more deserving than I. Why couldn't I charge through an open door, instead of peering tentatively around the doorframe?

Well, as Hillary Clinton once said, "Coulda, woulda, shoulda—didn't."

I'm over it now. Pretty much. But the other day I met the alternate-universe version of myself, and I have to admit, it gave me a pang.

He doesn't look much like me—he's about two feet taller, almost 30 years younger, African-American and gay. He's a senior at Stanford, my alma mater, and he found me through the alumni association. He wants to move to New York and hoped to get my advice about neighborhoods and jobs and...whatever. Mostly he talked and I listened—with admiration and a rueful shaking of my head.

"New York is the ultimate city!" he said as he perused the diner menu, before telling the waiter he'd please like the "freshly brewed coffee."

"It's so easy to be gay here, it's so easy to be African-American here. This is where it all happens. It's the greatest city in America!" No, he said, he definitely did not want to go home to Los Angeles. "Noooo, no, no. Maybe when I'm older and I'm ready to retire."

He had just auditioned for a summer theater program with Steppenwolf in Chicago, and was casting about for a job he could get in the fall in New York. "I'll do anything—I'll start in the mailroom, I'll get people's coffee. I'll walk dogs. Although I hear that's really competitive."

His plan was to work for a year while studying with his acting coach, go to drama school for three years, and then, ideally, move to London or Paris—where he'd spent his junior year abroad and attended every theatrical production he could grab hold of. "I saw 60 plays last year," he said. "I was broke, but I loved it."

When we met for freshly brewed coffee, he'd been in New York less than a week and had already seen four plays on student-rush tickets. His favorite was Red, the two-man play about artist Mark Rothko, starring Alfred Molina.

"It's about the nature of art, what is art—that whole difficult conversation and dialectic that people have," he said. "I saw it in London and I think it's even improved since then. The staging is so cinematic."

I walked him to his subway, and he thanked me profusely for my time and all the (non-existent) help I'd given him. As I turned and began to walk away, a middle-aged man leaned in to me and said, "Way too pleasant for New York."

I laughed. "Oh no," I said. "He'll do fine."

"You suddenly realize what a tremendous opportunity it is just to be alive. The potential."

And then—bam!—we lived in New York. And it only took me 40 years to get here.

I keep waiting for the giant wallop of realization, the smack on the rear end as the door to California hits me on my way out. But it's not like that. I've discovered that instead it's an incremental dawning, a gradual accumulation of signs and moments.

I got my New York driver's license, surrendering my California license in the process. I have no car, but I have a driver's license, on which I've given my permission to donate my organs and tissue and eyeballs in the event of my untimely death. (Realizing that my eyeballs would likely go to a New Yorker, the better to see the Empire State Building, was one tiny wallop of realization.)

I got my first piece of direct mail containing return-address labels in my name paired with my New York address—and considered donating money to the cause just because they were the first. Yes, I'm that kind of idiot.

I give directions to inquiring strangers on a regular basis, and have only once sent someone 90 degrees in the wrong direction.

I launch into conversation with total strangers, as I did today on the subway when I found a car full of people dressed in plastic bags. It was the day of the New York City Half-Marathon, explained the woman on my right, who was proud to have completed it in under 10 minutes per mile.

I group my errands not by which side of the street the stores are on or by how many left turns I can avoid, but by the walking route I'll take to get to them. The other day I had a nice straight-line trajectory from the neighborhood office store to the FedEx office to the Jefferson Market library, back to Three Lives bookstore and home. It was a sunny day and I smiled the whole way.

I'm convinced I love snow and slush as much as sun and blue skies. I do not make myself popular when I express this opinion—admittedly formed after only half a winter on the east coast. But where else can you enjoy scenes like this:

















And pat yourself on the back for having survived this:






















And then you see things like this in a sidewalk planter, which give you a whole new appreciation for spring and new life and starting afresh and hope and change and you feel like the first person who's ever witnessed the birth of a season:






















This morning The Child, home on spring break, said in the midst of a lovely 56-degree day, "I wish I could transport my L.A. friends here and say, 'So, what do you think of the weather?' And when they say, 'Brr, it's cold,' I can say, 'Yeah, no, not really.' "

I promise I'll never become a smug East Coaster who glows with moral superiority because her winters are tougher. I'll probably never call myself a New Yorker, because I haven't earned the title. I'm still an L.A. girl at heart—one who goes to the water for relief and renewal, and who feels calmed by the sun setting over the place where a body of water meets the land, whether it's over the Pacific Ocean...

















...or over the Hudson River.

















But I'm mighty happy to be here.

* Title courtesy Katharine Hepburn, speaking of her film The Corn Is Green, in her autobiography, Me.

Guess Who's Coming to Dinner

"Orphaned again!" my dad cried, as My Beloved and I prepared to leave my parents' home for our flight back to New York. My parents have watched a lot of kids (6) and grandkids (13) and great-grandkids (5) come and go from this house, while they stand on the front porch and wave goodbye. They prefer the hellos to the goodbyes.

We'd been staying with my parents for nearly two weeks, ever since escrow closed on my L.A. condo and we'd moved out—watching the moving truck drive away...






















...and vacuuming and scrubbing the now-empty space.

















I leaned on the third-floor railing and cried for a minute. Stan patted my back. Then we laid out our keys on the kitchen counter, gathered our backpacks and our bottles of 409 and Windex, and closed the door behind us. Goodbye, house.

The two weeks at my parents' house were a gift. Yes, it was a little weird staying in the bedroom I'd grown up in, surrounded by too many pictures of myself in my hideous adolescent state. But the come-full-circle effect was soothing in a way I hadn't expected. I started my L.A. life in this house, and I left my L.A. life in this house. In fact, I literally left my L.A. life in this house, since my mom encouraged us to fill up a drawer with our socks and t-shirts so we'd have them there for our next visit which would be VERY SOON, she suggested.

Stan and I got up early each day and sat in the backyard reading the paper, while the cat put on his Fearless Hunter costume and stalked grasshoppers.






















I had the chance to appreciate the stillness and the rustle of leaves and the changing light.

















We drove around town in the car we'd sold to my niece and borrowed back from her, now with her bright-yellow graduation tassel swinging from the rear-view mirror. I jammed my camera phone with an L.A. mosaic—from the ridiculous...






















...to the sublime.

















We scheduled as many goodbye lunches and dinners with friends and family as we could, and I always said the same thing: "We'll be back often. We'll just be traveling from east to west to east, instead of from west to east to west." But I discovered we couldn't stop people from treating this like a mournful farewell.

Between outings, we spent mornings at the breakfast table and evenings at the dinner table with my mom and dad, tucking ourselves in among the routines they've formed over 61 and a half years of marriage. I appreciated all over again my mom's unassuming strength, my dad's quick wit, the old Bob and Ray jokes retold with fresh appreciation, the Sinatra CDs playing in the background, the comfortable potato face of Jim Lehrer each night on the big TV, the sound of my mom's voice reading crossword puzzle clues to my dad, now legally blind with macular degeneration. Like a Waltons family of four, we'd bid each other good night and take up our stations in bedrooms down the creaky hallway.

And then, last Monday morning, it was time to go—time to gather our bags and the giant sheep-cat, and head east toward home.

(To be continued...)

"Has your mind taken hold again, dear Professor?"

I hope you'll excuse my long absence. I've been having a Jason Bourne moment.

For those of you who haven't enjoyed multiple viewings of The Bourne Identity, The Bourne Supremacy and The Bourne Ultimatum like The Child and I have: At the beginning of The Bourne Identity, Matt Damon is found floating in the ocean with gunshots in his back; he has no idea who he is or how he got there, or why people seem to be coming after him with nefarious intent. Turns out he's a highly trained CIA assassin, but he doesn't know that. He just knows that no matter what country he's in or what life-threatening situation presents itself, he can miraculously speak the language and instinctively break a guy's neck in less time than it takes to say, "Who am I? Where am I?"

My Bourne Identity Crisis is less deadly, more domestic. Still, a little unsettling.

I'm back in Los Angeles again, this time to close escrow on my condo, sell everything I own (except my baking dishes and my books; too many books), pack everything in boxes and finish—really, I mean it this time—the move to New York.

At least, my body's back in L.A.; my mind is apparently flying in on the redeye. I get in the car and my body knows how and where to drive, but my brain is going, "Wait, what?"

We arrived at LAX on a weekday morning, and took the #6 Culver City bus up Sepulveda toward home. I watched the city go by out the window. The Citibank (Didn't that used to be called something else? What the heck was it?), the Trader Joe's, Dinah's Family Restaurant. It all felt familiar—my body knew enough to relax, sensing we'd be on this bus for a while—and it was completely strange, too. (The strangeness amplified when the bus stopped outside a mental clinic and a woman about my age got on, her hand clamped over her own mouth. She sat in the front of the bus and rocked a little, emitting stifled screams from behind her hand.)

We walked in to an oddly familiar foreign apartment, everything in a realtor-approved state of fake perfection. What is this place, and why do I know where they keep the extra rolls of toilet paper?

Since then, we've been going through the appropriate motions: selling, packing, boxing. A lone desk chair bobs sadly on an ocean of blank carpet. The desk is gone, though; carted off by another in a new series of Craigslisters. The sound of screeching packing tape travels around the apartment—now it's coming from the walk-in closet! now from the kitchen! A molehill of taped, labeled cardboard boxes grows into a mountain in The Child's former bedroom.

It's weird. What can I say? Qu'est-ce que je peux dire? Wait, what?

And it's exciting, too, of course. I'm developing a new identity. Someone who can fly in from New York, be dropped down in the middle of Los Angeles and instinctively find her way around. And, of course, miraculously speak the language. Sorry I'm late, I was trying to avoid the 405, so I took the 134 to the 101 and got off at Coldwater and came over the canyon, which was fine till I got to Santa Monica, so I thought Olympic would be better, but...

Try that, Jason.

* * * * *

Title courtesy Tracy Lord (Katharine Hepburn, of course) in The Philadelphia Story, screenplay by Donald Ogden Stewart, based on the play by Philip Barry.

Olly, Olly Oxen Free

One of the great surprises of starting this blog was discovering the world of support and fellowship that existed "out there"—though fellowship is an unfortunate word, since my blog world is primarily populated by women. Articulate, funny, self-deprecating, generous, open-hearted women. From the charming and poetic Miss Whistle, who inspired me to start this blog, to the witty and fashion-savvy (not fashion-slavish) That's Not My Age, whose acquaintance I made just yesterday, these women have included me in a community that expands infinitely outward yet remains as warm as a campfire circle. (I'd also like to thank my muse, Katharine Hepburn, whose name always manages to catch people's eye.)

Yesterday, the Finnish goddess Helena Halme, who tells the romantic story of how she came to marry her Englishman and live in that country for now more than 20 years, "tagged" me in a sort of blog round-robin. When tagged, you're supposed to reveal 10 things about yourself then pass the baton to seven others whose blogs you admire. As Helena suggests, this is a good news/bad news thing: an honor to be listed, a challenge to reveal. Then I decided this blog is nothing if not a great wallowing in self-revelation, so what the hell? Fortunately, Helena and others before her have already played fast and loose with the "10" part of the deal, so I won't be struck dead if I come up short. Here goes.

1. My original life's dream was to be an actress. It was a high school dream, I admit, but passionate and real—until my un-Hepburn insecurities took over and I switched to my default setting: a college English major and a career spent behind a typewriter and a computer screen. Not that there's anything wrong with that! Unless you're doing it out of fear and retreat, rather than by choice. So my midlife efforts at Hepburnization are, in part, an attempt to reconnect with the teenager who never felt happier or bolder than when on stage playing Helen Keller in The Miracle Worker or Hermia in A Midsummer Night's Dream or Adriana in A Comedy of Errors.

2. I'm only now beginning to overcome Imposter Syndrome when walking the streets of New York. For the first nine years I visited New York, I was convinced that every person I passed on the sidewalk was looking at me and saying, "She's obviously not from here." Or worse: "She's obviously from California." I dodged and wove in the face of crowds. I was way too polite. I gave everyone else the right of way. And my clothes! Every season there seemed to be some mutually agreed-upon uniform—ballet flats or tight jeans tucked into boots or mini skirts with black tights—and I was never wearing it. Now for the first time I've either gotten with the program (thank you, Michele Hush, for the advice on buying a down coat), or I've decided I don't give a flying...whatever. Which would make me a true New Yorker.

3. I love water towers on the tops of buildings, trash cans on every corner, and ancient diners with $1 cups of coffee. I must look like a lunatic these days, because I'm smiling all the time as I tread the dirty, dog-poop-smeared, ice-encrusted streets of this city. I'm in my honeymoon phase, where I love everything about it. Subfreezing temperatures? Invigorating! Taxis honking? Musical! That razor-sharp wind off the Hudson? Um, that sucks.

4. I can be a spoiled princess baby. After I made my 47th elevator trip from the sixth floor to the basement while trying to do two loads of laundry with competition from five floors' worth of dirty underwear and dryers that left everything delightfully moist after an hour's worth of creaking and tumbling, I sniped to Stan, "We really have to install a washer-dryer in this apartment." He blinked at me. "I've never had a problem with it," he said. Then he added the magic words, "So I'll do all the laundry."

5. I'm more attached to my car than I admit out loud. My car's name is Dusty. For obvious reasons. She's a blue, only slighted dented 1999 Honda Civic. I resented her just the tiniest bit when I got her, because she has an automatic transmission and I really prefer a stick. But she carried us across the entire country without incident, then took me and The Child safely through a winter weather advisory, including icy interstates and swirling snow flurries, as I drove The Child to her New England college last weekend.

















I'm selling my trusty steed on Saturday. And while I'll be happy to be liberated from insurance payments and gas expenses and repair costs, I'll be a little sad, too. Goodbye, Dusty.

















6. I get testy with New Yorkers who engage in clichés about Los Angeles. We once had dinner with good friends of my Beloved, on whom I was really hoping to make a good first impression. The wife was chic and elegant. "Do you like living in Los Angeles?" she asked with velvety incredulity. I nearly bit my tongue off. "It's my home," I ended up saying. Lame. Say what you will about L.A.—traffic yes; plastic surgery, yes; sprawl, yes; 'Have a good one,' yes; the weather, yes—it's as rich and astonishing, as spectacular and as vile as anywhere on earth. I like that about a city.

7. I'm still making it up as I go along. Whether it's parenting or relationships or my so-called career, I basically have no idea what the heck I'm doing. I'm hoping that good intentions and sincerity make up the difference.

Okay, kids, that's all I got. At least there's a certain symmetry: 7 revelations, 7 blog recommendations. (Limiting the following list to 7 is much harder than coming up with 7 revelations; I've included blogs that I believe have not already been tagged elsewhere.) And I'd like to state for the record that, according to my made-up rules of the game, you 7 have no obligation whatsoever to play along. I just love what you're doing and wanted to say so in public. Herewith, in alphabetical order:

A Bag of Chips: Yes, she's my niece and no, I don't consider that cheating. She's creative, thoughtful and funny as hell. She's a photographer, scrapbooker, baker, and mom to three gorgeous live-wire children. And she made me a spectacular quilt for Christmas (thank you, Tina!), which you can see when you check out her blog. I especially recommend "Tina and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day."

Divinipotent Daily: So smart. So well-spoken. So literate. Every post broadens my intellectual horizons—in a readable, down-to-earth way. Side benefits: good quotes you've never heard before and great poetry. I especially recommend "Goodbye and Good Riddance, 2009."

Miss Whistle: She radiates positive energy, writes with heart and brains, and may be the most naturally generous person I've ever met. She recently lost her beloved father-in-law, and wrote exquisite pieces throughout the experience that conveyed simultaneously the incomparable loss and the enormous pleasure of his well-lived life. I especially recommend "Epiphany."

My Red Boa: I hope that I won't mortify my dear friend Marsha by mentioning her blog, which features beautifully rendered pieces about her childhood and young adulthood—nostalgic with a sly wit. I hope that she has recovered enough from her recent spill to think about sharing more of her stories. I especially recommend "Esmeralda and Me and the DMV."

Simmer Till Done: Luscious food, lustworthy photography, and best of all, writing that combines phenomenal intelligence with sharply honed humor—I ask you: What's not to love? Every post makes me want to cook, and as Jack Nicholson said in As Good As It Gets, "to be a better [hu]man." I especially recommend "You Scrape the Bowl Like a Housewife."

So Lovely: Heartfelt, unpretentious, and truly democratic in her interests, the pseudonymous Charlie Circus offers a cornucopia of topics and musings on her eclectic blog. She gave me a post's worth of Stuff to Think About in the piece I especially recommend, "A Longish One But Bear With Me..."

I Must See the Dhobey: Here's a blogger who almost certainly will not participate in this little tagging game: She's busy blogging from Burma in 1907. In fact, the fascinating posts are actually excerpts from letters written by the blogger's grandmother, whose surgeon husband was superintendent of the jail in Rangoon, Burma.

Laura Lansing Sleeps Here: End of the Road Trip

We're here. Safe in the New York loft looking at the view through the window while the New Year's Day Twilight Zone marathon plays on TV. All of the boxes and backpacks and bags of snacks have been unloaded from the car, which is parked two blocks away (a Manhattan success story).

We keep saying, "We're home!" and "We're back!" and "We did it!" and "My back hurts!" Yet it's strange, too, to realize that we're finished traveling.

We went from west to east in 7 days, and I feel like I gathered up the entire countryside as we went along and brought it with me, like rolling up a ball of yarn. I have this silent slideshow playing in my head all the time: red New Mexico plateaus, rolling Texas plains, bare-branched Tennessee woods, split-rail fences undulating over snowy Virginia pastures. We may be in the middle of New York now, but I'm still seeing Arkansas farmland and some jet-black grazing cows out of the corner of my eye.

We left Knoxville, Tennessee yesterday morning in a foggy rain—amazingly, the first "weather" we had to deal with on the entire trip.






















Somehow, even though we were making this trip in the middle of winter, and despite Midwest and East Coast blizzards in the days before we left Los Angeles (which caused no small amount of fretting on my mother's part), we managed to stay ahead of or behind the snow all the way across the country. Each day as we left our motel, I'd check the weather app on my iPhone, and see that the city we were leaving was due for snow...tomorrow. And we'd scoot out of town in the sunshine.

It rained all the way up and out of Tennessee and into Virginia, which still wore the hand-me-downs of the giant snowstorm that hit just before Christmas.

















Yet the highway was perfectly clear.

We drove all day and, as we did every day of the trip, arrived at our destination after dark. Before we left L.A., I'd had idealistic visions of hitting the road every day by 8 a.m., getting in our 7 hours of driving and arriving by mid-afternoon with plenty of daylight left. Ixnay on all counts.

We routinely drove out of the motel parking lot between 9 and 10 in the morning. Those 7 hours of driving turned into 9 when you included stops for gas and food and bathroom breaks and just plain sanity. And we never landed anywhere with even a sliver of sunshine remaining. Fortunately, we had the sense to always book a hotel room the night before, so we were never stumbling around looking for lodgings in the dark (a potential divorce issue even when you're not married).

But yesterday was even better, since we were staying with my cousin and her family in Springfield, Virginia, and we arrived to a warmly lighted house and a kitchen filled with the aromas of my cousin's scallop bisque, fresh bread and coffee cake that had just come out of the oven. I announced that we were moving in permanently. She took it well.

New Year's Eve notwithstanding, we were asleep by 11 p.m.—with a brief wake-up call at midnight when the neighbors set off fireworks.

And at 1:00 this afternoon we were back in the car for the last leg of the journey, carrying fresh supplies: half a homemade vegetable lasagna, peppermint brownies (with two layers of frosting) and chocolate-oatmeal-peanut butter cookies. No, she's MY cousin, and you can't have her.

On this day, finally, we knew we were in the east. For one thing, after six days of spending eight hours driving across a single state, today we were in five states in four hours: Virginia-Maryland-Delaware-New Jersey-New York. For another, after six days of driving for free across more than 2,000 miles, today we got gouged by tolls every 27 minutes. $2, $5, $4, $5, $8.70 and $8. Extortion! Graft! Waste, fraud and abuse! Welcome to New Jersey!


















But then the magic happened. We went to light speed as we entered the Holland Tunnel...






















...and when we came out the other side, I was reliving the moment nine years ago when I first popped out of that tunnel, riding in the back seat of a taxi after a red-eye flight from L.A. to visit my new beau, who met me in the lobby of his Greenwich Village apartment building looking sleepy and rumpled.

Now here we were, my beau and I, in my little car with California license plates, making our way up that same Hudson Street to that same former factory building in Greenwich Village we'll call home together.

We made it.

* * *

A playlist postscript:

For some reason, I had a hard time thinking of songs about Knoxville, Bristol, Staunton, Front Royal, Silver Spring, Wilmington, Trenton or Metuchen, but my favorite New York bard, Paul Simon, wrote the song that brought us home today:

America (Simon and Garfunkel)
"Counting the cars on the New Jersey Turnpike/They've all come to look for America."