"...an adventure any woman would relish for the rest o' time."

Dear 2010,

You're not very popular around these parts, what with all the lost jobs, unfound jobs, obscene political jello-wrestling, rampant greed and chicanery, and general displays of the end of civilization as we know it (exhibit one: any cover of OK! magazine). As my friend Michele said on Twitter the other day, "Dear 2010: Do not let the portal pummel your posterior on your way out."

So I feel a little sheepish—like the employee who says of a tyrannical boss, "Gosh, he's always been very nice to me"—when I thank you for the gifts of the past 12 months.

I don't know what little bird was whispering in your ear, but you seem to know my taste exactly. The life in New York is a perfect fit, and I'm already getting tons of use out of it! And I've received heaps of compliments on my new husband—what a great find! Thank you, so much, for everything.

Our arrival in New York City on January 1, 2010 after a spectacular cross-country drive.






















The sale of The Child's and my Los Angeles home of 10 years—and the successful arrival of our belongings in New York.






















The visits of four of my five siblings, three of my in-laws, and six of my nieces and nephews, and our adventures...
* circumnavigating the island on the factoid-rich Circle Line boat tour (did you know that 4/5 of the immigrants at Ellis Island never set foot on Manhattan, instead heading off by train to other states?).
* discovering (in the presence of three minor-age nieces and nephews) that yes, exhibitionists really do take the rooms at the Standard Hotel that overlook The High Line.
* eating pizza at Grimaldi's after walking the Brooklyn Bridge.
* falling back in time at the Museum of the City of New York.
* eating at Cafe Lalo with the You've Got Mail devotees in my family.
* paying respects to the Museum of Natural History—even if we only got as far as the lobby.






















A sunny April morning with arctic temperatures at the tippy-tip of Cape Cod, where My Beloved and I got married.






















Squiring The Child away from the disaster college. I asked if there was anything she'd miss about it. "Well, there was a tree that was great for climbing," she said.






















Watching the plants grow lush among the boardwalks on the Hudson River as we entered summer.






















Thick, humid July days and sultry August nights. Do I dare to eat a peach? I did.






















A final September trek to New England to gather The Child's now-mildewed belongings from storage—just before she started her new job in the fiction department at Barnes & Noble.






















A 10-day October visit to California, where we celebrated my miraculous mother's 85th birthday.













(My mother and her mother, taken sometime in the late 1940s or early '50s.)


My first chance to vote in a New York election. (But really, did you have to take away the cool voting lever thingies just when I got here?)























The spectacle of a New York City autumn...






















...and the quiet ferocity of a New York City blizzard. My first. Not my last.






















It's been a great ride. And, hey, thanks for introducing me to 2011! I think we're going to get along.



* Title taken from Katharine Hepburn as Eula Goodnight in Rooster Cogburn.

Suddenly, This Summer

My Beloved and I went back for a weekend visit to Provincetown, Mass.—or as my friend Jenny calls it, "the scene of the crime." We arrived in rain on Friday, were rewarded with a glorious blue-sky Saturday, and stumbled across two barefoot-on-the beach weddings, one gay, one straight. I love P'town.

On an overcast Sunday morning, we bicycled through the rambling Provincetown cemetery, which differs from other small-town cemeteries in the number of gravestones that read "drowned" or "lost at sea."

I was particularly struck by the plot of Captain Barzillai Higgins and his wife Abigail, and by the five little headstones laid out in front of them. Five of their seven children died before they turned seven. Two of them, little Abigail, age 4, and Isaac, age 1, died within six days of each other in April 1832. Captain Higgins was lost at sea when a steamship collided with his whaling schooner. Son Solomon died at 35 while at sea in Haiti. And Abigail lived to age 75—surviving her husband, one granddaughter, and every damn one of her seven children.

















If there's ever a sign from the universe that you need to get over yourself, you'll find it in a 19th-century cemetery.

I did some fretting this summer, but I do realize (after the fact) how first-world and 21st-century my worries were. This was our summer of transitions: our first together in New York, and the first time I've witnessed the bubbling-up of spring into summer and the fitful slide of summer into fall. This summer also marked the end of The Child's first year at college, a year that, not to put too fine a point on it, sucked. The qualities that looked good on paper—structurelessness, independence, having no roommates—proved less charming in realities on the ground; a year that started with anticipation, hope and a little stress ended with only the stress remaining.

So The Child is not going back to that college; in fact, she's not going back to college at all this year. After a couple of months in L.A., she decided to join us in New York and look for a job and an apartment. Which meant the three of us living together in a one-room loft apartment where the only wall is in the bathroom. Cozy!

We established house rules, we danced the complex minuet of three adults living in a small open space, we endured some gritted teeth and frayed nerves. But we—and she—rose to the occasion, too. She'd come home from days of pavement-pounding and resume-delivering, and we three would compare notes over dinners at our little table by the window. We'd all turn out our lights at the same time each night.

The Child got a job at Barnes & Noble, and thanks to Craigslist, has found an apartment with an adorable and compatible roommate in Brooklyn. In an emerging, gritty-turning-hipster neighborhood that had me fretting again as I researched crime statistics and haunted local blogs for comforting words on safety.

I consulted a young female acquaintance who has lived there for six years. Brigitte wrote back, "I'm not sure what I can say that would be reassuring except it is home to many people who live, love, and experience joy in this neighborhood." I calmed down. We walked the streets and appreciated the ingenuity and optimism of people opening bakeries and organic markets and coffee houses in former industrial spaces. The Child started schlepping stuff into her new fourth-floor walk-up.

It's only been a few days so far, and maybe I'll never lose my maternal capacity for spooling out worst-case-scenarios while I lie in bed listening to the sounds of the city. But though my child is not under my roof, she's not at sea, nor is she lost.

In fact, I think this may be a chance for both of us to find something.

Without Love

I started to write a long-overdue blog post about something completely different than this—about the usual: my life. I'll write that post next time, but not right now.

My former colleague at Modern Maturity magazine, Marcia Forsberg, has been missing since February, and her husband of 39 years has just been arrested on suspicion of murder. The police are searching the Lake Piru campground area in Ventura County, California for her body, based on "incriminating statements" her husband, Rick, made to the detectives. They think he killed her in their home in February and rented a car—rented a car!—to transport her body elsewhere. He then stayed in their Orange County home for the next six months—six months!—and told neighbors that she'd gone to Arizona to visit friends.

We've all seen these stories on the news, on CSI, on Without a Trace, on Law & Order, on Bones, on Mystery. I've never seen this kind of story flash on the screen with the face of someone I know. I'm not processing it.

I watched the bleached-blonde reporter end her story by ominously intoning, "And, neighbors say, Richard Forsberg had recently taken up...fishing," and I thought, "This is some kind of bizarre satire."

Marcia—pronounced "Mar-SEE-ya," because she didn't do things in a typical way—was tall, striking, with big curly hair and a constant conspiratorial smile. She was what you'd probably call touchy-feely, a woman who believed that her experience with breast cancer had taught her invaluable lessons, and who found the good and the humor in most situations.

She and Rick had no children, just each other, and from what Marcia always said they loved it that way. I had the impression of mutual, even slightly obsessive, devotion.

Modern Maturity moved from California to Washington, D.C. in 1996, and our work group broke up. A few of us met for occasional lunches and catch-ups, but I hadn't seen Marcia in years. But I can hear her voice, see her leaning over to me (I was 8 inches shorter) to share an observation or a mild piece of gossip and laughing richly.

Even if the police get answers, they'll never get the answers I want. I don't mean to sound naive, but how does this happen? What goes on in a nearly 40-year marriage between high school sweethearts such that it ends not in divorce, but murder? Who is this man, and where did the guy go whom Marcia loved and trusted?

I'm sorry, Marcia.

The Rainmaker

I like to sleep with the window open
And you keep the window closed
So goodbye
Goodbye
Goodbye.
—Paul Simon

I like the windows open. (Fortunately, so does My Beloved.) I like the sounds drifting up from the street, I like the cream-colored curtains billowing with a breeze, I like feeling connected to the world outside. But it's been hot here, really hot, and we've been closing the windows and running the air conditioner all the damn time. I hate that/I love that/I hate that/I love that.

I'm conflicted about my relationship with the air conditioner. But I'm more conflicted about feeling sweaty, sticky, clammy and gross, and about contorting myself into unattractive positions so that no piece of my flesh touches any other piece of my flesh.

Thus, the air conditioner runs several hours a day and we do our communing with nature in the early morning and the late afternoon/evening, when the air feels more like the caress of a silk scarf and less like the lick of a large dog. And we, like Paul Simon, sleep with the window open.

The other morning, I was having one of those especially vivid and surreal dreams that I swear are swirled up when your sleeping body is a little too warm. This one had to do with a cryogenic chamber buried in my parents' backyard. I wasn't sorry when I woke out of it, even if it was 5:30 in the morning. I got up and went to the window, and saw this:

















And then this:

















I'm not usually a sunrise kind of gal, so this felt like a reward for virtue.

There are other rewards awaiting us out there on the fringes of the day. Like the trail of breadcrumbs I found on my morning river walk today:







































There were more than a dozen of them. I hoped to find a chalked "YES!" at the end of the line, but I'm afraid the mystery remains unsolved. She couldn't have said no...could she?

The light this morning was eerie—a dark gray sky foretelling an oncoming rainstorm, with the sun sliding through underneath. It made Jersey City seem downright compelling.

















The other evening, after working at our desks in the artificial air all day long, we wandered down to the water again, just in time for the sunset.






















The sky and our mood mellowed.

















And when we discovered a tango class in progress at the end of the pier, it made perfect sense in a Felliniesque kind of way.

















Then we went home and threw open the windows and let the sirens and the whoops of laughter and the clop of horse hooves drift up to us on the breeze.

"Corners—lights—shadows."

I've been driving the streets of L.A. a lot lately...in my head.

I guess it's fitting that when I think of Los Angeles, the land of the driven, I should remember intersections and gas stations and mini-malls. But there's a poignancy to these particular memories; a minor-key soundtrack seems to be playing on the car stereo. Because sitting in the passenger seat as I drive is a Child. She's a junior in high school, doesn't yet have her license, and every morning I drive her the 10 miles across town to school.

Sometimes she sleeps the whole way. Sometimes she eats the fried potatoes I made for her while she'd showered and dressed. Most mornings we listen to her CD mixes, and I routinely fail the obligatory exam.

"Okay, who's this?"

"Um, All-American Rejects?"

"What?"

"Um, The Flesh Tones?"

"You mean The Hush Sound? No."

"Um, Tegan and Sara?"

(Shake of head. Facepalm.)

But the dopey ones I manage to learn by heart; in fact, I can never get them out of my head. She and I tsk with mutual disdain over the inane lyrics.

" 'There's no distance in between our love' ?" The Child says, her shoulders and voice rising with incredulity.

" 'You're part of my entity/Yeah for infinity' ?" I counter.

Then we sing along with Rihanna together.

" 'You can stand under my um-ber-ella-ella-ella-eh-eh-eh.' "

Every time she plays a new song for me, she surreptitiously watches my thumbs to see whether they tap the steering wheel in time to the music—the sure sign of a hit. She finds it weird and slightly disturbing to see them tapping to the beat of Katy Perry's "I Kissed a Girl." But I think I secretly get some cool-mom cred with her friends when she reports this. (She may beg to differ.)

I'm proud that she feels comfortable enough to preface a new song with "This one is not really parent-appropriate"—and then play it for me anyway. I admit to brief palpitations on the first hearing of The Dresden Dolls' "Shores of California," with its lyrics "All I know is that all around the nation/The girls are crying, the boys are masturbating."

Now I hear "Shores of California" and I'm achingly nostalgic for a certain stretch of Santa Monica Boulevard between Westwood and Beverly Glen, or of Sunset Boulevard between the Strip and La Brea. I miss turning the corner from La Brea onto Hollywood Boulevard and waving at my dad's star on the Walk of Fame.

"Hi, star!" we'd chorus, waving vigorously, perplexing the guy hosing down the sidewalk.

And I miss the sleeping, texting, chewing, singing, ranting, witticizing, facepalming, silently mulling high school junior sitting beside me. The girl who is now a sophomore in college and is spending the summer on the other side of the country.

I'll never get that year back. I'm grateful to have had it. And as anyone knows who's read my many recent posts, I'm truly grateful for the here and now in New York City. Still, in some impossible way, I want to hold that junior year in my hands again. These conflicting true things co-exist in an uneasy mash-up in my head. And I'll just have to live with that.

As the sage said: "You're part of my entity/Yeah for infinity."


* Title taken from Katharine Hepburn's autobiography, Me; on leaving the California house she once shared with Spencer Tracy.

End-of-the-Line Trip #3: 1 Train to South Ferry

[The third in an ongoing series of trips to the end of every one of New York's subway lines.]

I love that Manhattan is an island. I love that if you walk anywhere long enough in any direction, you'll end up at water. I love that there are all kinds of methods for getting on and off the island—and that my favorite, ferries, can take you to other islands.

Yesterday was the 4th of July and it was 12,000 degrees in New York. (Today it's 12,001.) Naturally that meant one thing to My Beloved and me: We must spend it out of doors for hours on end, surrounded by scads of other people. Otherwise, what's the point?

So we took our neighborhood train, the sweet poky local 1 train, to the South Ferry station at the bottom of the island. There we'd catch the ferry to Governors Island for a free concert by Rosanne Cash, whose latest album, The List (inspired by the list of 100 essential country songs given to her by her father, Johnny Cash) has been in heavy rotation at our house.

We'd never been to Governors Island before, so the lure of the new was part of the attraction of the day. A military installation since the days of the British (when it was used for "the accommodation and benefit of His Majesty's Governors"), the island was closed as a military facility in the 90s, and is now being redeveloped by New York State and New York City. The southern end of the island will be reshaped as a Central Park-like space, with man-made hills and streams, the better for viewing the Statue of Liberty across the harbor. The public can visit the island on weekends via the free 800-yard ferry ride, and bring or rent bikes to ride around the island.

As the doors of the subway train opened at South Ferry, the riders poured out and up the stairs, dividing left and right depending on whether they were aimed at the Staten Island Ferry (right) or the Governors Island ferry (left). We shared our standing space at the front of the ferry with a group of 20something hipsters and a hyper-confident, blonde-ringleted five-year-old who muscled her way to the window to announce the goings-on.

"WE'RE LEAVING!" she bellowed as the ferry creaked away from the dock. "WE'RE MOVING! HEY, WE'RE GETTING THERE! WE'RE HERE!"

While we'd had visions of sitting in the blazing sun for hours, we were surprised to find the island shady and pastoral, with rows of grand old houses that are in the process of being reconceived as artists' galleries and local artisans' shops, among other things. On the 4th of July, it was an ideal place to loll about and picnic.

















We planted ourselves in a prime spot near the stage almost two and a half hours before the concert, and spent the time people-watching, reading, eating grape tomatoes and chocolate-covered pretzels, and noticing that the signage managed to spell Cash's name wrong. (No "e" in Rosanne, guys.) The sound check gave us early birds a little bonus concert, as she and husband John Leventhal and the band tested out the blues classic "Motherless Children."






















The concert itself included fantastic duets between Cash and Leventhal on "Sea of Heartbreak" (which she performs with Bruce Springsteen on the album) and "Bury Me Under the Weeping Willow"; a rocking version of "This Land Is Your Land"; and Cash's killer cover of Bobbie Gentry's "Ode to Billie Joe."

















And the rousing encore of "Man Smart (Woman Smarter)" gave me the happy chance to trot out my lame white-girl dance.






















Then...back across the water to Manhattan...






















...just in time for a wonderfully international 4th of July dinner with old and new friends from the U.S., the U.K., South Africa, Italy, India, and Canada. Plus a view straight down 23rd Street of the fireworks over the Hudson River.

I know it wasn't Thanksgiving, but I gave thanks, anyway—for independence, for great friendships and great music, and for a family and a city I love.

End-of-the-Line Trip #2: E Train from Jamaica Center

I'll admit right off the bat that this one is a bit of a cheat. Yes, we did arrive at the end of the line on the E train, but it was...an accident. It was part of a series of June travels—New York-L.A.-New York; New York-Virginia-New York; New York-Orlando-New York—that have only now ended and involved one unexpected ride on a shuttle bus in Jamaica, Queens when the subway was being serviced. And a careening, cheek-by-jowl journey it was, as squashed travelers and locals swayed and lurched through the lamplit neighborhoods, keeping up a loud patter the whole way—"This is riDICulous, yo"..."Where are we GOING?"..."Just take me to my crib, I'll DRIVE to Manhattan"—until we all tumbled off the bus together at Union Turnpike and poured down the stairs to the subway.

So, my apologies, both for this little ruse and for my long blog absence.

After spending so many months chronicling my impending life changes—a Child going to college, a cross-country move to New York—I discovered that once I actually landed, I got so swept up in just being here that I neglected to settle down and write about it.

And there was the little crisis of confidence, too; the feeling that I was blathering on narcissistically and who could possibly care? (I'm not fishing here, I swear.) But a few gentle nudges from friends made me realize that I was being a wuss, and a lazy one. If you're going to start a blog, then blog, you idiot.

Hence, blog. So where were we?

1. In which she dives into the deep end. Within a week of our official, no-turning-back move to New York, I had joined the Film Forum, the New-York Historical Society and BAM (the Brooklyn Academy of Music); donated money to Hudson River Park and WNYC (the local NPR station); attended three films, including one double feature (Red Dust with Clark Gable, Jean Harlow and Mary Astor, and Bombshell with Jean Harlow, Lee Tracy and Franchot Tone—bliss) and bought tickets for two lectures. Who knew that the multitudes were waiting breathlessly for a chat on "James Madison and the Constitution"?

















I felt like a pirate plunging both hands into a great pile of plundered loot: the riches! I wanted to do it all, every day.

2. In which she receives visitors. In the span of a month, we welcomed four of my five siblings, my sister-in-law, one brother-in-law, one niece and one nephew, many of whom gamely camped out with us in our wall-less one-room loft. Besides offering a warm blanket of family togetherness, these visits were a fantastic opportunity to be an annoying show-off. "That white building that looks like crumpled plastic? Oh that's Barry Diller's IAC headquarters, designed by Frank Gehry." "Here we are in Washington Square Park, where they once conducted public hangings and buried impoverished victims of the yellow fever epidemic." I adore being an annoying show-off. These visits also got us to parts of town we'd never been to before: the archives building where you can do genealogical research; the gorgeous new Brooklyn Bridge Park on the East River between the Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridges; the Museum of Arts and Design; Grimaldi's Pizzeria. You see things in a new way when you show your town to out-of-towners.






















3. In which she goes..."home"? In early June, we flew to Los Angeles for 10 days, the first time we'd been back since the move. Having reserved the smallest rental car possible (the clerk tried to persuade us to upgrade to a compact), we ended up with the only car left on the lot: a monstrous white SUV. I mention this because the weirdness of lumbering around in a Sherman tank after 30 years of driving Hondas and Toyotas added to my initial sense of dislocation and discomfiture. I didn't belong here anymore. The next day we downgraded to a Hyundai and things began to feel more normal. We stayed with my parents, gathered with family, visited friends, soaked up the sight of blossoming jacaranda and bougainvillea...






















...spoke to a classroom full of fifth-graders, tooled around town, and took a passing glance at our old condo building (pang). I visited with The Child, who is staying with her dad for the summer, and felt the familiar flutter of guilt over selling her childhood home. Then she and I made a red velvet cake for a family birthday party, and all was temporarily right with the world.






















4. In which she goes there and back again. A late-night arrival at JFK, one whirl on a subway shuttle bus (see paragraph 1, subsection a), and a 5 a.m. wake-up call later, we took Amtrak down to Washington, D.C. for a research trip into Virginia. (The second in our series of graphic novels is set during the Civil War, and opens on a fictional plantation near Fredericksburg.) We stayed with my cousins, the youngest of whom led us on a walk in the lush woods near their home:






















(That's my Beloved, though, not my seven-year-old cousin in the photo.) Civil War history being rather ever-present in Virginia—we were once crisply informed by a white-haired gentlelady in the Richmond Visitor's Bureau that "Theah's just one pawnt of view down heah, and it's the Confederate pawnt of view"—it wasn't difficult to find sites where we could witness 1860s farm life in action. Ask me anything about grain cradles, flails and threshing wheat! On our last day, we toured the Smithsonian's American History museum, where I pronounced Hillary's gown the best-looking of the First Ladies' inauguration dresses (yes, even more than Michelle's one-armed number), but Grace Coolidge's flapper style evening gown the most delightful of all. Why Calvin Coolidge, you sly fox.

5. In which she and The Child go to Hogwarts. In the greatest of all possible boondoggles, I managed to get a magazine assignment that sent The Child and me to write a mother-daughter piece on the new Wizarding World of Harry Potter attraction at Universal Orlando. Me: mother-daughter bonding time! getting The Child her first byline! The Child: butterbeer! Pygmy Puffs! possible Luna Lovegood sightings! It was a busy, humid, footsore few days (we threw in Disney World while we were at it), and I came as close as I ever want to to losing my lunch on a roller coaster during the "Forbidden Journey" ride through Hogwarts.
But I got my bonding wish as we drove around listening to The Child's playlist in our air conditioned Ford Focus; and she got to live her longtime fantasy of walking in Harry's footsteps—even if she was joined by ungodly numbers of fellow tourists, many of whom had waited up to six hours just to get into the park, followed by untold hours of waiting for rides, butterbeer, food, and the privilege of spending money in the Potteresque shops. The Child's advice: Go in a year. (Footnote for Potter fans: Sadly, the pygmy puffs were sold out, the Extendable Ears hadn't yet come in, and Luna Lovegood was nowhere to be seen. But the chocolate frogs, complete with holographic trading cards, were plentiful, and the girls of the Beauxbatons Academy of Magic and the boys of Durmstrang Institute made fetching appearances.)

6. In which she enjoys her honeymoon. Humidity, crowds, non-functioning subways, the Gay Pride Parade landing on our doorstep? Bring 'em on! I'm in my honeymoon phase—with my Beloved-Husband and with New York City. They both delight, inspire and intoxicate me. And I don't have to find parking! I'm a lucky girl.