On Top of It All
On top of it all
I am bereft. This is a post about bereavement. To which I am no stranger. I won’t get all dramatic on you with details — you all have your own problems. But suffice it to say that loss and I are old drinking buddies, and I cling to it like lint.
It’s been going on for weeks now. Pandemic weeks, which are like New York minutes, irreconcilably fast and interminably slow at the same time. It began with the idea of moving to the country. My wife’s dream. A house with chickens. That has been a motif of our relationship since the early days. A notion I let simmer like stew in a crockpot month after month, year after year, salted with ambivalence, peppered with curiosity, spiced with hints of dread.
Though most would never guess, I am a country boy. I grew up getting lost in the woods, swimming in ice cold streams, canoeing down the river, cultivating a mostly innocent pyromania. But, raised by cultured, educated, elite parents, who listened to jazz and worshipped cinema, I always longed for cultured, urban life. After college, I moved to New York City and, with a few interludes in exotic places, have lived here for more than 30 years — a bedlamite, a sybarite.
New York has become my identity in so many ways. It’s in the way I talk, the way I walk, my postmodern polymathy, my intellectual snobbery, my flaneurish dilettantism. I’ve worked in the non-profit sector. I’ve tightroped between liberal and progressive. I two-wheeled through the chaotic streets for years as bike lanes sprouted in my wake. I lived over the best bagel shop in Manhattan for two decades and became bilingual as an adult. I would have trouble really saying that I come from anywhere else than this unfettered cosmopolis, with all its love and hate and arrogance and indifference.
And, if anything, New York has reached out to me more seductively than ever before these past few months. Months in which I have been largely cut off — as we all have been — from most of the things that distinguishes this crowded plot of earth from all others. Here I sit, on the ramshackle roof terrace (the very one that sold on us on moving to this apartment three years ago; the very one that was, for me, the dream of living in this city — with a view off to morphing midtown and a sky slashed with pink clouds every evening) overlooking an analogously ramshackle stretch of Harlem, as I have been for, what? 150 nights? More? My own glorious prison yard. And, from here, and from the tentative masked forays through the streets —on foot, on bike, by car — somehow the deftly alluring Gotham has wooed me in unexpected ways. The roars of protest marches on nearby streets, the fireworks exploding on all sides every night, the sultry darkness and breezes from the sea that touch your skin like amorous hands.
I am going to miss it. Terribly. In the marrow of my bones. Like the other great losses in my life.
But…in these final days, I’ve been feeling ready to leave. The other day, I experienced another loss. Not the kind of loss that transforms you. But maybe the kind that kicks you in the butt. Someone broke into our building and stole my beloved road bike, which I had ridden thousands of miles. I rode it countless times to Bear Mountain on sunny weekends. I spun it on three New York Centuries, and a 150-mile 12-hour ride from Penn Station to Montauk, Long Island. I once rode it from my apartment on the Upper West Side all the way to my hometown of Milford, PA in one long, sweaty day of climbing and inventing routes. It wasn’t an expensive bike, but it was a companion in my life. And the theft seems like an omen. Our neighborhood has deteriorated here. Crime and desperation are on the rise. Suddenly I feel alienated from this area that had engaged me so much for the past seven years living and working here, taking pictures, admiring drunken street revelry, at once repelled by and lost in its drama and anger and exuberance and exasperation.
Does one bereavement nullify another?
I can’t help feeling like a traitor of sorts. At this moment that the city is deconstructing itself and, in some real sense, decomposing before my eyes. I perceive that this is a moment of reformation and transformation, and it’s been exhilarating, if exhausting. And I preemptively regret that I won’t get to be a part of it as it evolves into whatever comes next. But, at the same time, something has clicked — somewhere between my lifelong sense of adventure and my attraction to a home base that embraces me. And that something is telling me that now is a good a time to head west.
I don’t mean to feel that I’m running away from it, but I guess, in a very real way, that’s what I’m doing. And it pains me. But I also feel an incipient sense of liberation starting to pulse in my veins. It could be age, the need to distance (socially?) from the chaos. Perhaps.
But, of course, it’s also something grander and less selfish and less transitory. I’ve committed myself to a relationship with a wonderful woman — a great woman — someone who has taught me so many things and who seems to understand needs that I have that I, myself, am unable to apprehend. And that love I feel for her leads me to put aside, if reluctantly and hesitantly, my more primitive ties to my comfort and my past and my tendency toward stasis. It leads me to put aside the storied childish things, and, of course, what ultimately is a kind of fear, to share in her dream — a dream that is logical and heartfelt and authentic, and one that brings tears to her eyes. And that is better than enough.
So I go. I say goodbye tonight to this home, a romantic perch above a crumbling, romantic city. And exchange it for another home, surrounded by trees and buzzing with insects. Sirens for birds, pavement for grass. There will be chickens eventually, too. And maybe by then, the view they inhabit will be as glorious as the one I leave behind tonight. (See you there.)
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