Moving, Part Two (The Bright Side)

Caramel, my future pet goat

While all the confusion and lostness of this move remains true and real, I will say that I am extremely grateful to have a few friends here – people that I have known since I was 12, 14, 18 – and they have welcomed me, invited me to their homes, housed me when I needed a place to stay before I moved here, and fed me wonderful meals. Their kids entertain me and help me keep a lid on my [by now] screaming maternal instinct. One friend, Kira, is as close to a Pioneer Woman as one can get – she works one and a half full-time jobs in addition to raising a family, being involved in her community, working a vegetable garden, and keeping many animals. (She worries that she is not doing enough. Oy.) She has had me over for several amazing, home-cooked, locally-grown, healthy and delicious meals (the woman grinds her own flour and makes her own yogurt!!!).

And best of all, she has allowed me to come snuggle their new baby Nigerian Dwarf goats whenever I want.

This is a picture of the one I fell in love with, because she let me snuggle her and she gave me little tiny kisses all over my cheeks and chin.

Kira doesn’t realize how much power snuggling a baby goat has to chase away sadness and loneliness.  

(It's dark, but the baby goat is there...)

Moving, Part 1 (Feeling A Bit Sorry For Myself)

This coming Saturday – if all goes well – I will move into my fourth home in four months.  I am finding all the moving – and the many other unknowns in my life – a bit stressful. There are some really great things about living here in the “Happy Valley,” as some call the Pioneer Valley. I am much calmer, for one – by my own assessment, and by that of other people who talk to and see me. There are bunnies on the library lawn in the evening. People are friendly and courteous, make eye contact, and smile (which – it must be said – delighted me for the first three weeks or so, but which I am now finding a bit overwhelming; I’m longing for the personal space that New Yorkers claim and are given automatically). Here the pedestrian rules the world, rather than being a target for angry drivers. I can almost always sleep through the night, uninterrupted by street fights, sirens, or domestic abuse taking place on my street corner. I can take a walk without getting hooted at or having to always look behind me (although I still do). I can drive 15 minutes and go swim in a lake whenever I want, rather than having to make a whole day of it and spend $50 to take public transportation to a beach. My kitty gets to spend her days watching lots of squirrels and birds out the window, rather than just the occasional pigeon. These things are lovely.

On the downside, it’s white, white, white, and very homogenous. I desperately miss the cultural diversity of NYC, and the wonderful Babel tower of languages that always surrounded me there. Also – I miss my friends. So, so much. And the way I always run into people I know on the street. And I miss all the things and places I know. After 14+ years of NYC living, I know where to go to get almost anything there. Here, I don’t even know where the best/closest places are to get lightbulbs (Walmart? Really?), key copies, photocopies, massage, or shave ice. Further, anyone who knows me knows that I am TERRIBLE at dealing with change. Intellectually, I know it’s good, and necessary, and inevitable; emotionally, I completely freak out, no matter how big or small the change is. So this was a big one.

When I moved, I tried so hard to purge as many of my possessions as possible. I failed miserably, being a hopeless pack rat, but one thing I did at the time that I was so proud of was get rid of my mismatching dishes. I was kindly given a beautiful set of matching dishes by Jeff and Megan, and I thought – oh, these are grownup dishes. In my new home, I can have people over for a meal, and I’ll lay out a beautiful grownup tablecloth, and I’ll cook (!), and I’ll serve the food on my beautiful grownup matching dishes. It was a good plan. After much anguish, I parted with my dishes, which were partly randomly inherited, but were partly my grandparents’ dishes. (Don’t worry; nothing valuable. Monetarily, at least.) They were yellow stoneware, not particularly pretty, and not even close to a full set.

(This is not one of the dishes. Unfortunately, I can't remember the name, so can't find an image. Stoneware...yellow...?)

But now…I would pay so much money to have those ugly yellow dishes back. The same exact ones that were my grandparents’, then mine – not a new, full set of the same kind. I felt like they were home, they made me me, they helped me know where and who I was. Those dishes have been with me the whole 14 years I’ve been living on my own. I don’t know who I am with these new dishes. Maybe they match someone I would like to be (matching, pretty, “grownup”) but not the person I still feel like I am (messy, mismatching, imperfect). I know it’s silly to long for dishes – especially when there were only 2-3 of each kind left, and they weren’t pretty – but out of all the things I gave away, I miss those the most.

There is a poem that has been circling through my head since I moved to this apartment; I read it in The Sun Magazine, and miraculously found that I had made a copy of it and put it in my files:

After a Move

Patrick Donnelly

These are not my keys,

this is not my door.

I’m so tired, I could sleep anyplace,

but this is not my bed.

This is not my street,

not my face,

not my dirt

where someone’s hand

touched the wall again and again

to help themselves down the stairs.

These are not my eyes,

not my leaves, not my light,

nothing like the view I knew.

These words are not mine,

none of this food is mine,

And when I asked for the kind of sandwich I liked

the man behind the counter said simply:

No.

Careful What You Wish For

On the one hand, I am completely skeptical of the idea that our puny little minds have the power to “manifest” something that we wish for, as in creative visualization, whether it be the job of our dreams, the honeypie of our dreams, or a massive wad of cash. On the other hand, there is something to be said for aligning your own goals and practices around those things which you want most in life, and I’ve seen – in both my own life and my friends’ lives – that this can definitely help bring about your desires. If I had a third hand, however, I would say that sometimes, really eerie things happen to me, and while I would like to explain them away by “coincidence,” given my very clinical, scientific, evidence-based schooling, I don’t know that I can always do so with confidence. (And – as my pal Rodrigo used to say – sometimes it’s just more fun to think about magic than about science and coincidence. Although this used to annoy the heck out of me. And it still does, sometimes.)

These Weird Things are not always good. I might cite all the violent things that seem to happen in my vicinity (and apparently, not in my friends’ vicinities) as an example. Also, there have been several occasions where I’ve been thinking a lot about someone I haven’t seen or spoken to in several years, and then – within a week – they’ll either contact me or I’ll run into them. (A skeptical scientist such as myself would ask me to write down all the times I’ve thought a lot about someone and haven’t run into them, but that’s not as much fun. So we won’t ask any scientists to weigh in here.) The most bizarre incident occurred a few months ago, and it has made me a bit more of a believer than I was previously. In what, I don’t know, but I am trying to be a bit more careful about my thoughts. (Why not? It’s a good Buddhist practice, anyway.)

Leah, Olivia, and Rebecca had just had the first evening of their clown show, Pretty ‘n’ Papi [http://www.nytheatre.com/showpage.aspx?s=pret12133]. It was Feb. 24, approximately 7:40 p.m. Leah was in town for the weekend to do the show, and would be again the following weekend. I was planning to possibly move out of NYC in a month. Leah, Olivia, and I were walking from the theatre, desperately trying to find something to eat. We walked in front of the theatre where “Stomp” plays, and where it has been playing almost the entire time I’ve lived in NYC; people were lining up to go in for that evening’s show. As we walked by it, I said to Leah something like, “I have never seen “Stomp,” and I’ve wanted to for years. Could we figure out a way that sometime in the next month we could go see it?” She said, “Sure,” and then behind us, half a block away, on the corner, we heard a scream.

Normally I am quick on the draw when there is street drama (as people who’ve seen me intervene in a fight will attest), but Leah is 100 times faster. While I was still standing in place trying to figure out what was going on, Leah was already there at the drama, with Olivia on her heels. A little girl was lying on the sidewalk, apparently unconscious, and her family members around her were trying to pull her upright. As I got there, Olivia rightly told them to let her be, not to pull her up. Leah was already several feet away, on her phone calling 911, and shouting at me to do CPR. {Preliminary weirdness here: I had just been thinking about renewing my CPR training, and realizing that I couldn’t remember my skills – how many breaths to how many chest compressions – and JUST THAT MORNING I had gone online to look up classes to register for.}

I will try to condense the drama here – the little girl did not need CPR (thank god), and I did not abide by the CPR rules anyway, which left my brain completely (i.e. introduce yourself, explain your training, ask if it’s okay for you to help (if it’s a minor, you must get permission from the parent before you do a thing), ask what happened…all these things are crucial, yes, but they take too much time, and I forgot about them anyway. I redid my CPR training shortly after, and I will do those things next time.). So I was trying to find out what happened from her parents, while trying to figure out what was wrong with her and what I should do, if anything. (Passersby attempted to be mildly helpful; they weren’t.) I was holding the girl’s hands, and trying to figure out if she had had a seizure, or was bleeding from the back of her head where she had hit it on the sidewalk. Leah and I were yelling back and forth so she could communicate with the 911 folks. The little girl started to regain consciousness, and I told her to stay where she was – except we learned that she didn’t speak much English – she spoke two European languages I have NO skills in (I think it was Swedish and Flemish – what?!?), so I just continued to speak to her in English, and occasionally remembered to ask her parents to translate. She did seem to understand English fairly well, and when Leah told 911 how old she thought the girl was (“about eight”) the girl corrected her (“nine”), which made me feel much better about the situation. I told her she was going to be okay, and asked if she had pain – was trying to figure out how badly she had hit her head when she fell (Leah had somehow turned around before the scream – talk about psychic, especially since it really was immediately after she said “sure” to me – and saw the girl fall straight backwards like a plank).

It sounded like what happened is that the little girl had been really sick for a few days, and hadn’t eaten much, and was possibly dehydrated as well, so had fainted due to either low blood sugar or dehydration. Fairly soon, the ambulance came, and at that point the European grandmother had tired of allowing her granddaughter to remain lying on a NYC sidewalk, and had hauled the poor kid up. But she seemed okay. I still kept my hands on her in case she went down again, and we encouraged them to go to the hospital just to see what was wrong, which they did.

At some point towards the end of this, it came out that the family was visiting the dad from overseas, and they were all on their way to see….(drum roll)…”Stomp.” Although the girl had been sick, she had been feeling better that day, and had insisted on going to the show. As the folks were tending to the girl in the ambulance, the dad very sweetly thanked Leah, Olivia, and me, and hugged us.

Then he gave us his “Stomp” tickets.

We sort of stammered a lot, but he said he knew he wouldn’t be able to get his money back, and he wanted someone to enjoy the show. Five “Stomp” tickets. Orchestra seats. $50 each, for a total of $250. Then he got in the ambulance.

We stared at the tickets because we were deeply in shock (okay, I speak for myself here). Then Leah had the foresight to go to the ambulance and ask the dad (Mike) for his contact info. She said we would try to sell the tickets and give him his money back. He said he didn’t want any money, but they traded contact info, and then we went back to staring at the tickets. At that point, the show was starting in about seven minutes. We concluded we would be unlikely to be able to sell all the tickets, and tried to decide if we should go.

Olivia didn’t want to go, and Leah and I did (but felt weird about it). Leah called Rebecca, who wanted to go, but had to run from across town. We then did some sneaky wrangling and managed to sell the remaining two tickets at half price to two ladies who were most grateful (but did not want to pay any more).

Then we watched the show, which I’m sure was wonderful, except I spent most of the time a) trying to stop shaking, b) thinking about what had happened, and c) trying to work out in my mind if we could each give Mike SOME money towards our tickets, although this inspired much debate among our team for several days.

(The short-version coda to that is that over the course of several weeks, I basically had to force Mike to take the money the two women had given us; he completely refused to take any additional money, as he said he was so grateful for our help and our kindness, and he was so glad we had gotten to see and enjoy the show.)

But truly, it has made me a bit nervous about what I put out to the ol’ Universe. Perhaps I should be sure to be VERY specific in the future; “I want ____, but not at the expense of anyone’s health or wellbeing. I appreciate your efforts, Universe, but let’s not get too dramatic here.”

And WHY have I not – since – spent massive amounts of time visualizing the things I want even more than “Stomp” tickets??? (I also think it’s easier to visualize “a pint of Ben & Jerry’s” or even “a pet monkey” than to visualize “a job that satisfies me; a nice, mold-free apartment; a wonderful partner; a family once I can afford one…”) Perhaps my visualizer needs some rewiring.

P.S. I am clearly a few months/posts behind. I have already moved from NYC to Western MA, although I’m not sure I have fully decided to do so, yet. So perhaps I should write a little something about that.