It seems so wildly ironic that 1999 should have been such a
year of transition for us.
Those of you who have followed our seemingly eternal quest for a new
apartment know we gave up on renovating our old apartment a few years ago
in favor of finding a new apartment. We closed on a wonderful one-bedroom
apartment way up in the Midtown sky in early 1998. The apartment had a
great view, a terrace that was bigger than our entire previous apartment
and needed, well, a little work. This June, a year and a half later - with
new floors, new electrical, new lighting, new closets, and lots of plastering
and painting - and just as we were about to move in, we went on a long-scheduled
and long-needed vacation.
For several years, we've spent a week or so on a mostly-deserted little
island in the Caribbean, in a cottage without running water (unless you
count the rain), without electricity (except for a solar cell and some
batteries) and, of course, without any digital anything. The one clock
in the cottage, which never runs on time anyway, is buried deep in a drawer
as soon as we arrive. We've found it very restorative to stay someplace
so different from our usual urban, plugged-in lives. This is the first
year we've stayed there after being told that cell phone services (and,
by extension, cellular modems) now reach our formerly isolated island.
While we didn't bring our computers, nor spend the soft days communing
on cell phones, we could have, and a few other sandy occupants of the island
apparently did. It's different now, knowing.
When we returned, we moved in. You might wonder why it took so long.
Don't - it's a long New York story. You might think we moved in with everything
finished and, as we intended, an apartment worthy of Metropolitan Home.
Don't. As we write this, our not yet beautiful apartment is full of boxes,
and full of holes, the detritus of two cabinetry contractors who couldn't
quite do what they signed up to do. We're now searching for a third.
In the midst of our move, Thomas, our cat of thirteen years, died. Sure,
that's always sad, but please understand. He wasn't just our cat. He was
our family. The constant companion, the bedmate when we were sick, the
friend when we were alone. Our boy. Of course, he was also possessed by
demons, as the trail of blood from our friends and family will attest.
It was that black-and-white duality that made him so interesting. Though
he never saw the new apartment, we still see him lurking about occasionally,
sunning himself on the bed or hiding amid the boxes. We miss him.
Living high above Manhattan in an apartment with a terrace is quite
odd. Did you know there are Terrace People in New York, at about this height?
For one reason or another, they traded interior space for exterior. Some
of them have Amazon forests, through which you can scarcely see their terrace
(though you can sometimes see the owners, watering cans in hand, trying
to keep their urban jungles alive). Some of them have urban deserts - tiny,
denuded expanses of red tile on which live neither plants nor furniture
nor people - and you have to wonder what they think, now, of their costly
trade-off. We, of course, have Grand Plans for forested nooks, for productive
gardens, for summertime blooms, but so far we have broken lawn furniture
and one lovely tomato plant, in spite of which we have entertained a few
very tolerant friends most joyously on warm summer evenings. Did you know
that living so high gives rise to dreams of flying?
What with all of the rest of the madness in our lives, we probably should
have expected our mid-life crisis too. We had been hoping to avoid it altogether,
sneaking through our forties forever young, before fate noticed. But we
didn't scurry quickly enough. It's reminiscent of your first hangover,
really, the kind of thing you read about, figuring the litany of agonies
must be a caricature of something far more prosaic - until it happens to
you. We'll recover, and we're learning new things about ourselves in the
process but, as with a pounding hangover, the thrill of learning is somewhat
tempered.
Then we ran out rather precipitously one Saturday and bought a cute
little blue Mazda Miata convertible. Now, we know what you're thinking.
But it wasn't the usual midlife-crisis-buy-a-convertible cliché.
Honest. We had been planning to buy it for months. Well, maybe the timing
was suspicious. (And yes, it's a surprisingly large amount of fun, and
we're learning the joys of road trips again.)
The Miata would have been great on our Northwest Tour this year - a
couple of weeks in Washington and British Columbia, visiting family, wandering
around Vancouver during a conference, marveling through the Olympic Rain
Forest. We tried renting some other convertible for part of the drive,
but it was big and mushy and just not the same. There was, however, one
day spent in a cabin on the beach in the drizzling rain, with the car parked
the whole day outside, with us parked the whole day inside, shuttling a
small tower of cut logs into the stone fireplace, keeping ourselves warm
against the blue-gray ocean mist, being silent or talking softly, that
will remain in memory for a very long time to come.
We wish you all a Happy New Millennium. We'll be spending that particular
transition on a sailboat in the Caribbean with Steve & Pat Weingart.
We’re looking forward to the opening year of this new millennium being
as interesting as the closing one of the last millennium though, we hope,
much less tumultuous
