May 19, 2008--Snowbirding: Letter from Home

May 19, 2008

Dear Christian:

The hardest part of returning to New York City after snowbirding is to figure out what to say to the regulars at Balthazar about what we’ve been up to for the past three-and-a-half months. Considering how we spent our days in Delray Beach, it’s hard to make ourselves sound cool.

It was difficult enough before heading south to describe what we were doing after we both left our jobs. New York University and the Ford Foundation defined us as retired, but since our egos didn’t allow us to be comfortable with that designation we struggled to find ways to say what we were up to. Taking a version of a sabbatical? Our university friends would understand that. Wandering? Some of our younger friends who had recently done some of their own--one hitchhiking from Argentina to Peru—smiled supportively at that. Taking time off to figure out what to do next? A therapist we know approved of that. Or what we finally settled on—Living in different way we finally called it. That yielded some blank and some envious stares.

But did any of what we have actually been doing for the past few months qualify for any of these explanations? Sabbaticaling in Florida? Wandering in Florida? Living in a different way in Florida?

From the looks on our Downtown friends’ faces, regardless of what we said about ourselves, in spite of what we claimed we were up to, if you spend winters in Florida, one their looks told us, you’re snowbirds. “But, but, but,” we stammered in response.

“And retired ones at that!” they threw in for emphasis.

But during the three weeks that Rona and I have been back in the City, we’ve been casting a cold, objective eye on New York—the sort of capacity one develops after having been away from familiar haunts for a month or more—and retired or not, sojourning or not, the Big Apple is not looking so good to me. At least not at the moment.

All the clichés are true. The city is full of strivers. Not just those of song—the one who try to make it here so they can make it anywhere. But also those who come in from the city’s outer boroughs—Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, and Staten Island. The hip magazines cover and pitch themselves to the young investment bankers, the media elites, hedge fund operators, trust-fund kids, and aspiring actors, writers, and artists. Those who are all in a fierce struggle of the fittest to see who can make partner before 35, get cast in a TV commercial, open a new impossible-to-get-into restaurant on the fringes of a gentrifying neighborhood, get mentioned on Page Six, buy a place in the Hamptons from last year’s bonus, or get invited to Anna Wintour’s party at the Mets’ Costume Institute.

These folks are swarming all over our downtown neighborhood. We see them in Balthazar in the morning, like us, sucking down $4.50 espressos and we will find them later slipping past the rope line at a Meatpacking District club if we somehow manage to stay up past 1:00 a.m. and decide we need to take a walk over to the Hudson to inhale something resembling sea air.

They are the ones haunting the hottest boutiques in NOLITA (formerly Little Italy) looking for just the right whatever; poring over the zines at Café Cubana to see how many people they know who made it into print and fretting, since they were at that party last Tuesday at the Waverly Inn or managed to score a table at the Spotted Pig, why they don’t find themselves pictured there; and later in the week we will notice them hustling a screen play over coffee at Gitane with the friend of a friend who’s in town executive producing a film out at the Steiner Studio.

But filtering through all this glittering, visible behind that scrim if you look carefully, are the people striving in other ways:

The Mexican here illegally clearing tables so his kids can get an education and he can each week send money home to his parents in Santa Clara; the Polish girl working behind a coffee shop counter in order to have the chance to improve her English, take a few course at Hunter College, and then marry the guy she’s been with and return to Warsaw with enough saved for a down payment on an apartment; the Haitian woman, a boat person, who filtered north from Florida and now works six-day-a-week 12-hour shifts at $8.00 an hour with Mrs. Green in our building who had a stroke last September and now needs constant assistance and total body care; the Italian-American girl from Staten Island who dropped out of community college and now schleps on the ferry every day at 5:30 in the morning to lower Manhattan to get to Goldman Sachs where she has her sights set on moving up from the data entry pool to become an administrative assistant where, who knows, she might meet a trader and wind up on another, preferred island—Long Island; and you would notice the 47 year-old single mother who lives in what she calls an “Archie Bunker” house in Flushing and who after driving her son back and forth to early morning swimming practice plops herself onto a Green Bus, gets dropped off in Midtown, and spends the rest of the long day working in the sportswear department at Bloomingdale’s.

This is what I have been seeing with greater clarity during our first days back from Florida. All that aspiring and self-confident getting and posturing and preening and spending masking the simultaneous and complementary efforts of all the others who have gravitated here. What used to make our hearts beat faster when we were pursuing similar things. I’m now feeling like a spectator at someone else’s party. It’s an exciting party, but it also feels empty. And it makes me wonder what I had then been about. There were things that I could have rationalized to explain away my own relentless striving, if I had either the time or the inclination, though I suppose I did, but now I’ve been wondering about all that I let slip by.

A clue to this, to what I might have missed, came at breakfast the other morning when we were having coffee with Jonathan Miller, a friend from London who was in town to direct an opera at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. In addition to all the many other interest he pursues, he roams whatever city he might be in to take photos of abstract slices of otherwise overlooked and undistinguished buildings. He showed us one of his recent favorites. From right down the street. The huge Donna Karan billboard painted on the side of a building at the intersection of Broadway and Houston Street.

It was an image of the downtown skyscape over which was imposed her familiar DKNY logo. What made the photo special, Jonathan said, from his studies of neurobiology and the related psychology of perception, is that it is impossible to take in both images at the same time—you can see either the skyline or the DKNY. But not, in one glance, both.

As I peered at the picture on the screen of his digital camera, I tested his assertion. And yes, I could see just one image at a time. As he had said.

But still, in spite of this phenomenon clearly being beyond human resistance, I felt frustrated. Though having to acknowledge that it is biologically determined, I perversely pushed myself to overcome that imperative. So I might, uniquely, be able to see both images simultaneously. I even jokingly asked Jonathan that if I were schizophrenic might it be possible to see both, “You know, each personality would take in one image.”

To Jonathan this did not warrant even a snicker of response, and so he reached across the table to retrieve his camera. And at the same time, with a sneer, dismissed me as someone not worthy of any more of his attention.

Yet, as he pulled the camera from my hand and rose to leave, though I chose not to say anything further to him, I was certain that for a brief moment, I was in fact able to take in both images.

Perhaps it was my hyperactive imagination, perhaps a rebellious spirit that has never been comfortable accepting the impossible or the forbidden; but even now, a week later, I am convinced that I had seen at the same time both the Wall Street skyline and Donna Karan’s corporate logo.

Could there be any acceptable explanation for this? Whatever its source.

Only that, while snowbirding, after whatever I needed to do in the city to filter out the daily load of sensations—I suspect especially a literal narrowing of what I would allow to be taken in through my eyes and ears—down there along the ocean margins, I slowly reawakened those capacities so that I would not miss the smallest details--tracks in the sand the residue of the scuttling Sandpipers, the timed-to-the-minute morning and evening flight of the Pelicans, the smallest disturbance of the sea’s surface that revealed the hidden presence of bait fish and the inevitable feeding frenzies that foretold, the plaintive midnight wail from across the Intracoastal of freight trains pushing north, the swelling of the spring Hibiscus and the promise of the next day’s lurid blooms, being lulled toward an intoxicating afternoon nap by the slap of rain on the roof of the day room.

I have no other explanation.

As I wallowed in confusion, unable to make sense of what I was now feeling, my previous life, and what it all might portend, Rona reminded me that we were due downtown in an hour for a party announcing the engagement of Lori and Anthony. They had become very dear friends; and after years on their own, had met fallen in love, and had decided to take another chance at commitment. They were among my favorite people but still I struggled to rouse myself, even to celebrate with them, at a party where I would know virtually no one which would only darken my mood about what had become of my city.

Rona, though, said that we could not do this to them, we had to “make an appearance,” they were expecting us; and if I didn’t any longer care about any of that—the thought of which clearly annoyed and frustrated her (she was losing patience with my moping and deprecating New York) it would be “good” for me. I needed to get out and about. If I couldn’t even manage to do that in honor of our friends I should call the owner of our place in Florida to see if I could have it twelve months a year. (I noted that she didn’t say “we.”) I should stop all this feeling sorry for myself and become a full-time Florida resident. It would even have tax advantages, she added with a mocking tone, since she knew that would be an attractive idea to me as I sulked my way toward old age.

So I dragged myself to the shower, put on some clothing appropriate for the occasion (it had been so long since I had done that that I needed to leave unfastened the button on my trousers), and made my weary way down onto the teeming streets. Rona said let’s walk. Again, that it would be good for me. I was no longer getting any exercise since I had not found anything to replace our twice-a-day walks on the beach.

Well, Christian, I cannot begin to describe for you the bedlam into which we entered.

The sidewalks jammed with those scurrying from their offices; others like us weaving their way to bars and restaurants and loft parties in Soho and Tribeca; and the leftover day-trippers from New Jersey and Connecticut and Long island who had been stalking the city since afternoon and now as the sun was dropping raced to catch their commuter buses or retrieve their garaged SUVs.

Or the blare of traffic. An unrelenting rush of taxis and buses and screams of fire engines and ambulances, all in a cacophonous blend augmented by the basso continuo of the subway rumbling beneath Broadway. A riotous symphony of the city which at previous times I had experienced as exciting. As contributing to the electric meaning of life.

Now it was just noise. Penetrating, painful noise. And aimless bustle.

Fortunately, as I was about to submit to what would be enduring unhappiness and defeat and retreat back to the sanctuary of our apartment, we arrived at the site of the party—on Prince Street in glittering Soho, which was shrouded in an unexpected and welcome early evening hush. What until the 1970s had been factories and warehouses and machine shops were now boutiques for Michael Kors, Marc Jacobs, and Calvin Klein. And above those mirrored shops, which when the area was rechristened Soho (derived geographically from being South of Houston Street) were illegal squatting places for visual artists and filmmakers were now priceless residential lofts for the lucky (who had bought early) and the super rich—it was well known that Rupert Murdock until recently had resided in a triplex loft just up Prince Street, a loft he sold two years ago to fashion mogul Elie Tahari for a reported $25 million. Another big city story of location, location, location.

The elevator crept and rattled up to the third floor and deposited us directly into one of these legendary living spaces. I reflexively began to estimate square footages and how much Lori and Anthony’s hosts would ask for it if they were to put it on the market. (Though I had been away from New York for just three-and-a-half months, and thus in spite of the other changes I have chronicled here, I still retained that real estate reflex which could calculate square footage with one hand tied proverbially behind my back while using only my peripheral vision.) I quickly deduced that it would add up to quite a nice seven-figure number even in this declining market.

But before I could refine my calculations, shape up in my mind the draft of what the listing would say (“4,000 sq. ft. artist’s loft in Soho’s gold coast. Magnificently renovated. Chef’s kitchen. Pictured in Architectural Digest [June 2003.] Floor-to-ceiling windows. Three bedrooms, two with workspace lofts. Marble solarium . . .”), before I could remember to adjust the armor of indifference and unhappiness I had been ostentatiously wearing since returning from Florida, Lori noticed us, spotted me about to fold back into my funk (Rona, obviously, had been slipping away to the phone this past week to confide in her), and with her most radiant of smiles pulled me back from the worst of my own self-indulgent pouts.

There was no resisting Lori, or for that matter her Anthony who also bounded in our direction. They radiated so much reciprocal happiness that I could not resist allowing them to fold me into their restorative arms, nor resist with them sharing a few tears. Theirs clearly from their new life; mine from realizing, in the flow of their emotion, that this too was New York. My New York.

There are no new beaches, no beginning of new friendships (please note Christian--as sweet and promising as they truly are) that can supplant this!

Sharing the aura of their joy, I realized that there needed to be no supplanting. There needed to be no either-or.

And thus I knew in that quick instant that I would be all right. That Rona and I would be all right. That like true snowbirds we would be migratory. Dividing our lives between wonderful roosts.

But enough of this. I must be making you weary as I rattle on. I know you are busy juggling so many things.

But please Christian, say hello to everyone at the Owl. To Tracie and Dave and Megan and Troy and Ken and Fatch and Jodi and Jen and Tom and Harvey and Joe and Charlotte and of course Jack. Tell them please how much I miss them and my Spinner Sharks and Wahoo salad and those lazy walks along the beach as the sun settles and the evening breeze begins to quicken. And add that I am fine. Let them know, please, that things are complicated but we’re now doing well.

And that we’ll see you in December. That’s a promise.

Steven