Detox

Well, I made it. 

One of my dearest friends in New York, JK, - wife of my oldest friend in the City, NK, and overall amazing human being - drove down with me in a rented SUV.  If you ever find yourself a friend who will drive 14 hours with you and a cat who peed on herself in New Jersey in a car with a blind-spot the size of Texas, hold onto that person for dear life.  JK, I love you.

It's been exactly two weeks since I officially landed in Chattanooga.  These last 14 days have felt a bit like a prolonged detox from New York.  I've avoided phone calls, text messages, and e-mails to the point of absurdity (sorry), and the idea of attending one of the crowded Fourth of July events this weekend nearly sent me into a panic.  Instead, I've mostly been hiding out in sparsely populated restaurants and cafes with my very understanding significant other - let's call him Mountain Man because it makes me giggle.

I'm just exhausted, and it might take a while to get over that.  Have patience with me.  I promise I'll make it up to you.

Two Weeks Out of Xanadu

"You see I was in a curious position in New York: it never occurred to me that I was living a real life there. In my imagination I was always there for just another few months, just until Christmas or Easter or the first warm day in May. For that reason I was most comfortable with the company of Southerners. They seemed to be in New York as I was, on some indefinitely extended leave from wherever they belonged, disciplined to consider the future, temporary exiles who always knew when the flights left for New Orleans or Memphis or Richmond or, in my case, California. Someone who lives with a plane schedule in the drawer lives on a slightly different calendar. Christmas, for example, was a difficult season. Other people could take it in stride, going to Stowe or going abroad or going for the day to their mothers’ places in Connecticut; those of us who believed that we lived somewhere else would spend it making and canceling airline reservations, waiting for weatherbound flights as if for the last plane out of Lisbon in 1940, and finally comforting one another, those of us who were left, with oranges and mementos and smoked-oyster stuffings of childhood, gathering close, colonials in a far country.
     Which is precisely what we were. I am not sure that it is possible for anyone brought up in the East to appreciate entirely what New York, the idea of New York, means to those of us who came out of the West and the South. To an Eastern child, particularly a child who has always has an uncle on Wall Street and who has spent several hundred Saturdays first at F.A.O. Schwartz and being fitted for shoes at Best’s and then waiting under the Biltmore clock and dancing to Lester Lanin, New York is just a city, albeit the city, a plausible place for people to live, But to those of us who came from places where no one had heard of Lester Lanin and Grand Central Station was a Saturday radio program, where Wall Street and Fifth Avenue and Madison Avenue were not places at all but abstractions (“Money,” and “High Fashion,” and “The Hucksters”), New York was no mere city. It was instead an infinitely romantic notion, the mysterious nexus of all love and money and power, the shining and perishable dream itself. To think of “living” there was to reduce the miraculous to the mundane; one does not “live” at Xanadu."  -Joan Didion, Goodbye to All That

I Might Just Miss It

My mother is a real estate genius. Seriously, if you need to sell a house, call this woman. Many, many years ago in a pre-New York era, I used to spend a lot of time with her looking at houses that had just come on the market in our North Chattanooga neighborhood. My mogul mother can spot a hidden gem from a mile away, and she taught me to see the often hidden potential in these historic homes. I learned to love crown moldings, built-in shelving, and other period details. And little known fact here: as a result of my early real estate explorations, I can pretty accurately estimate the year a house was built based solely on the style of the interior doorknobs.

When I was looking for my first real New York City apartment two years ago, I fell in love with my current Astoria place immediately. It had beautiful hardwood floors, unique molding, and all kinds of fabulous pre-war detailing (note: in the North, the war referenced in the term "pre-war" is World War II, not the Civil War. Shocking, I know.) Ornate glass doorknobs? 1930! Dream come true!

Perhaps had I not been paying so much attention to the damn doorknobs, I might have noticed the ear-splitting, soul-crushing rattle of the N Train right outside the window. But no, there were floor inlays to see and vintage radiator covers to examine! It wasn't until the lease had been signed, the furniture had been hauled, and I had lain down for a post-move nap that I finally noticed the thunderous subway noise. And then my neighbor's weekly band practice started, the plastic pony ride for kids at the HomeMark 99¢ Store on the corner started blaring out "It's a Small World (After All)," and the afternoon service at the Iglesia Cristiana Emmanuell across the street kicked off with some particularly loud Spanish Christian pop tunes. It was the only moment in my life when I have ever seriously contemplated jumping off a bridge.

It has been a noisy two years. The rumble of the train every three to six minutes has been the background noise to everything that has happened in this apartment. It's been the soundtrack for dinner parties, birthday parties, movie nights, and a million other gatherings. It's been my lullaby and alarm clock. On particularly cold nights, you can even hear the automated train announcements : "This is an Astoria-Ditmars Boulevard bound N Train. The next stop is Broadway." It's all maddening, and yet it's been so much a part of my daily life that I might just miss it. So on my last night with reliable internet access here in New York, it seems appropriate to post this video shot from my kitchen window during a snow storm last winter.

Here's to you, N Train. It's been real.

It's All Wrapped Up

In August 2005,  I could not wait to leave Chattanooga, TN.  I was 18, bored, and ready for a big change.  And so I moved to New York City to begin my freshman year of college.  I believed New York would make me stronger, smarter, more bold, more daring.  In many ways, it did.  In those first promising days in Morningside Heights, I also began to realize that New York would cement my "Southernness" in a way I had never expected.  Being from Tennessee suddenly became one of my defining characteristics.  Chattanooga became a never ending source of stories to share with my fascinated and shocked "Yankee" friends.  Telling tales about my single-sex high school's bizarre traditions became a favorite pastime, and I bragged more than any human being ever should about Chattanooga's famous pedestrian bridge. 


As clichéd as it is, it is completely true that it took leaving Chattanooga to make me appreciate my hometown and my Southern roots.  But I still loved New York.  I loved the crowds and the chaos and the competition, the food and the friends - I loved absolutely everything about it.  Then one day I didn't.  It was like a switch had flipped overnight, and I woke up one morning hating the sweltering subway platforms, dreading the sidewalk traffic, and crumbling at the thought of another tense interaction with a fellow New Yorker.  Just like that, I was done.  I'm sure that this process was in fact more gradual than I imagine it to be.  Maybe one day I'll stop and explain more about the last five years to you and to myself and perhaps I'll understand what changed about New York for me, but all that really matters for now is that it's June 2010, and I'm sitting in Queens surrounded by boxes.  In six days, I'm moving back to Chattanooga, TN.

How the hell did that happen?  Well, if you've ever doubted that God has a plan for your life, just let me tell you about my last six months! It might just make you a believer in that pesky, overused line from Jeremiah 29. However, there's plenty of time to tell you more about that later.  For now, it's enough to say that I couldn't be happier to be going home. 

I'm starting this little project to keep my New York friends updated about my life but also to document this transition back South for myself, to remember the events, the love, the family, the recipes, the challenges, the food, and the friends that shaped my long road back home.