25 July 2008
The morning is cool, probably in the sixties, and the scenery outside still lacks full contrast because the sun is only peeking over the us. As far as “us” is concerned, everyone else is asleep and I haven’t had my coffee. I am sitting on the porch while the birds tell each other goodmorning, and the air is so cool that I’ve left the front door open next to me to cool the house too.
A few days ago I was in a meeting at work –
I am hardly awake enough to type. I keep making errors. You don’t see them, but I do. I am dutifully fixing them for you.
– and heated discussion ensued. People were deeply engrossed in the topic at hand and how it related to them. The topic: nearly irrelevent, at least if the world were on the brink of ending, or recently had and everyone was still there anyway.
When I described the heated argument – without mention of topic, mentioning merely only human attachment to the topic — last night to my poetry friends at Linda’s, they asked if I wanted to just jump up and yell that this was just not a big deal and didn’t we all just see that we could find a solution? What the hell was going on here? And I said that, indeed, that thought had occurred to me too, briefly, but the one that I found more baffling reminded me the night that Berto Benigni won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film. For Life Is Beautiful, no less! In his limited English but full excitement, he jumped from chair to chair – over people, he in his tuxedo and they in their fancy dresses – yelling, “I kiss you! I kiss you! I kiss you!”
Oh, to be back on earth with humans and their superficial attachments!
I thought this moment would come with horror. It has come with a deep sigh of relief.
16 July 2008
Yesterday I admitted to a new colleague, who I was talking with next to the newspaper boxes outside the Weaver Street Market, that I had occasional moments of: Now, why the h*ll did I do this? Mostly, I am so busy, unadjusted, and happy to be here that I don’t have moments to think about the life change at hand. But the times that I do: on my scooter, while I’m riding to and from work; when I’m mowing our lawn, nearly a half-acre, with a push mower for the first and last time in my life. Collectively, that’s about seven hours, most of them spent mowing, to contemplate the move since we arrived nearly two and a half weeks ago.
Fact 1: I miss my sister.
Fact 2: During the time that my office computer was being fixed today — major communications connectivity/syncing issues that leave an assistant dean of communications nearly wacked out by the inability to communicate — I stood at my window and watched the girl’s field hockey camp playing on the bright field visible through the trees. All that youth and energy. I contemplated the comparison of this window versus my previous office window, which I also enjoyed looking out of, particularly for the bend in the river, but which was twenty-four stories high, and therefore let in only the sound of helicopters and airplanes, and never the sound of girls cheering. Girls cheering outside my office. I considered picking up these girls and putting them outside my old office. In Tent City.
Fact 3: I wonder if this is a totally unhealthy thought: imagining these girls in Tent City outside my office. So I recall again being in Boston after the storm and looking with surprise at fresh dolmas in a deli. I wonder how people emigrate from war-torn nations and arrive in cities like New York and still develop a sense of humor. I am deeply agitated, which means only one thing: the beginning of a poem is trying to work its way out.
Fact 4: I am appreciative of the opportunity to be here. I consider any moments of desire for New Orleans — gosh, did the NYTimes have to have a blurb on the Sazerac just waiting for me on the conference room table during my meeting at the university news services office? — are like enduring and haunting moments that follow the end of an abusive relationship. It’s possible for humans to miss anything that was familiar.
Fact 5: I agree with her, It is the most wonderful city in America. Then I add, But it needs a lot of help, from the inside and out.
Fact 6: This blog entry notwithstanding, I have not found routine enough to write regularly. Have, in fact, gotten two separate illnesses that I have pushed through with determination and also nursed one sick child through, which means my ability to adjust to routine has not been interfered with only by newness and the piles of boxes.
Fact 6: I don’t check email with any regularity anymore. If it’s not work related, we are lucky to find me anywhere.
Fact 7: In the moments of wondering why I’ve done this, or why I’m here, I recall that I have not made a professional move in six years. Those six years have been chock full of life change, but nothing has kept Paula from the front desk I walk past, or Vonnie from saying good morning every morning for those six years. So I know: I will adjust. Someone said, After you’ve been here a few months, you’ll feel like you’ve been here for years. I nod, hopefully. I think of all of those special people in my life who I have picked up from other places I worked: Noelle and Emmy from a restaurant in college, April from the T-P, Rebecca, Leslie, Amy, Jeff, Sarah. Why is it that, suddenly, in a new place, I wonder who I’ll take from this one? I can’t recall having this feeling before, but surely I must have. Or maybe not. Maybe I look farther into the future now. Although I have no plans of going anywhere else. In fact, was so disillusioned by the act of moving that perhaps would like to stay here, right here, in this house, for the rest of my mortal existence. But I know that eventually I will move on, five to ten to fifteen years from now, and I will take with me my best friends from here.
Who I have yet to identify.
A few guesses, a few hunches, but one never knows, just the way one never knows who she’ll keep in touch with, even when she says she will.
And then there are the surprises, the people she keeps in touch with but couldn’t have predicted.
Which is sort of what it’s like to look at this sea of new faces, and know that unpredictable friends are in the midst.
12 July 2008
Of course this day would come but who would have thought that the first blemish on Paradise would be that someone took the plums from our plum tree!
+ + +
On the other hand, recycling here is a huge bonus. Keep in mind that in Louisiana, there were no options in the greater metro area for recycling post-K, until perhaps early 2007, when a Baton Rouge company began visiting about every 2-3 months for a centralized pick-up. Big yay to having to store your recyclable goods for 3 months, right? We always had a trunk-load to drop off, but really, what I’m learning is that I could fill my trunk every two weeks if I needed to. Now, everything is recylable and picked up curbside: plastic, glass, paper, all sorts of paper, etcetera, etcetera. The city even has a separate pick-up for grass and branches — mulching, perhaps? What a novel idea!
11 July 2008
Imagine: You sit at a sushi bar and options come around on slim conveyer belt that circles the sushi chefs and comes within an arm’s reach.
This is no dream; this is Sushi-Go-Round, or Sushi-a-Go-Go, in downtown Chapel Hill. Not your finest sushi ever, but fresh, cheap, and tasty, and an absolute delight for the sushi-eater under age 10.
I had eaten there once when I flew out here for a post-hire meeting, and I knew immediately that I would not be likely to ever return without my daughters. They loved it.
+ + + +
The weekend ahead: unpacking more boxes, a trip with Sophie and Audrey to the farmer’s market by free (!) bus, and a pottery and story time at the library on Sunday. Tonight: Nancy Drew and a big tub of popcorn, coming up.
10 July 2008
A.D. wished me a long and happy honeymoon in N.C.
S.C. hoped the job was as much of a paradise as the neighborhood.
Next week, I have my first after-work happy hour cocktail meet-up scheduled for the first time since — no exaggeration — before Sophie was born. That’s 2002, people!
I’m meeting someone who might be a new friend. One should know by the end of next week. Consider though: about a month ago, I read a story in the Raleigh News and Observer by B, and I wrote to her:
Dear B:
I got no further. Clicked Save. Considered that perhaps I would really contact her upon arrival. Or in the weeks thereafter. She had been writing a column about life in N.C. post-Katrina, having left New Orleans before the rebuilding tiredness could even set in. Thus, a different set of memories and circumstances. She’s been here nearly two years.
So imagine my surprise when, two days ago, she showed up in my email inbox welcoming me to Chapel Hill.
Then I heard she makes a mean red beans and rice.
+ + + +
Day 4 in the new job.
– I interrupt this message to remind us of the entry written during my first major trip out of town post-Katrina. I went to Boston and arrived a day ahead of L.T. Two significant life events occurred — and let’s keep in mind that that this was nearly 14 months post-K. –
1. After dinner, I walked into the corner market that sold beautiful fresh fruit, imported chocolates, fine table crackers. They also had a deli with dolmas, sliced peppers, meats simmering in cracked pepper. I wandered back in forth in front of the deli, mesmerized by the sheen and shape of the food therein. Suddenly a man appeared, waving furiously and wiping his tired hands on his stained apron, speaking mostly Spanish. What was he saying? The deli was closed? Really? Closed? Well, it hadn’t even occurred to me that I *might* buy something. That any of it might actually be real.
2. A few days later, Leslie and I went for a glass of wine and tapas at a nearby Spanish restaurant. We sat upstairs and spoke of interesting things, and then, suddenly, the lights went out. Sh*t, I thought, and we both had the same concern, looked toward the windows to determine how far electricity had been lost. Then, from the side of the room, a waiter entered, carrying a cake with candles and singing “Happy Birthday” to a nearby patron.
–
The adjustment to this Boston-like reality, with its organized streets and functioning lights, is separate from the professional endeavors, and yet closely related to the speed with which one’s new 3-hole puncher arrives and the lovely lack of explicit concern for survival by any of those not yet diagnosed.
+ + + +
One walks the streets and sees a home nestled at the bottom of a hill, and one wonders why the owner is not paranoid about flooding.
+ + + +
A.B. warned me: You need to remember to have patience with all of the people who have not experienced all of the things you’ve experienced.
K.B. thanks A.B. for the warning and heeds.
+ + + +
Plus, one still has nightmares about flooding. And worse. Last night, no less.
+ + + +
One parked such that she could walk through the trees on the way to her office, and one went for a walk with her children after work to find the closest entry to the North Chapel Hill Woods (three blocks — wahoo!). Spray for skeeters! Check for ticks! Let’s go!
+ + + +
One can make communications plans, write reports, develop suggestions. One can turn architectural detail, local foliage, and history into design elements. But mostly one is just happy to be a human in a place where being a human is not so difficult. One is, fundamentally, relieved.
+ + + +
One gets enough phone calls from the other place to remind oneself that she is not living on the moon thinking this way. She has truly arrived to a different part of the United States, where a different set of expectations exist, and where it really does make a difference that she does not drive through an area where hundreds of homeless people live in tents. Hundreds. Still, she’s haunted by them. She imagines, sometimes, the saddest cases she encountered day after day, and how out of place they might look standing at a bus stop here. She doesn’t know why she does this, but she writes the rough draft of a poem about it and wonders if she will ever write happy little poems about weeping willow trees and laughing children.
She doubts it.
+ + + +
Then, tonight, when a friend in New Orleans called and mentioned his dinner of crabs and shrimp and boiled potatoes and corn, she salivated with jealousy. She is trying to get over it.
One white oak tree at a time.
7 July 2008
Katie says, “Never wear new shoes on your first day at a new job.”
+ + +
I arrived in Chapel Hill at the height of spring blossom — was it late March? — for the first time. Since then, a sequence of distant and not-so-distant events led to this morning, when I pulled out of the driveway and turned onto Hwy. 54 to drive to campus. Along the way: trees and well-paved roads. Not along the way: potholes, boarded houses, and unboarded but abandoned houses. Along the way: women jogging, boys walking dogs. Not along the way: hundreds of people living in tents, drugged homeless men standing in the middle of a highway looking lost.
One wants to be thankful for the view she has.
One is also thankful for the view she no longer has
and which she promises not to forget.
She promises to find some way to use at least one skill (writing?) to tell stories of the human conditions stuck in her memory (through images making their way to poems) in ways that retain the dignity of man (and woman, of course).
If, by some chance, she goes, say, more than one full twenty-four hour period without being thankful she has arrived here, she will be
human.
She will try not to anyway.
+ + +
The scene: She is walking from her office with X, her new colleague who is kind enough in balmy 210-degree Southern summer heat to walk her across campus to get her parking permit and ID card. She is sweaty, hoping no one else is noticing this as much as she is, and she is also taking time to notice the white oaks along the path. And the rocks. Large rocks. Rocks so large she contemplates the fact that a human may not have put them there. She contemplates the possibility of walking from her car door to her office door — five days a week! – through this small slice of nature. She would have to park an extra thirty yards to enjoy this small slice of nature with its large non-man-made rocks. She wonders how long she would consider those extra thirty yards worth their extra steps. Instead of suggesting that the rocks look like they could be part of a theatre set, which she has also considered, she says to X, “The campus is really lovely.”
She is surprised to hear herself use the word “lovely.”
She contemplates the fact that she must mean it. And has begun reading Keats too!
Yes, lovely.
X says, “It *is* a nice campus, not that it’s Utopia.”
+ + +
Oh, she has a stack of at least fifty forms to fill out to prove that she has not arrived in Utopia.
However, she is relieved that real human faces are guiding her through the dark, thunderous sea of forms.
Chorus: O, the seas from whence we came!
+ + +
She had time between forms and meetings and a goofy ID card photo to contemplate the responsibilities, goals, and expectations of the new job that put her on Hwy. 54 this morning.
And, mostly, she is just happy to be here.
6 July 2008
Packing my bag, putting out my suit, am ready to start my first day as assistant dean of communications at UNC-Chapel Hill School of Law.
1 July 2008
Here it is: the first morning that I am sitting at my bedroom window, overlooking the plum tree and early morning runners, listening to the yet-to-be identified birds, and writing. I haven’t found my way back to a normal writing schedule since I began using my morning timeslot for cover letter writing and then packing and dealing with moving paperwork. I knew this morning would come though. And yay that it is here!
The hour is later than my normal writing time, which means that I am nearly wide awake and have taken the time to do other things, like make coffee and read the Letters to the Editor in whatever issue of The New Yorker made it to this house after I changed the address. I’m back to my desk though, and it feels like a good writing spot, especially now that I know what’s at the end of the road I’m overlooking — the duck pond with its weeping willow tree branches skimming the dark pond where turtles lurk.
30 June 2008
What makes paradise paradise:
1. An evening walk with the girls to the duck pond, where, along the way, we find some doves, and then arrive to walk around the pond and see the ducks, stand on the dock, and feed the turtles. As we walked back home, Audrey saw a house nestled in some trees, with a lovely deck for birdwatching. She said, “Now that is the most beautiful house ever.”
2. Our neighborhood is also inhabited by birds and deer.
3. The mailman knocked on our door to hand us our first package (books for the girls, a gift from their dad) and welcome us to the neighborhood.
4. Henry and I sat on the porch for a few minutes last night during a rainstorm, and it was the perfect place to watch a storm and stay dry.
5. School registration for Sophie was a breeze, and Audrey’s new teacher was very nice and her classroom looked like a small wonderland with live fish, plastic dinosaurs, and lessons in Spanish.
6. Curbside recycling again. Imagine!
7. Obamarama.
8. The plum tree in the front yard will be ready to be picked in about three weeks.
9. The drive to Wal-Mart took fifteen wonderful minutes through windy, hilly country roads that, on some hillcrests, were breathtaking.
+ + +
Even in paradise, though, there is room for a wee bit of homesickness in short slices of moments, usually ones very far away from the rabbits, the plum tree, and the turtles down the street. When I am brushing my teeth for instance, and I miss my own old bathroom. Or when my brother calls to see how I’ve settled in, and we haven’t spoken on a regular basis in years. Not until I decided to move away, that is, and I like hearing his voice again. I missed New Orleans when the coffee aisle in the grocery store did not include Community and the bean and rice section did not include Camellia red beans. And I’ve gotten teary a few times over how much I miss my sister. Even her happy little voicemails make me teary.
Despite any momentary sadnesses, I am certain I made the right decision. We’re in a much healthier and cleaner place, and I am so happy about the happy families and children around us. And despite the shock of having to leave Louisiana faster than I expected, with fewer goodbye dinners than I expected, I’m happy we arrived a little early. The house is still packed with boxes, and I haven’t found all of my clothes or filled the scooter tank with gasoline, but I’m finding my way around town, and know where the Shrimp Guy sets up once a week. Which was very, very necessary. Crabs, shrimp, scallops, and fresh fish. Yum.
27 June 2008
It’s that simple: Paradise.
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