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When your friends call and write and ask, sweetly, if all is well, that’s a sign that you’ve been gone too long.  When the people who have been where you’ve been, and know what sort of enormous change has been wrought upon your life, write and ask, sweetly, if you plan on sharing the details of that enormous change any time soon, that’s an even greater sign.  But when the comment spammers show up and post gibberish seven times a day, well, that’s when you know you have to send up a flare.

Dear friends, all is well, really well.  I have landed safely at law school, where I’ve been a brand new 1L for seven days, dancing with the usual suspects of a first-year law curriculum:  Criminal Law, Contracts, Torts, Pleading & Civil Procedure, and the timorous beastie known as Legal Analysis, Research and Writing.  I have made some friends, many of whom were in middle school when Lloyd and I got married, but they don’t hold that against me.  I won’t lie about the workload:  it’s been confounding, and I’m still trying to figure out the best way to manage it.  It seems that I either read too quickly, and thus miss a lot of nuance, or I read too slowly and overparse when I could be getting a lot more done.  Fortunately I have a study group, and once we get together, I’m sure we’ll all have a lot to learn from each other.

On a happier, or at least more familiar note, our month of living in hotels is almost over.  Tonight we take a walk-through of our new apartment and receive the keys from our landlord; over the next couple of days we will bring carloads of stuff from our storage space—oh, wait, did I mention that we have a car now?—and on Friday we will check out of our scary hotel, and, after my last class, we will get the bed out of storage and move in for real.  Our new sofa and our cable/internet hookup arrive on Wednesday.  Between that, the unpacking of the kitchen utensils and the arrival of my orders from King Arthur and Penzey’s, we’ll *really* get something done around here.

Thank you, dear friends, for being so patient and kind at a time when I’ve been so spacy and disconnected.  It’s not been an easy process, but overall, it’s been a very, very good one.

To quote both one of my favorite novels and one of my favorite movies:  Well.  Here I am again.  (Mind you, the context in which I say this is considerably less dramatic.)

The past week has been both so action-packed, and yet so quiet, that it’s hard for me to believe that at this moment seven days ago, Lloyd and I were holed up in the tiniest, most craptacular airport hotel of our shared experience, watching Law and Order: CI, trying to fall asleep so that we could wake up good and early for our car to the airport.  At the time, nothing loomed larger to me than the plane ride, of zipping across space and time, chasing morning across the country, watching the landscape change, bumping gently over the Great Lakes, noticing the ground suddenly becoming closer as we flew over the Rockies, descending into San Jose just before lunchtime.  (The last two flights I had in and out of San Jose, I flew at night, so I had never seen the ground below me before.  “We live here now,” I thought as I watched us descend over flatlands, hillocks and chapparal, and I wanted to laugh and cry all at once.) I had thought, honestly, that once the flight was behind us, the hardest work was behind us, too.  We had packed and shipped and junked our way out of New York City.  Everything else would be gravy.

I won’t say that our first week here has been harder than anything that has come previous to this—nothing, but nothing, will ever be harder than the Thursday the junk men came—but I can’t say it’s been terrifically relaxing, either.  We hit the ground running in San Jose.  From the starting point of the big fugly SUV we rented at the airport (which is too freaking big for most of the available parking spots in town, but works like a charm for moving boxes around, which is why we opted for an SUV as opposed to a nice hatchback or sedan), we have spent the past week travelling the Enforced Cultural Death March that is the freeway.  If I haven’t mentioned it lately, Lloyd is my hero.  He drives that big fugly thing onto entry and exit ramps like nobody’s business, he merges carefully but assertively, he occasionally shows annoyance but he never, ever, ever shows fear.  I, on the other hand, do.

There are about 500 lovely things to do on any given day here, from walking to the San Jose Municipal Rose Garden to visiting my dear Northern California-based friends who have waited patiently for us, but for the most part we’ve been tuckered out by driving from Fremont to San Jose, running a series of errands (getting our storage locker, greeting the big rig full of our stuff and unpacking it, opening bank accounts, etc.) and then driving back to Fremont.  Tomorrow morning Lloyd and I will go to the DMV and take our written test.  Once we have our shiny new California licenses in hand, we can arrange to get that special auto insurance that you get when you don’t yet own a car—so that when we *do* go buy our car, we can say “hey, look, we’re insured!” We’ll start car shopping.  We have finished bike shopping, and even as we speak, we are waiting to take delivery on our new Schwinns.  Monday night, we’ll try to score some groceries.  On Tuesday we finally take the big fugly SUV back to the airport and ride back to our neighborhood via the Airport Flyer.  At some point Lloyd will board a bus to Palo Alto to do a dry run of his commute before he goes back to work on Friday.  I, meanwhile, will be doing my required reading for orientation, which starts on Wednesday.  We’ll be doing all of this from a suite at a grotty little motor inn within walking distance of school.  When we booked the room, I was so thrilled to be in a place that didn’t involve Rollerball-like levels of travel stress that I didn’t care much about amenities, at least until our landlord said “gee, are you sure you want to stay there?” (I nearly answered, “well, no, but since we can’t move in until the end of the month, we aren’t exactly spoiled for choice.” But like our old landlord, our new landlord is a likeable guy, and I don’t want to piss hime off with my snarktastic tongue.)

All of this laundry-listing is to say that dear friends, I am so hungry to land in a place of our own that I can feel actual hunger pangs.  I don’t want to live indefinitely off of Trader Joe’s food, coffeebar sandwiches and Big Bags of Frozen Meat from Costco.  (Yes, we ponied up for a Costco membership.  I live for the day when I can bring home entire pallets of Fat Tire and economy boxes of Cheez-Its.) I want to unpack my pots and pans and cookbooks and baking sheets.  I want to bake a goddamned loaf of bread.  I want to go to the Capitol Flea Market and buy 30 pounds of apricots for jam.  I want to go to smaller, shaggier flea markets and buy butter lettuces and banana shallots.  Until we can get our hands on our own orange tree, I want to buy four pounds of oranges for a dollar and suck them all dry.  I want to make bright, beautiful food for our friends, but especially for Lloyd, to whom New York City was not especially kind, from a physical-health perspective.  Most of all, I just want to sit still for a while, in our living room or on the deck in our backyard, knowing that no matter how busy the coming weeks and months will be—and, make no mistake, they will be busy—we won’t have to plan the logistics of how we’re going to come or go.  We’ll just sit still, even as we’re also moving into something truly amazing.

I have to admit, I oversimplified a bit.  It hasn’t all been filling out forms and driving out to Fremont.  We’ve had a chance to eat some terrific food (although I think I picked up a little food poisoning at a taqueria, but I hope I’m wrong because I really want to go back and try their tamales), from machaca in San Jose to pho in Fremont.  On ‘mouse’s recommendation, we took a drive out to his flea market of choice, which was noisy and raucous and every bit as much fun as he promised it would be.  To the surprise of no one, I found the yarn store in San Jose, a short bike ride from our house and a short walk from my upcoming part-time job.  (Confidential to Momerina:  Come now.  No, really, right now.  Are you on the plane yet?) And, of course, as soon as we felt solid earth under our feet, we took a walk to the Municipal Rose Garden after all.  Those showy beauties are just too damn irresistible to not visit.

Happy start of the working week, dear friends.  With any luck, I will be considerably less truculent, and more voluble, once I have some interesting school tales to tell.

There’s so much to say, dear friends, and I’m the first to admit that I’ve fallen down on the job at saying it.  I have yet to write a proper “farewell, New York” post.  I have not yet begun to enumerate just what it takes to leave the place you’ve called home for 14 years and move to a place further away from home than you’ve ever lived.  (The short answer, though, is “money,” and you’d better believe that I have opinions about this.  The sheer panic of the last week, of getting out of Astoria; of having to hire a private carting company to pick up all the trash we could not leave out for NYC Sanitation; of spending 90 minutes at Staples trying to UPS the last of our belongings to San Jose; of spending four days at a hotel on the ass-end of JFK Airport, taking Long Island Rail Road into Manhattan and walking around the city as visitors, as opposed to residents; of getting on the plane and having an uneventful flight (save for the moment when I tried to buckle my seat belt and discovered that no, I did not lose any weight this month as I thought I did); of arriving in San Jose, driving around for an hour with a miskeyed GPS system (once we corrected it for driving as opposed to walking, we were fine), losing our calm minute by minute, and then finding it again at the truly fine Thai restaurant on the Alameda where we stopped for lunch; of gradually getting our bearings and finding our home and our hotel and school and ‘mouse’s office—it’s all there, clanging around inside my head, which, really, is a terribly selfish place to keep it.

It will all be shared in due time, dear friends, from the pure joy of discovering what is considered “humid” in San Jose to the pure whimsy of stopping at a dollar store in Fremont to get some paper plates and plastic utensils following our Trader Joe’s run, and finding dollar packets of curry leaves at the register.  In the meantime, I can say that it’s quite something to consider:  in less than a week, we have gone from this:

to this:

Okay, in fairness, we don’t actually live there yet.  We are living in a hotel in Fremont until Sunday, and then moving to another hotel in Santa Clara for two more weeks.  But at least now we know we have a safe place to land, and that, to crib shamelessly from Robert Frost, has made all the difference.

Oh, dear friends.  There will be a time for abstract thought, for careful consideration of the world around me, for discussions of the books I’m reading and the movies we’re seeing and for nifty recipes.  Now is not that time, though.  Barring weather silliness, in exactly two weeks from this moment, Lloyd and I will be in the air over eastern Pennsylvania, chasing the morning across the country, landing in San Jose somewhere around lunchtime.  Between now and then, we have packing and accounting and clothes-shopping and eye-doctor-visiting and a whole other raft of tasks that leave me incapable of much beyond simple subject-verb constructions.  Actually, if I remember both the subject and the verb in all sentences that follow, it’s a good day.  The mighty have fallen, and far.

As my boyfriend Gordon once sang, I’ll tell you what’s what, I’ll tell you what’s what.  Two weeks ago, life chez PTMYB was not happy.  My severance from LuthorCorp was just about gone and my unemployment was about to dry up.  I had no word whether or not my student loans had been approved, much less when (if) they would be disbursed.  Lloyd had had a series of job interviews for possible transfers to his company’s San Jose office, but none of them led anywhere.  Our apartment hunting had yielded nothing.  I began to wonder if maybe I had made a catastrophic mistake, if we should have stayed put, if I should have gone to Boston and just taken an additional loan to cover both my living expenses in Boston and my share of the rent in New York.

I am well aware that the best way to suffer a reversal of fortune is to crow about it too loudly, so I will not.  I’ll just say that the unemployment benefits have been extended.  The loans came through and will be disbursed at just about the time we need them most.  Lloyd had another interview on Friday, and this one looks good.  And—oh, mercy, oh, luck, O Time, Strength, Cash and Patience—we have an apartment.  Specifically, it’s a house, one half of a duplex.  It’s one bedroom, and not quite as big as some of the other places at which we looked, but it’s twice the size of our current apartment, it has plenty of space for us (even more space since the landlord agreed to lease us half of the garage for a shockingly competitive price), it’s close to all of Lloyd’s mass transit commuting options (both bus lines and Caltrain).  It’s three blocks from school and eight blocks from my part-time job.  It has spectacular amenities (which will be meticulously documented once we’re moved in).  It has been checked by my legal advisor and deemed good.  The landlord is friendly, outgoing, and willing to answer our zillion questions.  For the life of me, I don’t know what we did to deserve this apartment, but once I find out, I’ll be sure to keep doing it.

About the only less-than-perfect thing about our new place is that we won’t be able to move into it until the end of August.  That’s allright, though.  We have a room at a hotel in Fremont for a week, long enough for us to find our feet and go take our driving tests (for unlike New York, California won’t just let you turn in your license and get a new one).  At about the time that Lloyd will need to be commuting and I’ll need to be closer to campus, we’ll be moving to another hotel in San Jose for two weeks.  That’s three weeks in hotels.  We can handle three weeks of hotel living.  I guarantee, though, that on the day we move in, I’ll be unpacking my cookbooks and pots so fast that little trails of flame will litter my wake.  Then, dear friends, the fun really starts.

First, though, we have to pack up the kitchen.

In the end, the NYPL host quoted Milan Kundera as saying, “A European is someone who longs for Europe.” To which I will add the implied: A New Yorker is someone who longs for New York.

“Nostalgia” is made of two Greek words: Nostos, to return home, and algos, which means pain or suffering. It is literally homesickness. Maybe this is how you know if you’re a New Yorker or not. It’s not where you were born, or how many generations precede you, or how you make a living, but do you long painfully for New York? Are you homesick for this vanishing city?

-- Jeremiah Moss, “Discussing Eminent Domain,” Vanishing New York

In just under three weeks, the movers will arrive at our storage space in Woodside.  Lloyd and I will pack the truck—we’re moving on the cheap—and the movers will begin their 8-to-15-day trip across the country with nearly everything we own.  On Monday, August 4, we will fly out of JFK.  From that moment, we will resume our Just Visiting status in New York for the first time since January 1993.  At one time, the thought that we would leave was as remote as Omicron Persei 8; the idea that we would move 3,100 miles away to a place where neither of us had ever lived was beyond consideration.  Now we are here, packing boxes every night, sorting what comes with us and what gets tossed or donated or given away, living on the verge of the next moment.

We have been asked often if we’re excited about relocating, and while the answer is still an unequivocal “yes,” right now we are in a place where contemplating the future brings not excitement, but trepidation, if not outright fear.  We don’t have a new apartment yet; my student loan money has not yet been disbursed (although I’ve been told by heads cooler and wiser than mine that the money is on the way); my unemployment benefits end next week (although apparently the feds have extended benefits for 13 more weeks, but I’m not sure of my eligibility) and my savings are running out; and, most troubling, Lloyd’s company may not approve a transfer for him after all—which means that he may have to take an unpaid leave and temp for a while until they figure out whether there is still a place for him in the organization after all.  Through all this uncertainty, he has been a rock, an optimist and a dreamboat, but this kind of uncertainty takes its toll, and this week it’s taking its toll on both of us.  We know that this is a temporary state, and once we’re all settled in, optimism and good cheer will rule the day.  Right now, though, contemplating our future is nervewracking business, so I am turning away from the future for a few hours to consider the past, and to think about what brought us to this point, the point where we decided to leave New York.

I could say that the decision to leave came with the decision to attend law school, but that isn’t really true.  The school shortlist included two New York City schools, Cardozo and Brooklyn Law, both of which waitlisted me.  Or I could say that the decision came on the day I was laid off from LuthorCorp.  Even as I’d said that I had no idea what the future held, I knew exactly what a future in New York would hold:  either I could maintain our tenuous standard of living by taking another hideous cubicle-farm job, or else I could try to find more creative, satisfying work that wouldn’t begin to cover my half of the rent, to say nothing of groceries or health insurance deductibles.  (This is one reason why, to use a vile old phrase, I’ve never “done anything” with my culinary school diploma.  I just couldn’t afford it, especially after Lloyd was laid off from his job with a now-defunct DSL provider.  Even after he found another job, we just couldn’t afford to live on one full salary plus one entry-level pastry monkey salary.) I do remember thinking “it’s not a question of if, but when” on the day that I yelled at a Republican for hassling a mentally-ill woman on an escalator at Grand Central Station.  Ultimately, though, I knew long ago that our time was up.  I knew it five years ago, the first time I saw the DeBeers Christmas ads at Grand Central.  I knew it then; I knew it every Christmas after that, every time I saw the new set of ads; I knew it, and continue to know it, every time I walk by a construction site for a new luxury apartment building.  I know it every time a specialty bookshop closes and a Banana Republic opens up in its place—or when a 30-year-old bakery closes and an Ann Taylor store becomes a bigger Ann Taylor store.  I know it every time a supermarket turns into a drugstore, or a bank branch.  (There was a time when I considered it a point of pride to not have to rely on supermarkets, and, in truth, I still prefer to buy my fruit and vegetables and poultry and eggs at the farmer’s markets, and restrict my supermarket usage for cleaning and paper products.  But I also know that my experience is not universal, and that supermarket access is critical for people on fixed incomes and for the working poor, and that the loss of a supermarket can have a devastating impact on a neighborhood.)

Of course, every time someone mentions that the city is changing, and that little treasures of the city are being replaced with charmless alternatives, there is always a chorus close at hand to remind us that everything changes, that nothing remains static, and do we really want to live in the bad old days of fiscal crisis and escalating crime rates and grafittied subways and crack and AIDS and Gerald Ford inviting us to drop dead?  Of course I know that nothing remains static, and it shouldn’t.  The problem I have is not with change per se, but rather the nature of it.  I could just be projecting a romantic view of the past, but I don’t think I am.  Businesses have fallen and risen, neighborhoods have shifted and changed, for as long as this city has existed, but at least in the past it felt as if there were a place for all of us, not just the richest or luckiest of us.  There were places for the very wealthy, both of the old money and self-made varieties; for the middle class; for service workers and artists and public safety workers; for grocers and milliners and clerk-typists and photographers.  Now Manhattan and Brooklyn are being gobbled up by one luxury building after another and one high-end retailer after another, and Queens isn’t far behind.  I think of a story I’ve told here before, probably once too often, about the time Lloyd worked as a temp for a nonprofit that aimed to bring business investment into Lower Manhattan after the 9/11/2001 attacks, and how the head of the organization told a journalist that she was after serious money, and didn’t have time to talk to locksmiths.  I think of a conversation I’ve had with Julie more than once:  Is it really a sign of progress that hedge fund managers and designers and real estate moguls can live here, but their support staff can’t?

I am aware that I haven’t even begun to discuss the effect of this sort of hypertactic money-chasing on the arts-and-letters community in New York.  Of course high rents and lack of amenities are perilous for artists, musicians, photographers and writers, and New York certainly isn’t doing itself any favors by pricing them out of the area, but from where I sit, I can see the disappearance of more than artists.  One of my favorite short stories is Patricia Highsmith’s “Where the Door is Always Open and the Welcome Mat is Out” (anthologized in both a Highsmith collection, Nothing That Meets the Eye, and an anthology edited by David Sedaris, Children Playing Before a Statue of Hercules), about a middle-aged secretary who spends a strained evening hosting her sister from Cleveland.  Mildred Stratton lives on Third Avenue in the 20s and rides the bus to her job in a small office; she keeps a small, neat apartment, shops regularly at the delicatessen below her apartment, loves her quiet life in a noisy city and feels bound to protect it from her sister’s unsympathetic scrutiny.  It is a funny, quiet story about a hardworking, kind woman who doesn’t necessarily want to set the world on fire.  In the coming New York, there is no room for people like Millie Stratton, and, I fear, no room for people like me and Lloyd, either.

(Dear friends, I am aware that this is a scattershot, disorganized, unfinished essay, what my teachers used to call “not your best effort, Jen,” but I felt keenly that I needed to write this.  I’ve only begun to scratch the surface of what I could say here, but I do need to take a break for some exercise and some lunch, and maybe a little packing.  By all means, though, this will be continued.  Thank you in advance for your patience.)