Two jobs and bike rides

Last night I went out on the town in Portland (finally). I started off at a lecture series at the Portland Museum of Art (the Architalx series; last night the speakers were Nieto-Sobejano, an architect team from Madrid). An old friend who lives here in Portland invited me, and through him I met lots of new people, and I learned just how small this city is.

When my brother was over yesterday morning helping me set up the couch, we looked out my window and saw, for the first time, a group of people at the top of the Portland Observatory (see photo for view from my apartment, and see this link for more info http://www.portlandlandmarks.org/portland_observatory/observatory.shtml). We figured they must have been on the first tour of the season. Last night, the first person I was introduced me to was someone who worked for Greater Portland Landmarks. I asked if he happened to have been in the Observatory that morning, and sure enough, it was him I saw through my window that morning, teaching new docents how to give tours. Small town.

Nightlife here is certainly different from that on New York, in so many ways. First, there's the fact that you are bound to see at least one person you know when you're out on the town. I've only been "out" in Portland twice, and both times I've seen one of the young city council members, who both my brother and my friend know. (A true politician, he remembered meeting me, that J was my brother, and where we met the first time.) Second, at least three people I talked to mentioned that they were planning on going for a bike ride today (Friday). I don't recall every being out on a weeknight in NYC and hearing people making such laid-back plans for the next day (besides Noah, my old housemate, a bike-riding aficionado!).

Some similarities: attractive, accomplished women complaining about how hard it is to meet men. Through my friend, who as I said knows everybody, I also met this beautiful, funny woman last night--she literally looked like Julia Roberts, or Juliette Binoche--who was talking about how hard it was to meet a man. Now that I finally have one of my own, I almost feel like a traitor when I talk to women about this, even though I know exactly where they're coming from. I always thought it was a NYC thing: men there are so focussed on their careers, or they're too metrosexual, or they're fixated on meeting a model. Apparently not. The difference here though is not that the men are just elusive in these ways, they're just actually unavailable, as in married. Though I was surrounded by many more married couples in my last year or so in NYC, it still wasn't a given that a man in his mid-thirties as most likely married, the way I assume it is in the rest of the country...

A Place to Sit

The exciting news in my life is...I bought a couch! Last week while in NYC I went to the Bo Concept warehouse sale in New Jersey (so great to have a car) and fell in love with a cream-colored micro-suede couch. It was a floor sample, so was on sale for like 1/4 of the original price. Alas, someone had already staked their claim to it, so I left the NJ warehouse empty-handed. But as soon as I got back to N's Red Hook pad, I got on craigslist and found a similar one! We drove the Volvo uptown and picked it up from a nice girl on the Upper East Side who was moving to Queens. N disassembled it for me (Bo Concept is like the fancy older cousin to Ikea), we brought it down the five flights (so easy and lightweight!) and then I drove it back up to Maine on Tuesday morning. My brother helped me reassemble it, and now, finally, I have a couch! My living room is turning into a room, instead of a giant entryway strewn with crap that I walk through to get to my kitchen. Ahhh....

Portland Head Lighthouse

N and I visited the historic Portland Head Lighthouse. It was as cold and foggy as it looks in these pics! Poor Ting-Tong was freezing.

Monday night in Maine

Shoes

So, I woke up today for my first “real” day in Maine. My plan was to update this blog, do my taxes online, catch up on emails, and look for work. But then my brother Jay called, wondering if I could pick up my niece Eliza early from daycare. Happy to have an excuse not to look for a job and to watch the Little Mermaid again, I agreed to pick her up and take her to their house in Brunswick.

So that’s where I am now, sans Internet connection, writing this in a Word document for later posting. I’m still grappling with my total lifestyle overhaul. One day, I’m riding the 6 train uptown, eating lunch on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, meeting friends for drinks downtown on the Lower East Side, walking home to my apartment decorated with mid-century modern furniture and hooked up with 500 cable channels and wireless Internet. The next I’m putting my garbage out on the curb and driving a Volvo station wagon with a 3-yr old (albeit a beloved one) strapped into her car seat in the back. These are not minor changes! It’s as if I moved out of the city and took on family life—only I don’t have a family. No husband, no kids—I feel like I’m living some phantom life, driven to it by the inexorable ticking of my biological clock. No kids—no problem! I’ll still get the station wagon and live in the suburbs! If I build it, they will come!

It’s confusing, because plenty of my friends have had babies while living in the city and maintaining an urban life. Certainly I could have, also, but maybe I compartmentalize things too much: city living is for being young, single, footloose and fancy-free. Maybe deep in the recesses of my mind I believe that city life is incompatible with child-rearing, given that I was raised in a pretty rural environment, with a big yard, unrestricted access to the beach, trees to climb, hills to sled down, an ocean to swim in, woods to explore—all of this with no limits. Our cat didn’t even have a litter box because he just went outside when he wanted to, and on occasion even brought us home a mouse or baby rabbit from the field in front of our house. Our dog never had to be walked; she, too, just pawed at the screen door when she wanted out. Our mailbox was far enough away that sometimes we drove to the top of the driveway to pick up mail; otherwise, you could walk there and make an afternoon of it, stopping at the willow tree, examining the goldfish pond at Mr. Abiri’s (he bought the house my dad was raised in), sneaking onto someone else’s property to check out the fort the Sylvester boys had built in the woods.

I always felt like a bit of an imposter in the city. It seemed that other people had more of a right to be there—people who had grown up in Westchester, or New Jersey, people whose parents held jobs in the city, or used to. For me New York wasn’t a natural progression, from suburb to city; it was a fantasy city, a place where a bigger, glittering life—the life I saw on TV and read about in magazines—was happening. I imagined myself like one of those girls in the Mademoiselle fashion spreads, wearing “career” clothes and working in a shiny office, high above the city streets. I don’t know what I thought I’d be doing, but it would be something important, and glamorous, and I’d always wear great skirts and tops and high heels that didn’t hurt my feet. (I didn’t even know heels could hurt your feet so much until I actually moved to New York and tried to wear them while walking across town to work then after work to meet friends for drinks. There were days I would barely be able to stand up in the subway, my feet hurt so badly. Of course, that could have also been because I bought such cheap shoes when I first moved to the city. There was a time when spending more than $50 on a pair of shoes seemed like an extravagance only other people would be self-indulgent enough to grant themselves—it certainly wasn’t for me. My, how things have changed!)

In my first few months in New York, I actually wore these hideous black platform shoes with two rubberish straps across the top that cost about $10 from Payless, I think. I wore them to work at Viking Books every day, because I didn’t have anything else. From my apartment on Mulberry Street, I’d walk across Soho to Penguin on Hudson Street, not having any idea how fortunate I was to live and work downtown and not have to commute on the dreaded subway. As the years went on, the distance between my place of work and residence slowly expanded: from E. 14 to Hudson St.; from 28th St. to Park Slope; from 19th St. to Williamsburg (this was actually an easy commute); and then, the commute that pushed me over the edge and prompted my thinking of moving out of the city, from Brooklyn Heights to East Harlem. Not nearly as much fun as walking from Mulberry to the lower West Village, and seeing movie stars and models on my walk to and from work!

The Pillow

Today is, in some ways, my first “real” day living in Maine. I’m certainly having conflicting feelings about my move. On the one hand, I’m sleeping better….and a lot more. N and I took a nap every day this weekend. I don’t know if it’s the fresh air or what, but something about Maine makes me tired. Could be that I’m so much less stimulated that I’m also a lot more relaxed. Or the feeling that a major milestone in my life has passed, and I’m letting that sink in. I don’t know. I feel like my life is going in slo-mo. Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

N flew back to New York last night, after spending the weekend and Monday and Tuesday helping me settle in. It’s really amazing how many people have helped me out in this move. My brother Rick and my dad arranged to have me take over Rick’s old Volvo, so now I have a car. My aunt Ingrid gave me my cousin’s bed frame, so now, actually for the first time in a decade, I’m sleeping on more than just a mattress and box spring. She also gave me a microwave and a couple of good pans. (She is in the process of moving to Portland, OR, where her husband will be working at a green architecture firm, so was more than happy to offload some stuff.) Soo’s boyfriend gave me a large color TV—I just had to scrape his kids’ finger paint off the screen. Amazing how things come together sometimes. And such generosity and helpfulness on the part of my family and friends.

Anyway, N and I drove to Maine Saturday. We stopped in Providence, to pick up the bed frame, then drove down to Westport, MA, to my dad’s house to pick up my old IKEA desk and thrift store kitchen table. We finally made it to Portland at about 11:30 that night, after taking a wrong turn in the final stretch (when it comes to directions, the two heads of N and I are not better than one).

We unloaded the car that night. Since it was so late, and the street I live on is so quiet, we didn’t worry too much about leaving the back of the car open while we brought stuff upstairs. But the next day, we looked around and noticed that the long pillow my aunt gave me that went with the headboard of the bed was nowhere to be found. We checked the car, checked under and around all of my still unpacked boxes. Nowhere. And then I remembered that there was this one group of people walking up the hill, making some noise, while we were unloading. A group of 20-somethings, it seemed, who sounded like they’d been out drinking. Though it seemed improbable, we surmised that in a fit of drunken chicanery, they must have thought it would be funny to take the pillow.

For the next two days, we were still puzzling over whether this was the correct explanation for the mysterious disappearance of the pillow. Then, on the following cold and rainy Monday morning, on our way back home from the Hilltop Coffee Shop, we saw the pillow draped over a chain link fence in someone’s front yard, wet from the rain, its distinctive floral pillow case still intact. We took the wet pillow home, washed it off and put it in the dryer, and put it in its rightful place on the bed. It was as if it had never left us. I don’t know if it’s comforting or not to have something stolen and then recover it. But it was some sort of welcome to the neighborhood.

I’m adding a picture of my Monday night. N and I played Scrabble by the light of the ship’s lantern he bought me at New York Nautical in Tribeca. Fun!