Spring Break Reflections

Last Thursday on my way home for spring break, I scribbled the following notes while pressing my cheek up against the cool window of the train.

"I'm on an Amtrak train to New York City for spring break. It wasn't until I boarded the train, settled into my seat, and glanced out the window to see Rochester slowly slipping away that I remembered how much I love to travel. During the countless stir-crazy nights of the past two months, I've reflected on the depth of my wanderlust, but I didn't remember the vicious freedom of slipping between cities, gazing out of windows at the countryside's secrets, and meeting the freshness of new places head-on... The other side of the window is moving by like scenes from a movie reel, and it's taking effort to remember that I am of these new things, and not only watching them. I have the supreme luxury of experiencing and being a part of things that I have never seen before. This life is not a movie.

The train car is overheated, and I wish for nothing more than to be outside... We're moving through the archetype of the North Country, and it's so beautiful that I'm kicking myself for staying on campus and in the city in the past weeks. The ruralness of it reminds me of the Pennsylvania roads that Yoda and I wandered through on our bikes last summer, except with a twist of wintertime mystery. Everything is coated in snow: the hills, the trees, the rocks, the boulders. Even the icy streams turning in between the trees are dusted with the lightest layers of crystalline powder. The houses we pass are something out of a Jan Brett picture book: diminutive, sturdy, secondary to the snow and wild, rambling, brown-and-white majesty of the forest. I never knew that ice on barren trees could be so beautiful, all curves and graceful, sparkling lines. Trunk after trunk, branch after branch, is outlined in glowing ice that glints but does not melt in the sun.

We're passing through red pickup truck towns, and abandoned hunter's havens in the middle of clearings. Every once in awhile there is a field that looks like an ice skating rink, and rumbling hills in the distance rising to the challenge of shaping the horizon. Buildings dot plains of fallow farm fields, spiky with brown stalks that poke up out of the snow, gently and with spunk. I finally understand why people call the snow “pristine”."

The following week continued in similar style, akin to an awakening from what I can only characterize as a kind of hibernation that I have burrowed into for the past few months. When I moved to Rochester in January, I found myself landed in a brand new place stark with odd challenges and an absence of the people I love and the things that interest me. I didn't have the familiar muse of New York City, of commuter trains and even the rambling farm roads of Central Jersey to keep my sense of noticing alive. So I settled into a defensive state of mind, one in which I simply sat waiting for the day that I could return to a place that would inspire me. And let's face it: Rochester doesn't inspire me. As much as I love my classes and enjoy my new friends, Rochester as a place doesn't buzz with the potential for poetry that I have found in other places in my life. As soon as I arrived in New York last Thursday, I felt alive again, awake; I was at home in a state of complete, surround-sound, 3-D-goggle vision inspiration. And more than that (perhaps because of that?) I felt utterly at home. Being back in Princeton and New York for ten days felt like recharging: I've come back to Rochester with a dual understanding that I cannot let life pass me by in the way that I have been, and that ultimately, though I have resolved to find the little beauties of Rochester so that I never go as crazy here as I did before the break, I can't stay away from New York forever. When I was applying to college, I thought it would be a good idea for me to live in other places, and as much as I value the prospect of seeing every little place that I possibly can, even when I lived at home I never had the chance to burrow into that amazing city that I've idolized for so long but never had the chance to truly embrace.

Anyway, enough with the introspection, and onward to the stories...

When I got into Penn Station, I had a few hours to kill before catching a train back to Jersey. I meandered (okay, I made a beeline) down to Union Square and popped into Pie By The Pound, my favorite pizza shop in the city. I think that more than anything, it's the memories that draw me to Pie; it seems like every time we have a CTY reunion in the city, or something crazy and weird happens while out with friends, or Yoda and I need a place to sit and hatch some new weird and crazy plan, we end up at Pie. By now the owner, Jeff, a tall, friendly bald man with a love of grand schemes and good people, knows me. As soon as I came into the shop, he pulled me into a hug and sat me down to hear all about college. I think that's one of the things that continuously draws people to New York: in provincial places like Princeton, or smaller industrial cities like Rochester, the people don't exhibit an almost desperate underlying need for human connection. A long time ago, I thought it was odd how much nigh-intimate interaction occurs between random New Yorkers, how many conversations spring up between people in a city where the underlying rule is that you don't make eye contact and you always mind your own business. But I think in a setting built around that kind of impersonality, when a connection is made, it is automatically more intense, even if ephemeral, than it would be in a place where people smile at each other when passing on the street. I've gone to the same coffee shop in Princeton at least three times a week for three years now, and though I know all of the baristas by sight, and we'll occasionally make small talk while I'm waiting for the milk to foam, I still don't know any of their names, and probably never will. But every once in awhile in New York, though it's rare, intense connections are built because once you break that fourth wall in between you and the person making your coffee or heating your slice, you really can't go back. It's pretty wonderful, really.

Back at home, I felt like my house had been hit by an Improv Everywhere team: the colors of the walls and the contours of light falling onto the furniture was so familiar it hurt, but huge landmarks of my life were missing, as if I were living inside an incomplete puzzle. My room was so zen, stripped of the posters and photographs and ticket stubs that used to coat the walls. It was completely empty save for my desk, bed, and the wicker mannequin I used to keep my hats and scarves on. I still don't know what will happen to her when the house is sold; I certainly don't have room for her in Rochester, and I doubt that she'll match the decor in Santa Fe.

The first morning that I made breakfast, I realized that we no longer have a toaster, and that half of the mugs were gone. Instead of the usual array of wooden spoons, spatulas, soup ladles and whisks in the "miscellaneous kitchen junk" drawer, we now had two long-stemmed spoons and a single spatula at our behest. Every day, more utensils would disappear as mom packed them, leaving Carly and I to stand blinking into drawers whose contents shrunk by the day. It was very Alice in Wonderland-meets-Harry Potter. I had to credit Carly with her patience with living in a disappearing house.

Most of my vacation was a whirlwind of seeing people: I visited Paul, from whom I finally gained custody of the keyboard that we got Idina Menzel to sign on some Thanksgiving weekend years ago; had dinner with Sandy and Everett, a newlywed gay couple that my mom goes to church with who are currently loving the struggle of raising their 13-year-old daughter, and who decided that bringing a quiver of wind-up bunnies to the pub would be a good idea; I got kicked out of Panera with Himanshu and friends, and then proceeded to stomp on an apple in the middle of Vandeventer Street as we stood giggling about god-knows-what. Dominique and I stayed up until four in the morning watching "PS I Love You" and crying, and I sang along to the entire Garden State soundtrack with Carly. I ate leftover lasagna that mom and I made on Christmas and froze, and I took a drive through the single-lane farm roads of Northeastern New Jersey that everybody forgets about when they say that my home state is the armpit of America. Oh, and somehow I got invited to the Inaugural Ball in 2009 (that's a long story that I'll be telling later).

Somewhere along the way, I realized that I never hated New Jersey, or Princeton, or even Montgomery. What I hated was being in high school, having so many limitations and restrictions and dreams that I couldn't even elucidate. After I graduated, I kind've fell in love with Princeton, and with the memories that I didn't even notice making when I was in high school. I've had a quirky, wonderful life there, and as much as I thank god I'm not in high school anymore, I hate the prospect of leaving New Jersey.

I'm still really not a fan of the freeway, though.

Spring Break

Happy March!

On Saturday, I'm going home for the first and last time. It'll be the first time since I've been at college, and the last time because two weeks after I go back to school, my mom is putting our dog in the car and moving her life to Santa Fe, New Mexico. Our house is on the market, and just yesterday, four different families came to look at it. All of the things I'm going to need and want and use are here with me in Rochester, and my summer clothes and things that I don't absolutely need are packed in boxes, stacked neatly against the walls of our garage. And even though I know I'll be back in the neighborhood countless times in my life to visit friends, when I leave my house after spring break, I have to really say goodbye to the place where I grew up.

I've lived in a lot of places: Boulder, Morristown, Bedminster, Montgomery, and now Rochester. I've been a resident of three states, and had bedrooms in four different houses. But as much as I bitched about it throughout the ENTIRETY of my adolescence, it's Montgomery, a snooty, suburban town in Central New Jersey four miles off of the Princeton University campus that's been the only place I've ever really called home. And now that I'm not going to have a home base there anymore, I'm realizing how much I loved it... Even if a huge part of that love was loving to hate it.

I am so happy for my mom. She needs to move to Santa Fe, and she deserves it--- her entire adult life has been spent taking care of other people, and the time for her to start a new life is way overdue. The idea of the single empty-nester packing up her life and moving to an artsy town in the American Southwest sounds like something out of a collection of mid-life crisis stories, but for my mom, it's her dream, and everything that she is. Ever since she was in college, moving east was something that she did out of duty, and wandering back west (usually in a car packed with all of her most important stuff, as will be the case at the end of this month) was something she did because her identity requires it. She's been vacillating between New Jersey and the Rocky Mountains since 1980, and it's about time she moved back for good.

But for me, it's a little different. I was raised in New Jersey, amidst flat farmlands and billboard-ridden highways. I lived on an express-train line into New York City, and as it turns out, New York is my American Southwest. I love it the way my mom loved Colorado when she lived there during college, and I idolize the streets of the East Village and the weird skyline of Central Park in the way that she yearned for pueblos and Native American pottery while she was raising me in a safe, sturdy community an hour south of her parents in New Jersey. While my mom was dreaming of other places, I became a Jersey girl, as much as I hate to admit it. I went to the mall with my best friend on Saturday nights in my Freshman and Sophomore years of high school; couldn't wait to get a driver's license and crashed my mom's car a month after I finally did. When I was sixteen I fell in love with New York City and never went back, even though, as I've been told by friends who live in the City, I still smell like New Jersey and will never stop.

(I really hope that last bit isn't true.)

So as much as I'm happy for my mom and excited about the new home that she will make for herself there, a part of me knows that as much time as I spend in Santa Fe, it's never really going to be my home. My home base still lies somewhere between the cherry blossoms of Princeton and the grit of New York, and I love it too much for that to ever change. In a lot of ways, my mom's move means that I'm more autonomous than I really thought I would be at eighteen: I live in Rochester. All of my stuff is here. And when I'm not here, I'll spend the rest of my time between New Mexico and New Jersey/New York, from mom to friends and back again. And I'm okay with that. I'll be back to Jersey, and I'm sure I'll be bitching about it all over again in time. But it's just going to be so damn hard to say goodbye to my room, and the kitchen where I learned to cook, and my makeshift art studio in the attic. My childhood is there, and within months, someone else is going to be living in it. A big chunk of home is going to be gone from home when I go back to visit over the summer.