In The Basement

My sister-in-law Susie grew up in the house where I now live. It’s on a street busy enough that it’s sometimes hard to pull out of the driveway, but there is an acre of land, so wooded that deer have bounded through the backyard. Earlier in the summer we saw rabbits foraging in the unmowed grass. The house feels big because of the number of trees and the acreage, but because there are five, sometimes six of us (with a seventh on the way), and because my brother usually has at least one of his dance students staying here, and because there are often other houseguests, it feels small. Earlier this summer my brother and sister-in-law and I cleared out the downstairs basement. It was a period piece, that basement, with veneer paneling, a dropped acoustic ceiling, a built-in wet bar, and a fireplace. We cleaned everything out and carpeted the room, and I stayed there for a few weeks until the dance student living upstairs left for her summer study in Miami. The basement room is still sort of musty—the other half still needs cleaning and organizing—and now it’s become a kind of rumpus room for my two nieces and a place to go when the rest of the house, which lacks AC, is hot. Fortunately, it's been a mild summer here.
Right now there is a pile of about thirty boxes of books in the middle of the basement, which still leaves plenty of space for the girls to play. My five-year-old niece Nina and I “opened” an art gallery downstairs, with a crafts table and construction paper and glue sticks and safety scissors and glitter and paints and crayons. Nina, who will be six in a week, is a budding artist. She loves arts and crafts; I taught her how to fold origami cranes, and she folded them for at least a month. Camille will be three in December, and doesn’t have any interest in sitting still and making things. She likes to climb and run and move; I have to tell her to stop climbing on the boxes of books or she’ll get hurt. She listens, and instead decides to run from one end of the rumpus room to the other and back. She shouts, “Look at me! Look! At! Me!” When Nina and I finally look up from the arts-and-crafts-table, Camille charges across the carpet to the airbed on the floor and throws herself across it. And then she does it again. And again. And again.
The books in the thirty-or-so boxes all belonged to Susie’s father. He was an English professor at Buffalo State College for many years. In the other part of the basement there were already at least fifty boxes of books, packed away with slips of notebook paper listing the titles, but John still had another officeful of books that hadn’t been moved in years. I finally boxed them all up because Bill wants to redo the office for his own use. I’ve never sorted through books so fast in my book-loving life. I divided them into three general categories: books that had obvious value (first editions, backlist keepers); books that had potential resell value (the old Vintage mass markets—John even had Lionel Trilling’s Matthew Arnold in mass market paper!); and books that are too niche or have no value whatsoever (Magill annuals, French lit-crit). It was something else, going through that library. I really enjoyed throwing all the poststructuralist lit-crit in the third pile.
I only met John once, at my brother’s wedding. We chatted for what felt like five minutes, mostly about Diana Trilling. John was very interested by the fact that I’d worked for her and had known her so intimately. Unfortunately, he was stricken with illness not long after that, and passed within the year. Susie recently told me that the room where I’m now staying is the one where her father was right up to the end. Staying in the room where he spent his last days is a kind of contact; so was going through all of those books. I imagine he’d read in all of them at some point. I haven't decided what to do with them yet, but it's one of my projects for the months to come.

Buffalo '07 (continued)

Walking to a recent appointment here on a block of Main Street at the heart of downtown Buffalo, I was reminded of downtown San Jose, the city where I was born and raised. During those years, the Seventies, San Jose was a city that was dying if not already dead at its center, yet it was thriving at its edges. The last patches of farmland in the suburbs was sold off to developers and turned into residential or commercial real estate. The city built out rather than up, but because San Jose is enclosed by hills and water and other communities capable of stopping runaway construction, its outward expansion eventually reached various limits. Before that happened, however, the city’s old, historic core was discovered by individual investors and development companies interested in its empty buildings and blocks. Downtown San Jose’s decline slowed during the Eighties and with the economic boom of the Nineties, especially in the dot.com industries, was more or less stopped and even to some extent reversed. It will never be a city in the European sense, and will never be a city again as it was before suburbanization. It will, however, always be my hometown.

Speaking of hometowns, in my new one I did two unusual things yesterday. First, in the afternoon, I visited a Dominican nuns’ monastery courtesy of a friend of a friend. On Doat Street near Schiller Park there is a monastery of nuns in the Dominican Order of the Perpetual Rosary. Most of the nuns are cloistered, and I got to meet one of them through the visitors’ grille. Later, in the priests’ dining room, I met another one, Sister Maureen. She was an extern, which means she can go out and about in the world. About sixty, sixty-five, she accepted her vocation later in life, after years of marriage and motherhood. I didn’t ask, but I’m guessing that her husband may have passed away after their children were grown. Sister had beautiful blue eyes and a lively manner; she taught English literature in her previous life. Later I was shown the church attached to the monastery. It was beautiful as only a Catholic church can be, and behind a large grille, in a chapel off to one side of the altar, a postulant was meditating on the Blessed Sacrament. When I was young I took Catholicism seriously, with the fervor of a child and a young, young man, and though I did not hold onto the Church and do not make regular contact with it for purposes of religious or spiritual practice, it is still a part of me and always will be. The monastery had a particular kind of spiritual power, perhaps the kind of energy others find at Dharamshala or Machu Picchu or Stonehenge; perhaps others find it in their own local parish. I have found my own spiritual practice, but was not at all sorry to have had the chance to touch base with the stillness and serenity of that monastery.

As if to demonstrate how dizzying reality can be, a few hours later, in complete contrast to the Monastery of the Sisters of the Perpetual Rosary, I was in Ralph Wilson Stadium for the home opener of the Buffalo Bills’ preseason. They were playing the Atlanta Falcons, and my brothers’ friends had box seats and two extra tickets. The only other professional game I ever attended was back in 1978, a San Francisco 49ers match at Candlestick Park. I don’t remember who the other team was, but I do remember that I got to see O.J. Simpson play. I wasn’t a fan by any means, but I did eventually become a diehard ‘Niners’ fan over the course of the Montana-to-Clark Cinderella season. I might not have become a football fan at all, but surgery on my Achilles’ tendon left me in a full-leg cast for the three months which coincided with the last three months of that season. I haven’t followed football much lately; the ‘Niners have fallen far from those glory days (R.I.P., Bill Walsh) and I could never really get behind the Jets or the Giants during my years in New York City.
Due to traffic and his characteristic reluctance to hurry when he isn’t in the mood to, my brother and I didn’t get to the game until halftime. I’m sure that if he had paid for the seats and/or if it had been a regular season game, we would have gotten to the stadium sooner. Our box was in the end zone, but I didn’t care. I was just happy to be there and I felt like a kid again. Of course, it was a treat to be in a box seat. The weird thing is how far away the game looks even from that close, odd angles aside. We left before the final gun, but did get to see one great interception and one touchdown by the hometeam. Oh…and we got to see a fan thrown out of the stadium. (Someone else in the box said, “Imagine getting thrown out during preseason.”) We did the Wave, and ate kettle chips with onion dip, pizza, and I finally had my first Buffalo chicken wing since arriving in Buffalo. Because Marshawn Lynch went to Cal, my alma mater, I got to keep the souvenir photo that they gave out. And since I have already been to a box seat in Ralph Wilson Stadium, maybe I’ve arrived in Buffalo for real. I even saved my wristband.

Buffalo '07

Earlier this year, I moved from NYC to Buffalo, which is where I am writing this. I'd lived in NYC since 1992 and it was time to move on. My brother Bill and his family have lived here for a while, and he had extended several invitations to come and stay as long as I cared to. Bill and I are close--which in my large and unwieldy family is saying something--so that wasn't the hard part of the decision. The hard part was giving up NYC. I love--have always loved--its energy, its crowds, its messiness, its insanity. At times I felt completely in synch with that, for better or worse, and certainly at other times I was absolutely out of step with it--more accurately perhaps, out of step with myself. From time to time, especially in the last few years, it felt like the exchange of energy had run its course, yet I still didn't know if I could give NYC up. Living somewhere as aweseome as NYC for fifteen years...well, it felt like I'd made a committment and was giving up on it. Without apologies for sounding like Carrie Bradshaw, I was waiting for NYC to break up with me, rather than the other way around.

But as I was crossing over the GWB in my rented Prius on a May day so beautiful it felt criminal, the sky above and the water below saturated with springtime blue, Manhattan shining behind me, the bridge's towers overhead, I thought, "This is right. This feels right." A few months later, settled in Buffalo, I wrote this poem (the title is a direct steal from Didion, who was stealing from Robert Graves).


Goodbye to All That

West Side Highway, a potholed ramp
Winding up, then the bridge’s pitch
Into light and air. A last glance south
At towers and places where towers were,
Other parts where I lived and where
I nearly died. No regrets, none.


I am actually in Williamsville, a Greater Buffalo suburb about thirty minutes from downtown. I honestly don't know how long I will be here, but it does look as though I'll be here through the academic year to come (I'll let you know about that later). What's important to me is that being here has granted me greater freedom and opportunity to write. Even something as simple as this blog seemed hard to get off the ground in NYC, and now I can stop saying "someday I'll get a blog going."