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."