Crash

This has been without exception the busiest, craziest, wildest year of my adult life. A year ago I was still bright-eyed and bushy-tailed about my new life in Buffalo but on a number of levels I hadn’t experienced much. What I had experienced was life with my brother and his family, and that was a rich and extraordinary thing to have happen at this point in my life. There are always tensions, anxieties, and struggles with family, and this family milieu here has been no exception, but the joys have been of a kind with few precedents in my life. To come around a corner and find Ian, or to have Camille run at me out of the blue and give my legs a hug, to see Nina mugging or just reading quietly on the couch…well, it makes up for the times they drive me crazy being nothing more than little kids. A great big piece of my heart has healed because I can say, The family I have been part of goes on.

The semester is coming to an end at Niagara University, and I have been invited back to teach in January. More significantly, my participation in the program at the Spencer Hotel at the Chautauqua Institution has also come to an end. That job was one of the very best and very worst experiences of my life. I had such high hopes for the idea that I could be part of—even in charge of—something like that. The truths of the job only revealed themselves in the doing—I slowly began to realize that the ownership team had ideas and money to throw at them. I began to realize that I myself was the answer to one of their ideas, and that money was being thrown at me. But by the end of the summer, when the team actually doing the work of putting the program together began to fall apart, and that because of poor decision and execution on the part of the owners…well, I began to wonder what I’d gotten myself into. On top of that, I was doing this first semester of teaching, and the commute was killing me. I managed to finance a car in early September—just ahead of the credit/loan crisis, fortunately—but the miles I’ve logged on it since are substantial.

So now what? Well, having severed my ties to the program at the Spencer, I’m now concentrating on getting back on track with my teaching and other work in Buffalo. For a few weeks there has been a lingering question of whether or not to pursue further work of the kind I was doing at the hotel in the Southern Tier (as this part of the state is called). But I keep getting offers of real work in the Buffalo area, and am growing ever surer that as I was coming to believe however reluctantly, I will remain in Buffalo for a long time to come, that this area is now home. I’ve found work here, I’ve made friends here, I’ve flourished here. The Chautauqua project was an opportunity I don’t regret. It brought awareness about myself as a writer and about writing itself that I didn’t know I had—for example, I believe writing can build a community. I believe writing is for everyone. I believe writing is important not just to me. Don’t get me wrong—it would have been very cool to develop and execute what I (and the hotel ownership) envision is possible, but that role belongs to someone else. My role…well, I know more about what it is in the world.