Didion with her daughter. From the LA Time's Jacket Copy

In order to do the heavy lifting of reading a Joan Didion book, the brain – and the heart – must be prepared to carry the weight. This is especially true with Blue Nights, Didion’s extended eulogy to her daughter Quintana, who died in 2005.  For this reason I hesitated picking it up immediately; one has to be in the right place to read about death, especially when it’s a mother writing about the death of her only child. I wanted to save Blue Nights, but the Bookforum cover, the NPR interview, the review after interview after review all finally got to me. I had to read it to know what all the fuss was about. I had recently finished the book and started jotting notes for a blog post when I found out about the death of my father’s girlfriend (for lack of a better word), who had lived with us for many years and played a major role in my upbringing. I returned to Chicago before I had the time – no, before I could create the mental space – to flesh these out.

• It is impossible to read Blue Nights without thinking about all the things one has loved and lost.
• Didion lets us see the small cracks in the veneer
• We are constantly shaping and reshaping the stories of our lives to align with the changing visions of ourselves.

In spite of my deliberate decision, I found myself reading the book at the wrong (or perhaps exactly the right?) time. What I was then forced to be reminded of – or rather, what I found myself doing – was what Didion describes: the frantic piecing together of two lives: the one that has been lost, and the altered version of one’s own.

Much of Blue Nights is devoted to an examination of the bizarre way that particular objects take on extreme significance, and how holding onto them is a paltry proxy for the loved one lost. Her jarring incantation throughtout the book about the flowers Quintana wore at her wedding and her school uniform serves a dual purpose: they first give the objects significance, but the repetition, at some point, becomes a chant, sacrificing meaning for cadence, rhythm and the sake of continuity until the objects lose their power. Talking about memories isn’t just about wanting to remember. It’s about remembering hard enough so you can purge them from the system, and maybe (but likely not) forget.

I have often been surprised at the clumsiness with which people handle something has universal as death. After Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking became a seminal book about death, there seemed to be a general awakening about dying. We don’t know how to talk about it! It’s our last cultural taboo, so let’s share all the gory, nasty details of what death smells like and what grief feels like, how it possesses the body with a force unknown.In Blue Nights, Didion practically bludgeons the reader with the fact there is no comfort in the wake of death:

“You have your wonderful memories,” people said later, as if memories were solace. Memories are not. Memories are by definition of times past, things gone…memories are what you no longer want to remember.

Didion, and perhaps Tim O’Brien, are among the few who get it right about how death changes life: it reignites the desire to do something that matters. Not because of the realization that life is so precious and profound, but precisely because of the difficulty in convincing oneself that there is any meaning at all.

Didion also captures the post-death discombobulation. Grievers often become time travelers by finding blips in the past that lead to entire periods of memories that take on a new chronology, a new role in the narrative, after a death. There is a quote from Magical Thinking that about sums it up:

…yet this is a case in which I wish I had instead of words and their rhythms a cutting room, equipped with an Avid, a digital editing system on which I could touch a key and collapse the sequence of time, show you simultaneously all the frames of memory that come to me now, let you pick the takes, the marginally different expressions, the variant readings of the same lines. This is a case in which I need more than words to find the meaning.

I don’t know how to slaughter a turkey. I have no clue how to kill a sheep. I’ve never heard the choked bleats of a dying lamb, and I can’t even imagine the process of turning a furry or feathered animal into the various shanks, chops, thighs and breasts of the butcher’s sinewy world. I figure it begins with a quick slit of the throat, but I really don’t like to figure such things at all.

My trip along the Aegean Sea was one I knew I had to make before leaving Turkey. I didn’t plan on going shortlyafter American Thanksgiving and during the Muslim holiday of Eid, or Kurban Bayrami in Turkish – literally the Festival of Sacrifice. It simply worked out that way.

 I was teaching at an international school and living in Istanbul at the time, where it was easy enough to duck into a Starbuck or Gloria Jean’s and imagine I was just across the street from home, instead of around the world. Yet in the midsized village of Selçuk, just an hour’s flight from Istanbul to Izmir and then a short drive south, coffee shops were scarce. Sheep dominated the landscape. Not in sight, but in smell.

Everywhere I looked countless hoofed balls of fluff were corralled into makeshift holding areas along the roadsides. A boy no older than my eleventh grade students was chain smoking and half-heartedly watching a small flock grazing in an empty lot. A rickety pickup truck jam-packed with sheep lumbered along the road in a truck in front of us. Their heads bent low, I thought I saw a few of them lift their eyes toward mine and stare longingly like, um, sheep on their way to the slaughter. Everywhere we traveled the stench of impending death followed us. At least that’s how my Tofurkey-friendly brain interpreted the smell of sheep poop.

When God asked Abraham to sacrifice the thing he loved the most — his son — Abraham willingly obliged. The ritual of killing sheep on Kurban Bayrami stems from this ancient story. We all know how a ram intervened just before the moment of ultimate sacrifice. The Abrahams of today are still sacrificing lambs (I guess rams are going the way of the buffalo?) instead of their beloved Isaacs or Ishmaels. For some, the four-day-festival marks the end of the Hajj, or the Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca – though most, at least in Turkey, just spend the vacation at home with loved ones. The Turkish government put a ban on killing animals in public places, such as playgrounds and parks, but sacrifice is still highly visible in many parts of Turkey.

 Here’s where it gets tricky. The holiday is determined according to the lunar calendar, so on the solar calendar it tends to fall at some point after Thanksgiving and before Christmas and Hanukkah. I never gave much thought to these American holidays – all three of which I celebrate – until I spent them abroad for two years in a row. Before moving to Istanbul I was basically a “pescatarian,” and before that a vegetarian, despite my father having a conniption when I decided I needed to buy soymilk and tofu instead of eating like a “normal” person. Ever since reading about how Throeau didn’t want his “body to be a graveyard for dead animals” in Walden, I couldn’t not think about eating meat. Yet somehow eating meat seemed integral to living in Turkey (or was it that I just didn’t want to commit the ultimate insult by refusing someone’s cooking?) so I went back on the beef. Though I’d always had issues with piles of turkys in plastic wrap huddling in freezers everywhere, I suddenly missed them – along with overdosing on pumpkin pie scones and hearing Christmas carols on an endless loop. Because of this, I was eager to feel the impact of tradition, even if it wasn’t my own. 

Before vacation, I’d asked my students about Kurban Bayrami, and they rolled their eyes in that “OMG we’re so not that provincial” way they did whenever I asked about Turkish or Muslim traditions. Not everyone feels it their duty to slaughter, and you don’t have to get blood on your hands to reap the benefits of the ritual, they explained. Lots of people donate to a mosque and have a sheep slaughtered on their behalf.

 The holidays weren’t the only time I grew homesick. If I became oddly nostalgic for America and needed to reconnect with my country by surrounding myself with potato skins, hamburgers and gas-guzzling SUVs, I went to the wealthier, more bourgeois areas where many of my students lived where you could actually find decent sushi and Mexican food.

 I can picture myself chewing on a tasteless, overpriced mozzarella sticks, thinking I’d be better off with a cheap simit bought off the street. At Turkish restaurants, I almost always ordered lentil soup or chicken kebabs and ate lots of bread, avoiding anything I considered gross, such as red meat. I lived a sanitized, American life even while abroad. But I didn’t want things to be the same. That’s why doing the same things in Turkey I did in the States felt socially acceptable yet still slightly ilicit, like taking lots of ketchup and sugar packets from McDonalds. It was like I brought my sterile American-ness, right along with canned cranberry sauce and factory-farmed Butterballs, with me wherever I roamed. I wanted something to force me to live differently. Life should be different here, I told myself. But in most ways, it felt utterly, oppressively the same.

 At any rate, during my week in Seljuk, I managed to avoid watching the life eek out of a sheep thing. Still, a few peripheral sightings stick in my mind. On a walk through a quaint neighborhood to the Seven Sleepers, I turned my head to the left and looked through a narrow opening into a courtyard, where a bloodied sheep with its hooves tethered together hung upside down. I instinctively turned my head before I could really be sure I’d seen what I saw. A stream of polluted water turned out to be blood, the color of the eggplants stacked at the produce, stand running toward the sewer. A man tossing plastic bags of what appeared to be trash into the back of a garbage truck was actually throwing bags filled to the brim with bloodied sheep’s wool spilling through the handles, oddly resembling the cotton used for fake Christmas snow. My brain wasn’t trained to register such images, so I kept transforming them into something familiar. I realized that it was not the death of a sheep but the dying that bothered me.

 I was travelling with a colleague from school, and we stayed with my former boss and her husband, who had retired to the quaint town after teaching in Istanbul for seven years. During the day, we drove down highways that curled like concrete tongues toward the wide mouths of blazing sunsets. I basked in the sun at the Temple of Apollo. I walked through the ruins at Ephesus, the Greek subsumed by the Roman. I craned my neck looking high up to where the ancient city extended before an earthquake reportedly wiped out the entire metropolis. What had once been the second largest city in the entire world was mostly reduced to fragments of its former self. As legend has it, the bacchanalia festivals held here often rose to a fever-pitched frenzy that resulted in human sacrifice.

At some point during that trip, I stopped thinking of slaughter or sacrifice as barbaric. We all do the same thing, just minus the blood and guts, by elevating celebrities to unattainable heights and then cutting them down. We still have our Isaacs and Ishmaels, only we call them by names like Britney and Lindsay and Jessica and Kim. We intentionally topple – by character assassination or by waging media jihad – someone far removed from us so that those who we care about the most will be protected and safe, at least in theory. So I find it odd that my generation has more education, more experience abroad, and more to give than any generation before us, yet we don’t want to give anything up. In fact, we expect everything without ever considering that if we were ever to be at someone else’s mercy, there’s no ram that would intervene on our behalf.

So that’s why I worry about being more concerned with having a story to tell than actually wanting to live it in the first place.

 The day after the day of sacrifice, there were still plenty of sheep roaming free. I sort of felt like hugging them. Another year written in the book of life, kids! My vacation ended, and I returned to Istanbul to finish out the semester, where I continued to go to Starbucks, and even TGI Fridays on occasion. Though I didn’t know what was next, I knew there would be more pilgrimages to places unknown, if only so that I could be thankful for having returned. 

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Do you consider yourself an Ikea Swedish meatballs or Ikea cinnamon buns kind of person? This is the question I pondered during a much-anticipated pilgrimage to the home furnishings behemoth in Red Hook for the second installment of a weekend game I sometimes like to play called Decorating My Apartment Makes Me Feel Like A Real Adult.  After 3 months of living in our new place and an initial splurge on key household items like knives and chairs, my roommate and I decided it was time to get non-essentials like cookie sheets and mason jars to keep legumes, spices and other organic substances fresh. (I’m neither into Swedish meatballs or cinnamon buns, but I am the kind of person who wants to partake in the gingerbread house building contest in the kid’s play area).

I really try to avoid Ikea, so I beat myself up the entire time I was there. My internal monologue went something like this: “How predictable. How generic and lacking in inspiration or creativity. Didn’t I want my apartment – my space – to be cobbled together with various tchotchkes that reflect the complex kaleidoscope that is my soul? What about all the crap I’d accumulated during my travels, and was I not dedicated to shopping at small, locally owned businesses? Well, my gorgeous ceramic bowls from Turkey broke in transit, and all the nostalgic objects that I once felt defined me quickly turned to meaningless clutter when I had to haphazardly clear them out of my father’s home. As for trying to buy locally, perhaps the wood in Park Slope coffee tables is actually made of Swarovski crystals and valrhona chocolate. The local cheap stuff turned out not to be very cheap.

Soon this monologue died down as I walked in a trance-like state though the furniture jungle. You know what? Ikea products are just so pretty!  Plus, after moving countless times, I really felt like I want to settle (and by that I mean stay in one place for at least a year). Like it or not, part of committing to a  place is buying stuff for said place, stuff that isn’t totally disposable that you can’t wait to sell on Craigslist for a fraction of the price.

But back to the story. So a scowling woman walks into Ikea, and suddenly she is woozy with the overwhelming  urge for turquoise mixing bowls and new bath towels and a pink heart-shaped rug in the children’s section that has no place in her grown-woman apartment and a snuggly throw for watching movies on the couch and those round pastel lampshades that look like Chinese lanterns and the most adorable little snowflake cupcake holders  for the cupcakes she never actually bakes and and while she’s at it she might as well get the matching snowflake apron and potholder, right?  Oh yeah, and then there’s the coffee table she came for.

Here’s the thing: it takes a lot of disposable income to curate a unique style all ones own.  In the meantime, somewhere between totally broke and spending my disposable income on having Nate Berkus pimp my crib, there’s Ikea. Or maybe I can still get away with defining my originality by tearing pages out of magazines and putting them up on my wall in some kind of collage-y pastiche sort of thing….? Um, I didn’t think so either.

So now there’s this funky lamp and coffee table in my living room, plus the turquoise mixing bowls et al populating my kitchen. Maybe I’m just another sterile yuppie lacking in authenticity and a fully-defined self-concept. Or maybe I’m reading too much into it. Can’t I buy a 3-drawer dresser so my socks and t-shirts don’t have to live like orphans on the bottom of my closet floor without having it instigate an existential crisis?

One more thing. You know how some people say they start sleeping on one side of the bed or parking on one side of the garage to literally make space for someone new? It’s the whole if “you build it they will come theory.” I sort of feel that way about preparing my apartment not for another person, but for my own life.

When I lost my iPhone in the back of a taxi a few weeks ago, I decided I wouldn’t replace it. My incessant checking of Gmail, Facebook and Twitter had bred a certain gadget co-dependency that I felt rather ashamed of. I had become that girl walking down the street while texting without looking where she was going. I’m also the girl who has to check her phone in the middle of meals, meetings, and otherwise important events. Rude? Maybe. But you’re probably that girl or guy, too. Still. Perhaps the iPhone mishap was a blessing in disguise. I replaced it with a $20 go-phone, which is the modern-day tin-can-on-a-string equivalent: it makes calls and texts. That’s it. No photos, no email, no Internet – and worst of all, no Tweets. I’d survive. Maybe.

Day one. I could feel myself twitching. Gmail is blocked at my work, so by midday I couldn’t take it. I almost wanted to run into Rite-Aid and get the Patch. But this had nothing to do with nicotine. Finally, I ask to borrow a co-worker’s iPhone to check my email. I had important freelance-writer type emails to keep up with, I rationalized. But I knew there was more to it than that. The emails could wait a few hours. But I couldn’t. After some thought, I realized my Smartphone addiction had nothing to do with any one email, person or app. It had everything to do with a real time current of information that I desperately needed to feel was carrying me along. It wasn’t the information I needed so much as the sense of security I derived from knowing the world was at my fingertips – and not slipping through them. So when I got an email about Connected, a documentary about how our hyper-connected world is changing the way we live and think, I knew I had to see it.

But the film wasn’t at all what I expected. The narrative was propelled by Shlain’s story, but it wasn’t one about connectedness exclusively in the technological sense. It was the story of a tumultuous year, and how her father’s cancer diagnosis changed the trajectory of her story. Shlain lost her father to cancer in the spring of 2009, as did I, and this fact altered my experience of the film.

I really wanted to hone in on the anthropology of it all. The film touched on how societies throughout the world became more patriarchal as soon as literacy was introduced. Shlain’s grief and love for her father was palpable in the way that only a work of art that tries to wrap itself around life and death can be. What Connected does is what all effective stories must do: negotiate something universal behind the particular thrust of the narrative.

So I didn’t get all my answers. I didn’t figure out what to do about my Smartphone addiction, or if I should stop tweeting ridiculous nothings. Nor did I feel much better about feeling more isolated the more connected I become. Perhaps it serves as a facile justification for believing that my device is merely an extension of myself, but Connected helped to put things in perspective. The desire to be connected is fueled by something much more primal than owning a sexy new phone or serotonin-inducing status updates. It’s bound up with our need to create patterns and seek consistency to make sense of the world, especially when reason and logic reach their limits, and most particularly after a loss.

Adrian is (was?) a member.

I recognize that most of my existential questions will go unresolved, but I had to find an answer to my latest (ridiculous and first world) crisis: Should I join the The Park Slope Food Coop?

The concept of the co-op is simple: it’s run and owned by members, so there’s no big boss man disconnected from the workers, and no disgruntled peons on the bottom of the totem pole. Everyone is equal, in theory, which makes for an heirloom tomatoes and flaxseed oil sort of utopia. Again, in theory. Members work one short shift a month (lifting boxes, cutting cheese, weighing dried mango slices, whatever ) and in return have privileged access to luscious organic produce and  natural products at discounted prices.

Yes, I like my kale. But I also like saving money, and I’ve always been a little obsessive about my food in the first place. I’d head the rumors that the PSFC – with 15,000 members, it’s the largest food coop in America — was sort of like a yuppified fascist regime, only with lots of dried mango, yogurt smoothies and frozen vegan enchiladas. Still, I was curious. When I moved to the neighborhood, I stepped inside and asked to look around. I was envisioning a cartoon vegetable-scape like the ones in those  Jolly Green Giant commercials. The guy at the front checking cards informed me that I couldn’t come in without being escorted by a bona fide member, or I’d simply have to sign up myself.  So coop Gestapo did exist!

But I wasn’t put off. If anything, the forbidden fruit thing (no pun intended) made me want to join even more.  After nearly two months, I finally secured a slot at a two-hour long orientation session. The program included a slideshow presentation, introductions from potential members about why they wanted to join, plus apple cider and organic fig bars. For free! I even got my very own official-looking handbooks. After the lecture part of the program, we were instructed to venture downstairs into the basement.

It was at this point that I got separated from my group. As I wandered the aisles, I wondered: am I doing the right thing? Why do I really want to join? Was this merely a narcissistic, bourgeois, agrarian fantasy sort of thing? Did I find some pleasure in the delusion that I was at one with all-powerful Gaia, dear mother earth, because I can purchase Goddess Dressing at a discount? Was it just a temporary anecdote to the fast food banality of modern life, or a way to glamorize the “authenticity” of blue collar work, the kind that real people do for a living for minimum wage? (“Hey! I know how to work a conveyor belt and drive a Zamboni! I feel special!”) What did I think I could find at the coop? Friends? Community? A sense of Belonging or Purpose? What else was there, really, besides tofutti cuties and organic kale and lots of sinewy, scruffy guys who looked like they could just as easily be heroin addicts as they could be health nuts? (And in a place like Park Slope, couldn’t I find all three at any old grocery store?) Perhaps I needed therapy, not a coop membership.

But back to orientation. Finally, I made my way to the basement, where a group in bandanas was cutting brie (perhaps it was stilton or gouda?) on a large chopping table.

“Hello. Would you like some cheese?” asked a bearded gentleman.

“No. I’m looking for my tour group. This is my first time here. I’m worried they won’t let me join because I have a roommate, so we’re technically a household, and they said no sharing and – ”

“Is your roommate a member of the communist party?”

I could deal with the place. I found my group. I joined. My first shopping trip was overwhelming but productive. I had a really good mango from the coop for lunch. I bought gelato s’mores ice cream sandwiches for at least a dollar less than they sell them at Associated Foods.

So far, I haven’t encountered any signs of Fascism, and I haven’t broken the rules by sharing. Well, almost. For now, I’m on the kale train, but ask me again after I work my first shift.

I knew that by Wall Street, the occupiers were referring to the Lloyd Blankfeins of the financial world, not the Alizahs. But still. I write for one of the largest financial firms in the country, so by proxy, they’re also protesting me.  But I don’t need others to do that. If I wasn’t working, I might be protesting myself.

I was curious. I wanted to know if they were as disorganized as they were made out to be. Where were they sleeping? Who was feeding them? What were the police doing? Where did they go to the bathroom? (the Burger King across the street)

Turns out they were just standing there. The police, I mean. Leaning, talking amongst themselves. Some of the protesters were in little hives of activity. Others were doing nothing. I went up to the makeshift information desk and asked how the whole thing was set up.

These are the committees, explained a dude, pointing to a list that included media, arts & culture, food, childcare and topless dancing. He advised me to find a committee and get moving. The arts group was meeting in a few minutes.

In search of the arts & culture group, I came across the media group. A guy with British accent was explaining how they needed to become more systematic in getting their message out there. Who was going to be responsible for putting stuff up on the web? There was a bit about the live stream, but I couldn’t hear very well or see over the heads of people in front of me. A girl sat on the ground in the middle of the circle furiously typing on her Dell. It seemed productive.

Besides ratty mattress that made me worried about catching bedbugs secondhand and a few pockets of really bad b.o., the park was relatively clean. I even noticed two women sweeping around the edges.

It was hard to hear with so much noise. I learned later that they use a human mic system – people repeat what the speaker says, sort of like a game of telephone, so everyone can understand. I got tired of trying to decipher the group leader, so I walked over to the food table. Apples, oranges, and various snack type items were scattered on low tables in the center of the park. Someone was making lots of pb&j. Two girls, one wearing a headscarf, came up with rectangular aluminum trays full of what appeared to be homemade food. A mostly-empty can for donations sat on the table.

That’s when I met Chris, a journalist who works for a small financial publication. He wore a backpack and glasses and I though he should be in math club somewhere, and he was ready to answer questions before I even asked. People got the OWS group wrong because they were looking through the prism of a traditional protest, he explained. In the past, protesters started with a clear cause. Then they came up with demands, and only after they’d established some kind of platform did they attempt to harness the power of the people. Today you had general unrest, anger, and disillusionment, but they couldn’t be pegged to any one thing. It was bigger than protesting the war, the government, or even Wall Street, for that matter. But it needed to start somewhere, and so they started here.

****

I came back the next day. It felt a little more chaotic, slightly more carnival-esque, and I wondered if this was what Burning Man felt like, at least back in the day. I figured it had something to do with the possible Radiohead appearance that never happened.

I didn’t really have an agenda, so I wandered. I noticed half-shaved heads and shirtlessness. I signed a petition to ban the extraction of natural gas extraction by hydraulic fracturing known as fracking. I paused at a signs that read, “Do people care more about text messaging than paying attention to the world around them?”  and “Shit is fucked up and bullshit” and “Let the banks fail. We’ll build new ones.”

But it was not the smelly, scruffy or heavily pierced that really caught my attention.  It was the guys in khakis and button downs carrying messenger bags and briefcases who maybe worked in my building, or close to it, who wandered too. Did they expect to end up working on Wall Street? Maybe they wanted to paint colorful protest signs, too. Maybe they wanted to earn a living. Maybe they recognize their complicity in the corruption, too. Maybe they felt torn between inertia and responsibility and passion and frustration and the need to earn a living, as I did, too.

I went back to the info desk. Dan seemed like a leader, so I asked why he was the default info guy. He said he got the job of info desk guy because he sat at the info desk. All you need to know is that he made a short film about a guy who could play music by cracking his knuckles in different tonal and rhythmic patterns. We talked about a lot of things (Amusing Ourselves to Death, Citizens United, Obama’s campaign winning an advertising award). In his opinion (he emphasized that he doesn’t speak for everyone) the initial goals of the protest were simple:

1)Hold Wall Street accountable (Lloyd Blankfien et al go to jail)

2) Reinstate finance restrictions so a crisis can’t happen again (capital gains reforms)

3) Campaign finance reform (so candidates are elected, not bought)

All the while, people were taking pictures of two girls with a sign that read “Cats Against Groceries.” One was sitting in a box, mugging for the cameras and looking feline. Maybe because it was funny. Maybe because the girl scrunched in the box was pretty. Maybe because Cats Against Groceries is no less potent a phrase than We Are the 99%. Maybe we’re just tired of placating ourselves with our iphones (which unfortunately I can no longer do).

I should’ve stayed longer. But it had been a long week, and I was tired, and also lucky to be tired because I have a job. I wanted to finish the novel I’m reading and catch up on Demi and Ashton’s rumored split and cook  the acorn squash that was getting overly ripe on my counter. So they’ll continue to protest, I’ll continue to work in the financial district, and maybe even keep stopping by, if the spirit moves me.

I passed through Union Square shortly before this occurred. I weaved through a crowd chanting “the people, united, will never be divided” and headed into the nearby movie theater to see Drive. I’m not sure which type of violence I prefer: the gratuitous, almost cartoonish gore of the blockbuster, or the candid, made-for-YouTube street conflict below.

These days, I’m working near Wall Street, not protesting against it. I wonder: are there sides in all this, and if so, which one am I on?

The view from my window

Like many Americans, my consumption of 9/11 coverage has dramatically increased over the past week.  And also like many Americans, I still stare in disbelief at photos taken in the wake of the destruction. But these days I’ve been doing something I haven’t always been able to do. I look at the photos online, then I looked out the window of my office at Ground Zero. I looked back at the photos, and then again out the window, where an unconventional triptych emerges fifteen floors and ten years below me: one part pool of water, one part transformer-like metal structure, and one part gaping hole.

*****

I went to a trainer at the gym the other day who told me he used to be a stockbroker until 9/11. “Fuck this,” he told me he told himself, “I’m going to do something I love.” Now  he’s helping me tone my gluts.

There seems to be collective self-reflection going on as we approach the 10th anniversary of 9/11. As much as we don’t want to forget, inevitably, we do. The day has long since come and gone. It isn’t present. We don’t forget the event, but we forget the visceral sense of being shocked, afraid, uncertain, and also, alive. When I look out the window, I’m looking at history, but it doesn’t always feel that way. Sometimes it’s just scenery. But I don’t want it to be.

***

I went to a reading of Granta Magazine’s special 9/11 issue. The editor, John Freeman, spoke about how though the moment has come and gone, we’ll always searching for the precise instant when 9/11 began. Its roots are tangled and go farther back than I can remember.

So here we are 10 years later, obsessed with how we’ve changed. I no longer rush to turn on the television each morning just to make sure the world hasn’t blown up. I remember when airport security seemed like a legitimate way to prevent terrorism, and not another banal inconvenience or an excuse for groping. I remember when my mother insisted people were being nicer, that our collective grief had made us more sensitive and aware of the needs of those around us, and that people would stay that way. I remember a professor saying we’d never know the same sense of security again. Perhaps we were all right, at the time.

****

I recently did an interview with the poet Nick Flynn. His words are far wiser than mine. He reminds us that talking of tragedy head on doesn’t always capture the sense of loss. It’s in focusing on the lives, not the death, that we can connect with the enormity of tragedy. That’s why, on some level, we miss mourning and grief. Just when we thought we wanted to forget, suddenly we’re dying to remember. Or rather, to be reminded – to feel what we felt, because it’s the piercing pain and sadness that also makes us feel achingly alive.

But what do I know? I wasn’t there, I know no one who died. But I can’t help but think that if it were to happen today, I would be close enough to see people falling from the sky or crumbling beneath concrete.  So for a brief moment, I feel the past and present compress. From my window, I see the two empty pools that stand in the footprints of the towers. Then I wonder if I’m looking at the sky space where the falling man plunged through. I’ve tried to recreate it in my mind, but that’s the thing. I can’t. It’s all negative space.

Sure, the rest of the country has its hives of hipster/yuppie/artsy fartsiness. But Silverlake, Wicker Park and the rest don’t compare. It’s magical here. Here, women feed their babies with acidophilous-rich breast milk that tastes like tart frozen yogurt. Here, dads with sleeves of tattoos are not of the skeezy pervs on parole variety, but actually kind of hot even with salt and pepper sideburns. People sell their barely-worn couture on the stoops of their renovated brownstones, and hetero-normative love isn’t the norm.

I don’t know how everyone pays their absurd rent, since the entire ‘hood is walking dogs, jogging, pushing strollers and waiting in line to buy kimchi tacos at funky trucks all day. When I get on the train at Union, I swear I can spot the Midwestern transplants who actually need to go to work to live in yuppiestan.

There are a few things I’m not okay with.  A trendy hat shop opened up just down the street from me, which, a native Sloper pointed out, is a harbinger of Murry Hill-style blandness. (What’s next? North Face?) Now half the street is wearing faux fedoras. Sorry, my fellow Slopers, you little tattooed tofutti cuties, but you can’t pull off the Frank Sinatra rapper thing. Then there’s the pork place that’s opening – Pork Slope. Not funny. Since when did tripe become so trendy? I’m sure they’ll serve seitan-stuffed pig ears and bacon-wrapped matzoh balls or something equally ironic just to show how edgy they are. I’d stick with my kale, if only I could get an appointment for a two-hour orientation session so I could join the food co-op.

Truth be told, I didn’t plan on living here. During my apartment search, however, I realized that I didn’t want to live in an up and coming area with all the cool kids, aka gentrifiers.  I wanted already there. I think that makes me… how do I put this? Not young.

Also, have I mentioned that everyone’s womb is occupied here except mine? For an article, I walked into a baby store to see if I could find a few preggos. “10% discount for lesbian moms” hung behind the cash register. Being neither a lesbian or a mom, I felt slightly marginalized. Actually, I think it’s great. I sometimes wish I could have a cute little baby bump and a partner who likes to talk about feelings and ride my bike to prenatal yoga or take my baby to a bar. I guess I’ll work on crashing the food coop first.