Summer, Part II

Because every damn idiot in this city has to have their air conditioning turned up full blast for one or two lousy 90+ degree days, I and the other two million people in Queens have had our subway service severely curtailed because of potential power outages. Even as I write this, from out my open window I hear the familiar dripping whir of a hundred AC units, even though it's 74 freaking degrees.

You've just got to love New York. These are the same people who come out of An Inconvenient Truth shaking their heads about how shortsighted and dim those car-dependent Middle Americans must be.

Summer

Despite my longtime disdain for hot weather, I'm finding that I actually enjoy the stifling heat of New York summer. Here are some reasons why:

1. Sweat. It feels good and natural to sweat. I like being conscious of replacing my body's minerals - it feels urgent and important.

2. More sweat. Everybody is sweating. Even the uber-manicured beautiful people of Manhattan are sweating, filling me with a twin surge of compassion and smugness.

3. Hot pavement. I love the smell of hot pavement. It must hearken back to my childhood in the neighborhood of Cleveland that I, in the spirit of Old New York, refer to as NoHopA (North of Hopkins Airport).

4. Urban flowers. In the same vein, I love weeds urban flowers. Periwinkles, Queen Anne's lace, red clover sticking out of cracks in the sidewalk and twining around rusty chain link fences. Not exactly City Beautiful, but beautiful to me.

5. Weirdness. There's an endless variety of oddities you seem to see only in the summer: pigeons copulating, subway rats frolicking above ground, an old woman picking mulberries from a giant tree growing next to the freeway, a vinyl LP smashed into a million pieces all over the sidewalk.

6. No expectations. You know you won't be able to do as much when you get home because it's so hot, and can look forward to a long evening of being wrapped in a beach towel that's been in the freezer all day. I love justified laziness.

And finally....

7. Cicada and friends. I'm lucky to live by trees and grass, a rarity in New York. Trees and grass mean those lovely insect sounds at dusk, continuing long after the darkness settles in. It reminds me of sitting out on the porch in Ohio with friends, listening to Jim Blum.

Luckily there's Folk Alley.

In a City of Food, I Starve

You'd think that in the eight months I've lived in New York, I would've found a favorite restaurant by now. I haven't. Not even armed with my Zagat guide. Much to my surprise, I've discovered that I enjoy the fruits of my own culinary creativity much better. And, after all these years, I'm still in mourning for my dear, departed Clay Oven, squeezed out of its prime location on Lorain Road to make Fairview Park safe for another office building, and then from two subsequent less-than-prime spots in the general vicinity of Parma, and then ultimately out of existence.

I've tried to think of other restaurants I've loved, and came up with a handful, but with the possible exceptions of Luchita's, the Flying Fig, and Aladdin's, it was always more about the company - who I went there with - than the food.

For example, I've eaten at Tommy's with everyone I've ever been friends with, with every boyfriend I've ever had, and at every table in the formerly nonsmoking section.

I ate there with my high school boyfriend. I ate there with the guy I was cheating on him with. I ate breakfast there before embarking on a road trip to Mammoth Cave (the one time I ever ate in the abhorrent smoking section), during which it was decided that I should move to Montana. I ate there on my last trip to Coventry before moving to New Jersey (in the booth across from the grill, one of my least favorites. They forgot my fries).

But the only thing I've ordered there in the last 10 years is the veggie burger, because after a few years of experimenting, it was the only thing I ever found that rated above humdrum. Food? Meh. Mystical connections to my own past? Five stars!

I guess there are some things even Zagat can't rate.

Decluttering

I'm on a cleaning-decluttering jag, chiefly because a coworker (who happens to share my chair) has a bedbug infestation, and I have no desire to spend the summer itching, bagging up my clothes, paying vet bills for an itchy cat, and dealing with the management company here about who actually should pay for the exterminators. Best to be liberal with the dustbuster just in case.

I used to be really good at keeping my space free of unwanted junk, but somehow within the last two or three years it's just become easier to box up stuff when I move rather than really go through it. Not sure why, but in the absence of a worthier scapegoat, I'll just blame New Jersey.

Denial

I was waiting in line at the bank today and there was a CNN Report on about last year's bombings on the London Underground (I remember the day vividly, since my sister and brother-in-law lived in London at the time, and because I was an hour away from boarding a plane when I heard the news). The interviewer asked the London correspondent if he thought the attack had had any effect on the number of people riding the tube since then, which he dismissed with light indignance, saying, of course not -- in a city like London (as in New York) there simply is no other option if you want to get from point A to point B.

I've been asked similar questions when I come home. "Do you ride the subway?" "Aren't you scared?" The answers are yes, and no, respectively. Which surprises me, as anyone who knows me well is wearily familiar with all the imaginative demises I've (so far) wrongly predicted. T0 be honest, I'm more scared of a rabid sewer rat climbing up the fire escape and tearing through the window screen to have a rassle with my cat, or perhaps getting a fatal case of salmonella from a garden snail I've rescued from the hazards of the sidewalk.

For good or ill, living in New York just takes a certain amount of denial.

Placelessness

I've been quiet because I haven't been thinking much about Cleveland lately; it got to a point where despite all the good things going on, all I could see was bad. I'm not sure why this should happen all of a sudden, but it did.

I read about something like the Beck Center possibly moving to Crocker Park and think I've woken up on Backwards Day. I took acting lessons there when I was a kid, yoga classes there when I was an adult, and have seen countless performances there over the course of my life. The best thing about the Beck Center was the fact that I could walk there, I could take the bus there. There wasn't a huge parking lot out front with an invisible banner reading "traverse at your own risk." I guess I'm being cynical in using the past tense, given that it hasn't gone anywhere (yet). I know I'm deliberately overlooking this excerpt from the article:

Finding a new home in Westlake is an option. But Unger said another is to redevelop the current site into a mixed-use retail/restaurant/cultural complex where parents could drop off their children for arts classes and then shop or eat nearby.

But I don't trust Northeast Ohio anymore to hold onto its cultural institutions, keep them where they matter. I don't trust those cultural institutions to know why it matters that they stay where they are.

Who am I to say, anyway. Cleveland really isn't my place anymore. It belongs to the people who live there, and I don't. Most of the feelings I've got tied up in Cleveland are just nostalgia--brittle and crumbly and ultimately disappointing.

Half-Full, Empty, Half-Full, Empty

One thing I've learned living in New York is that you have to throw out the idea of the weekly grocery shopping trip. You can't load up your car with eight 24-packs of diet Pepsi and "family-size" jars of mayonnaise. I've had trouble letting go of this, not because of any attachment to either of those things, but rather my attachment to the take back your time philosophy. Walking down to the Whole Foods in Chelsea or going to the locally-owned natural foods store 3 subway stops away after work adds another hour to hour-and-a-half to my day, which means I get home between 7:30 and 8, and then I still have to make dinner. I have to do this 2-3 times a week, because I can only buy what I can comfortably carry onto a crowded subway, where I will likely need to stand for 45 minutes if I go to Whole Foods or 10 minutes if I go to the other store.

I can also zip down to the farmers market at Union Square on my lunchbreak once a week, though at this time of year it means that I come back to work dripping in sweat and laden with fresh vegetables and fruits which are usually high in quality but are suspiciously more expensive than vegetables and fruits found at farmers markets in the rest of the country (no way am I going to get 8 persimmons for $1 like at the West Side Market). Which suggests to me that New Yorkers don't know any better than to pay $6 for a quart of strawberries, but I'm cynical.

What I'm learning is that on the days I have to go shopping, I have to either be willing to buy prepared food that I can eat as soon as I get home (thereby bypassing dinner preparation) or I have to learn to plan ahead and essentially make two dinners the night before.

This would all be much easier if I lived within walking distance of a decent place to buy food, but I'm very particular about where I buy food, and the little urban supermarket within walking distance of us is of the variety where wilted lettuce is packaged on a styrofoam tray and wrapped in plastic to make it last longer, because apparently poor people don't eat fresh vegetables.

As a result, it seems that nearly all of my free time is spent thinking about food, particularly the permutations in which I need to transport it. Can I buy potatoes on this trip? Because I have to buy a cabbage, too, and I'm not sure if I can carry both, given that I also have to buy Cheerios. And I have to be hyper-conscious of what I already have on hand: oh good, I already have potatoes, I don't have to carry them -- that means I can buy two boxes of Cheerios this time and not have to buy them next week.

Seasoned New Yorkers will undoubtedly say "duh!" but I've recently made the breakthrough discovery that you have to use every opportunity out of your apartment to buy food. When you go see a movie in SoHo, buy tomatoes. When you go to the Met, buy salt. It just never ends.

And as such, it makes me anxious. It's something I couldn't get the hang of with reference work: it just doesn't stop, you never have a feeling of accomplishment. There was something nice about going to Zagara's, filling up and beholding a well-stocked refrigerator, and sitting back in front of the television knowing that I could cross "grocery shopping" off my to-do list for the week. Here, you have to live with your refrigerator in a constant, unsatisfying cycle of half-full, empty, half-full, empty. It's like having a chest cold you can't quite shake.