I was born and raised on the island of Manhattan. These two facts go a long way to describing my personality. I'm a city girl, plain and simple. I love going to the beach, I love travelling in Europe, I love walking in the wilderness and I love returning home to The City. As a child, my family spent the entire summer away. We'd leave the day after school let out and return with two days to spare for back-to-school shopping. On the way back from the airport, I would hang my head out of the cab window and inhale. I can still muster the heart-swelling excitement of hurdling back toward the skyscrapers. For 30 months of my college years I lived in upstate New York. But, other than that, I've never lived anywere else.
I have a husband and a daughter. They look like twins. I mean, it's quite possible I wasn't even in the room for her conception. He is my best friend and she is what would happen if my heart exploded and remolded itself back into the shape of a little girl.
When I met him, my husband was a Brooklyn-born, Jersey-raised punk who liked to read Hemingway and write in little notebooks. Everything about him was contradictory. This appealed to me, being an uptown girl taking refuge from the crazy materialism of my childhood crowd. He showed me a whole different New York. He knows every inch of the city and has taken me EVERYWHERE. We've had lobster in the Bronx and sailed a schooner around Manhattan. He was dubbed "the action man" by my girlfriends, dragging me to the Staten Island ferry for a midnight cruise or to the japanese infinity fountain at the Met. We've been everywhere in Brooklyn. We've seen the so-far-over-the-top Christmas decorations on the houses in Dyker Heights. We've seen the rambling mansions in historic Flatbush. We've looked at the ocean in the same glance as a ballgame in Coney Island. We've seen canoes in the Gowanus Canal and a rooster on the sidewalk of the Bronx. We swam in the ocean at Jacob Riis Park. Yup, I said swam. In the water. Off New York City.
New York is the media capital of the world and I've always worked in media. My first job was at a start-up magazine headquartered in a bright loft in Soho. It was the perfect place for a bunch of smart-ass 24-year-olds playing at publishing and spending investors' money. I moved on and up to the big boys in midtown. Expensed lunches, car services home and a flexible schedule seemed like job nirvana. My husband's chosen field was the rarified trade of ironworking. He is a member of one of the oldest, and most well-respected unions in the city. A profile on the cover of the the New York Times' City section heralded them, "Cowboys of the Sky." The moniker was appropriate. They are all, for the most part, highly-skilled, swinging dick, strong-as-ox, nearly-fearless, chops-busting hard-asses. And they are all thankful, even on the coldest and hottest days, that they get to do what they do.
August 15, 2003 was the day that our lives changed forever. It was the day after the multi-state blackout. It was the day I was exactly 16 weeks pregnant. It was the day my husband was almost killed doing the work he loved.
He will never be an ironworker again. Countless doctors have said so. He will never again be physically able to lift a 250lb keg of bolts. He will never free-climb a 30 foot column to guide a ton of steel into place. He will never stand at the top of the city and laugh at the jokers behind computer screens in hermetically sealed offices. Now, after more than two years of rehabilitation and soul-searching, my husband has found new career aspirations. He will learn to design boats. And, so we have come to Maine.
The last two years have been a series of tests for both of us. A test of physical capabilities, a test of marriage vows, a test of personal strength. But this, this moving to Maine, this is a test for me. I've never even taken a chance this big for myself, much less offered up my life to the desires of another person. So much of who I am is wrapped up in that city. Will I make it up here? Can I survive so far from my comfort zone? Will I take the fact of my husband's happiness and the increased opportunities for my daughter and meld them into a sustainable existence for myself? Or, best of all, will I thrive? Will I love the quiet, the pace, the people? Herein lies the answer: A blog to save my sanity, be my chronicle, my therapist, my touchstone.
