Category Archives: Southern Re-Immersion

What's in a Name

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A couple of Sundays ago The Husband and I attended a hockey game, my first, that pitted the Atlanta Thrashers against the New York Islanders.  TH is already learning that there is a price to pay for watching sports in my presence, and that price is explaining to me the rules of each sport.  Girly girl that I am, athletic events have a history of being a great reason to wear a new outfit…or go to a bar…but when it comes to what’s actually happening on the field (rink, court) I could not be more clueless.  And when it comes to the decidedly non-Southern sport of hockey, my knowledge is even less than nominal.  Down to which team is which, so I asked TH, as I looked at the hulks on ice, the question “Which one are we?”  Then I thought about the meta-ness of that inquiry, considering the two teams playing.  The city where we met and fell in love, and the city where we live our married life.  Which one are we?

I miss New York this time of year.  (Ask me again how I feel in February.)  I only attended the Rockefeller Center tree lighting my first year as a resident (and by “attended” I mean emerged from the subway and tried to maneuver through a crowd of tourists, policemen, and barricades in freezing temperatures before throwing up my hands and heading back underground and uptown toward the safety of my warm apartment).  But when I watched the special this week, I still felt that someone in the crowd was stealing my place.  When I watch Saturday Night Live (nope, never saw that in person either), I remember the last episode that TH and I watched as NYC citizens, from the couch in his apartment, and how I wildly suggested we try to track down their after-party and crash it (I had, possibly, been overserved earlier at dinner).  We did no such thing, but I did make a note to myself in that moment to remember what it felt like to watch Weekend Update and know that it was occurring a few blocks from where I sat.  To remember that for all the brokenness it took to get me there, I spent a pretty damn cool five years in the best city on earth.  And this week, when MAK posted pictures of her recent Manhattan visit, nostalgia swept over me.  I felt like an overbearing matriarch as I asked her for details and stopped just short of making sure she remembered to thank New York’s mom for letting her stay.

Yeah, I miss it.  But when I’m most honest with myself, I know I miss the way New York made me feel, that I miss being one of its am-badass-adors to the South.  I miss relating Beyonce and Jay-Z sightings, miss knowing what color the Empire State Building is each day and why, miss being included in limited release for movies (really, Atlanta?  No showings of The King’s Speech ANYWHERE?).  I miss being a New Yorker.

Now I am other things: an aunt, a homeowner, a wife.  Dr. Phillips, when I remember (I’ve unintentionally alternated between old and new names and left some confused patients in my dental wake).

The Sis and I may not be athletes, but we enjoy the sport of derision and we’re pretty good at it.  The objects of our attention lately have been the numerous neighborhoods surrounding my office, which is near her house.  Neighborhoods with names like Kensington and Fallkirk Pointe (don’t forget that E on the end! WTF?) and Arthur’s Vineyard (there’s no wine.  I checked.  False advertising!). And don’t forget Windsor Trace or The Parc at Lost Forrest (are you kidding me with this spelling?!).  Some of the most pretentious, unnecessary use of random titles I’ve ever heard.  TH and I were pleased not to end up with our first house choice for many reasons, not the least of would be telling people we lived in North Wellington.  Isn’t that a way to serve beef?  And do subdivisions need fancy names to feel good about themselves?  We’re in the South, where camouflage is a fashion choice.  It’s like these neighborhoods are wearing pearls and high heels to the gym.

The names I have now are not as temporary as so many I’ve had over the years, and I’m beginning to settle into them.  I’m so thankful to be out of that decade that involved a daily identity crisis, and the bad decisions made as I searched for who I was.  I’m so thankful that time was a thruway for me, and not where I ended up.  I’m so thankful that I didn’t wait for my new last name to be my new identity, but that I found out who I belonged to before I met my match and can now love him better because I know where my worth ultimately lies.

And I’m thankful that when it comes down to that “which one are we?” question, I don’t have to figure out which team belongs to each color.  I can secretly cheer for both.

Appetite for Destruction

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Last Wednesday, a day that had been named by our contractor as a Potential Start Date, The Husband and I drove over to the new house, fingers and toes crossed in the hope that we would see something–anything–that would show us some work had begun.  Measurements on the walls, big X’s on doors, even a toilet seat left up, for the love of God.  But when we walked inside, the still air of our intact (damn!) house greeted us and we reset our Hope Dials to Monday. Today.  Today will be, must be, the day they start to tear shit up.

It feels strange, this yearning for the elements of destruction: dust-covered floors, holes in walls and ceilings, floors ripped up, countertops demolished.  As self-appointed World Representative for Peace and Order and Clean Surfaces in the Home, I never find myself praying for men to be attacking mine with sledgehammers.  I remember last October when I walked into my New York apartment after a week spent in TH’s homeland of California, a week full of wineries and beachfronts.  I opened the door to my shoebox and stepped into the wreckage that my roommate had called to warn me about days earlier: an inch-thick layer of dust, plastic taped half-ass and falling off to reveal plumbing in the ceiling, bootprints on formerly-shining hardwood.  I had little long-term emotional, and zero long-term financial, investment in that property, so any effort at improving it was only a disruption of my orderly existence. But this new house…this is my long-term landing pad found after years of hoping and waiting and wandering; this is the gift of a plan gone right.  And if someone does not start tearing it up soon I will scream.

Sometimes I’m shocked I haven’t gone over there with a wrecking ball myself. After all, that’s how I have (unwittingly but for hindsight) approached much of my life.  For so long, I felt that my singlehood was an aberration, a curse, a punishment from a God who was not playing fair.  I felt like Toby on The Office, entering the church and asking, “Why you always gotta be so mean to me?”  Had I settled down into the makeshift plan I had created for myself, I would never have felt the drive to leave the South and move to New York, would never have endured the coldest winters and worst dates, would never have made the best friends.  I would never have said “I do” underneath a rainbow on my favorite beach, would never have learned how damaging it is to take myself so seriously, would never have learned about how many forms love can take.  I would never have pissed off my friends who thought I was being too picky when I maintained disinterest in the guys with whom they fixed me up.  I would have been too busy maintaining an image to sit behind a computer screen and write about who I really am.

What I can only see now, looking backward, is that every time I railed against the unraveling of my own plan I was fighting the unfolding of a better one.  I would gladly, blindly have taken a sledgehammer to the life I was heading toward, not knowing all that awaited me if I would just believe.

The faith I embraced as a child had to be transformed, uncomfortably, to become real–to know its object was not created in my image.  To know that love and hope were not as small as the outline I gave them.  To trust that there was a life for me that includes multiple places to call “home” in a nationwide radius and a partner with a Yankee accent.  To find that life is not a fairy tale, which is a blessing because I’ve never heard a version of Cinderella in which she laughs like a hyena.  To discover a love that is patient enough to bear my wrecking balls in the form of dustbusters and irritability and, at the end of the day, still be willing to explain the rules of football to me.

To believe that Not Now doesn’t mean Never.

King of Everything

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Growing up, I spent a lot of time in the land of indecision, waiting for other people to tell me which choice was best. When I initially crossed over into adulthood (the timing on this event is vague), my indecisiveness remained ingrained in my personality.  I could often be spotted in front of windows or counters or catalogs staring blankly ahead, waiting for inspiration to strike.  (This “inspiration” was another code name for that most popular of Christian catchphrases,”God’s will”, which I used to believe was only delivered in the black-and-white, written-in-stone, no-two-ways-about-it version that Moses received.)  As adulthood wore on, I realized that my indecisiveness had left a permanent tattoo on my back that read, “Please tell me what to do.”  And so I was the recipient of constant unsolicited advice, which I took from others with thanks as Gospel truth until one day I woke up and realized I was so damn sick and tired of other people always telling me what to do.  The pendulum swung to the other extreme, and I embraced decisiveness as a virtue alongside godliness and cleanliness.  And began to hate hate HATE the phenomenon of unsolicited advice, which persisted in spite of my new big-girl decision-making ways.

Now that I’m growing enough to know that God’s plan doesn’t come on one-size-fits-all mass-generated stone tablets, and that the intention behind others’ advice is more about helpfulness than judgment (USUALLY), I’m trying to be more patient in the face of pithy comments.  But…I’m not to the point where I’m beyond making Sara Bareilles’ song “King of Anything” my personal anthem:

All my life I’ve tried

To make everybody happy while I

Just hurt and hide waitin’ for someone to tell me

It’s my turn to decide

Who cares if you disagree, you are not me

Who made you king of anything?

So you dare tell me who to be

Who died, and made you king of anything?

Statements from others that begin with “You should” are still personal anathema to me and in the future may very well be answered with my iPod being held up to the offender with this song played full-blast.  I’m not THAT grown, y’all.  But along with my developed annoyance to such an infraction is the awareness that I have been guilty of the offense myself…with none other than the stone-tablet artist Himself. Alongside my childhood, teenage, and partial adulthood indecisiveness about immediate matters was the counter-intuitively paired set of plans I made about my future.  I knew what I wanted to be when I grew up and by what date I wanted those letters to appear behind my name.  I knew the age at which I wanted to be married (and oftentimes, to whom–ugh).  I was perpetually prepared with an answer to the question “Where do you see yourself in ten years?” even if I didn’t have an answer for the same question adjusted to a five-minute timeline.

As you all know by now, that plan of mine went exactly where it belonged, which was to hell in a handbasket.

I thought about all this last night as I hovered over the counter in The Sis’s kitchen, engaging in one of my favorite pastimes–wiping away crumbs.  We were winding down a marathon eight-hour period spent with family, and were all still alive (monumental!).  The Mom and Dad and dogs had left; The Sis was upstairs feeding The Niece; The Husband and The Bro-in-Law were in the family room watching and narrating football.  I thought about all the years I had ached for this sense of family and, more intensely, this sense of belonging.  Because we all know that family doesn’t necessarily provide that, depending on what yours looks like. And we all know how deeply the current of desire to be a part of a paired-off unit runs in our society and our souls.  We are nothing short of built for it.  I tried to make it happen for so much of my life, handing my suggestions to God in a “You should” format and expecting to get results as if He was more Sugar Daddy than Father.  And not for one second, much to my then-chagrin and now-inexpressible gratitude, did He cave to my decisiveness.  I couldn’t see what lay ahead–that dent in the couch and crook in the arm where I belonged, that person who would be family member and best friend and perfect match all in one, and all in due time (right, YM?).  As I heard footsteps and baby coos descend the stairs, and familiar voices lamenting Fantasy Football picks, and The Mom tell me this morning how much she loved seeing me in The Husband’s arms on the couch (with the addendum Finally! not spoken but understood), I felt the meaning of thanksgiving descend upon my heart.  Not to mention a plan–the best one– finally coming together.


Ties that Bind…and Gag

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Last weekend two branches of the family tree descended on The Sis’s house when The Mom and Dad and my sister’s in-laws (a.k.a. my Yankee ‘rents) came to visit the Blessed Child and witness her introduction to Santa Claus.  Or Phipps Plaza’s version of him, anyway.  The Niece donned her red Christmas jumper and her white tights that were a little tight around the waist, a little loose around the feet…well here, I’ll just show you:

The Husband and I met the cavalcade in the center of the mall for the preordained fifteen-minute session and watched as The Niece initially freaked, then grew comfortable with the jolly old man who had just come back from his break (The Husband and I were so hoping we would have seen him on our way in, sitting at a bar with a glass of bourbon and muttering about “those damn kids”).

The family I had in New York didn’t have my blood, but they might as well have for all the closeness and life we shared.  They consisted of the Yankee ‘rents, who were always ready to collect me at the Hamilton N.J. train station and whisk me back to their land of home cooking and champagne.  Then there were my girlfriends, with whom I shared trips to Italy and the Jersey Shore when we weren’t leaving our mark all over Manhattan.  And finally came the BF-turned-Husband, who ended up being my true home in the city.  Add to these individuals all the communities of which I was a part, most notably that of an eclectic group of believers who met at Hunter College every Sunday, and you had a girl who felt surrounded by family and rooted in a sense of belonging–one thousand miles from “home.”

Our life in Atlanta is well-defined by family, with the sibling branches of both of ours residing here and The Mom and Dad not too far (but far enough…love y’all!) away.  On the days I worked at NYU in the city, I would walk five blocks home for lunch in an empty apartment (unless strange, unexplained workmen and clouds of dust happened to be there).  These days I’m not walking anywhere for lunch, but a ten-minute drive gets me from my office to Casa Sis, where for the first six weeks of The Niece’s life I was able to monitor her growth daily. Now I have to settle for an attention-starved dachshund (well here, I’ll just show you)

and a sleep-deprived new mommy who is working from home while her daughter thrives at daycare.  Making my way in the world took everything I had; now I want to go where everybody knows my name.

But there’s not a lot of room for revision with your family: they’ve seen you at your highs and, most memorably (and oft-retold) your lowest lows.  So as backup, I’ve been reconnecting with Friends from Years Gone By and learning how we’ve all changed after some time apart.  Whether it’s lunch in midtown or wine in Brookhaven (after getting lost on Peachtree and crying into my steering wheel–thanks for waiting, KP and go to hell, GPS lady) I’ve been blessed to reconnect with people who knew me When…and When is most definitely and thankfully many miles removed from Now.  And Now that I’m not a walker in NYC but a driver in Atlanta, I have a rearview mirror that shows me how far I’ve come…and a community of all types of family who remind me that everything old is new again–with a little redemption thrown in.

Now if only the Yankee ‘rents would move here too…we could always use more champagne.

Perfectly Imperfect

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This weekend, we walked through our new house with a contractor–the fifth one we’ve brought in–and explained our vision for the master bath and kitchen. And for the fifth time, we heard a response that started off by pointing out everything that’s wrong with our vision.  This time, we even got a follow-up email that suggested a different vision, a 180-degree twisting of what we had asked for.  Not because what we had asked for was impossible or unreasonable, but because the contractor had a different idea of what to do with our space.  Funny, though, that she’s not the one paying for this project or the one who will live out her days and years in it.  Funny…

This remodeling venture and its for-the-birds nature has led to some pretty severe flashbacks; no, not from my time in ‘Nam, but to a period in my life that I call dental school.  I had no idea of what I was getting into when they called to tell me I was accepted as a member of the University of Alabama School of Dentistry Class of 2003.  All I knew was that in four years I would be called “Doctor” without having to go to medical school.  And that maybe I’d find a husband.  Cut to me sitting in a lab for the afternoon with a canister of blue wax, an open flame, and a pile of crap on a stick that was supposed to look like a molar.  Who the hell decided it was a good idea to let me in here? thought the girl who was used to being at the top of her class.  I would stand in line with the other students, poop in hand, and wait for my turn with the professor who would tell me everything that was wrong with my tooth.  Then, list of failures in hand, I would return to my seat for another round of Wax It Up.

I was beyond insecure already.  This method of learning did not help.

Flash-forward to present day, where I find myself engaging in a game called Find the Literary Agent: a self-imposed period of seeking and not finding, knocking and the door not yet being opened unto me.  Which is what they say happens to everyone who gets involved in this process, but everyone is not me and hearing no, however nicely it’s put, is never fun.  Even when it comes with compliments and versions of “It’s not you, it’s me” breakup lines.  But I’ll tell you one thing: the fact that there has been no weeping/gnashing of teeth/bad choices of men and drinks is a testament to the distance I’ve traveled in eleven years.  One thousand eight hundred fifty-three miles along U.S. highways; countless miles along roads of redemption.

There is an Indian folktale about a water bearer who traveled from the river to his master’s house daily, a rod held on the back of his neck with a pot suspended from either side.  One pot was perfectly whole; the other sported a serious crack. By the time these pots reached the house each day, the cracked one was only halfway full.  Broken Pot began to feel badly about himself (pots have feelings too) and expressed his sense of inadequacy to the water bearer, who responded by taking the pot on a tour of their daily path.  “Notice a difference between the two sides of the path?” he asked the pot, who noticed that Perfect Pot’s side was barren while his own side, having been provided with water from the crack, was blanketed with the same flowers that decorated the master’s table every day.

The greatest gift I’ve received from grace is knowing how loved I am, no matter what.  The second greatest gift I’ve received is knowing how broken I am, and that there’s nothing I can do to fix it.  In the face of such knowledge, all my attempts at covering up my flaws and pretending to be something I’m not become not only unnecessary but ridiculous.  And just like that, I am freed.  Freed to have a vision for our home that is waiting for the right contractor.  Freed to have a story to tell that is waiting for the right agent.  Like the $20-on-sale purse I bought two months ago whose handle just broke and is now bound with super glue, I am held most tightly in the spots where I have been broken–that is where the healing and stories happen; that is where the flowers grow.

Closing Costs (Campsites 2.0)

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At 9 am on Friday morning (okay, it was more like 9:10 and we were the last ones there, whatever), The Husband and I sat on one side of a large oak table beside our real estate agent and mortgage broker.  On the other side were the (about-to-be) previous owner of our (about-to-be) house and his agent.  At the head of the table was an attorney I’ll probably never see again, and in front of each chair sat a stack of paperwork to be reviewed by all parties and signed by some of us. Clearly, I was doing that thing where I act like I know exactly what’s going on as the grown-ups talk business and I secretly wonder how soon is too soon to reach into the bowl of Halloween candy on the table.

After an hour and a half of lawyer-speak and check-passing and John Hancock-ing, The Husband and I owned our first home.  And though I’ve experienced a cross-country move, my wedding, and the birth of my niece all since May, this was the first event of the year that brought tears to my eyes.

Being a girl with no shortage of emotional reserves (do not even MENTION the movie Harry and the Hendersons to me unless you’ve brought a box of kleenex and and industrial-size bottle of Afrin), I’ve kept waiting for the waterworks I was sure this year’s life-changing events would bring.  But instead, as each event has arrived, I’ve been gripped by joy and relief instead of tears.  As the skyline of New York faded into the green hills of Atlanta from my plane window, all I could think about was how thankful I was to have smuggled my best friend out of there with me.  When my wedding day arrived, all I could think about before walking down the aisle was how thankful I was to be hangover-free, rain-free, jilt-free, and wedding-planning-free.  And when my niece popped into the world, all I could think about was the healthy baby in my arms, the love that enveloped her, and the fact that I was not responsible for keeping her alive.  Joy…and relief.

Then came the search for a house for The Husband and me, the place where we would arrange furniture and unload wedding gifts and train a dog and, God willing, keep our kids alive.  And when we found the house, we focused on what we would do to improve it.  And it was all well and good and fun and theoretical–then we signed the dotted line and it became real. And taking on an inanimate pile of wood and bricks left a lump in my throat.  What the hell is that?

After a few days of thinking about it, I’ve had some insight into what the hell that is.  There is the pressure that accompanies being the people with whom the buck stops: this isn’t one of the many places I’ve lived before, where I held out my hand to pass a key and receive a security deposit reimbursement upon leaving. The daily upkeep and long-range condition of this house depend on us, not some management company.  We are financially and physically responsible for its well-being.  And if our Christmas decorations suck, that’s our reputation on the line.

Then there is the pressure that comes with buying a house that is too big for just us.  A house with four bedrooms, two of which remain unclaimed by us or guests, two that are screaming (or maybe that’s just The Mom’s voice I hear) for cribs and diapers and baby smell.  Not to mention the other rooms waiting to be populated by pieces of furniture, preferably not found on a curb in Murray Hill or purchased off Craigslist from a guy named Shasta who lives in a twelfth-floor Brooklyn walkup.  Buying this house is either a tempting of fate or, if you’re like me and fate has a personality and starts with a capital G, a huge act of faith.

But I realize that the emotion behind this purchase is not really about its occasional similarity to a pressure cooker.  As I signed the paper that put me on the deed to the house, I glanced over at The Husband and the slightly larger stack of papers to which he was adding his name.  And then at the leather-bound notebook he had brought along that bore the proof of years of work on our behalf.  Back when I was balancing on Cloud Nine and practicing the look of my name next to his and picturing my perfect wedding dress, he was saving and calculating and planning for our future.  He was putting money aside as I struggled to buy gum and worried about my next paycheck.  The home we have today is the fruit of his labor and his belief in our future.  All of which leads me to this: for all the planning and work and worrying I’ve done in my life, not one second of it secured my greatest treasures–they had to be received as gifts.

On Friday night, we opened a bottle of champagne at our Party for Two and sat in front of our fireplace on our camp chairs–the chairs that we took up to a rooftop in Manhattan where he proposed; the chairs that were our only furniture for our last weekend in the city as the rest of our stuff traveled across the country toward our future.  We sat in our home and toasted it, and I breathed a prayer of thanks for a life full of acts of faith taken on my behalf.

A Place for Us

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Last Wednesday, the rain poured outside as I stood inside my closet (a feat that would have required some serious contortionist stunts back in NYC) and stared at my clothes.  I was going to lunch with The Sis and AV, a friend from high school whose car I wrecked way back when, and their kids.  My first Ladies Lunch in my new hometown.  In New York, the girls and I didn’t “lunch” so much as we rolled out of our beds and stumbled to the brunch spot on the corner to begin weekend recaps.  But now I live in the grown-up land of chicken salad and driving and, counter-intuitively, highchairs.  And my Manhattan uniform of torn jeans and sole-ripped flat boots didn’t seem fancy enough for a midday outing in downtown Roswell.  So I picked out some leggings and a new shirt while, a few miles away, The Niece threw on her dressiest onesie–the white one with the Peter Pan collar–and I pulled out into the gray wet day.

Instead of a table littered with hangovers and mimosas and french fries, we talked over squealing babies and scattered goldfish and Dora the Explorer playing on an iPhone.  This is where and who I am now, and I love it–but it does take some getting used to.  Like the windshield wipers on my car whose controls confound me, I am working on finding my rhythm as it transitions from feet-pounding-Manhattan-pavement staccato to the slower but steadier pace of suburbia: strollers on sidewalks and feet against brakes.

And in an attempt to find that rhythm in places other than couch cushions, I’m reconnecting with friends from my Pre-New York days (thank God Facebook came around in that interim and saved me from having to put forth real effort). Messages have been exchanged and plans made with friends from all stages and locations of my life.  My friends in New York had to be searched out among the masses and uncovered; now I’m working on friends who will be rediscovered. Less getting-to-know-you and more what-have-you-been-up-to.  Along with the surprise of rediscovered friendships is the remaking and deepening of expected roles: my Writing (and Rejection and Cancer and Life) Support Group includes my best friend from tenth grade, my California Pizza Kitchen and Tim Keller Fan Club Life Partner from NYC, and a family member who was first a friend, then a sister-in-law.

And it’s all made me realize that life is so much more about the uncovering and discovering than any creating on my part.  In my old life, I spent so much time and effort building the identity I thought I should have that in my two years prior to New York, I realized that I had no idea who I was.  Cue the wrecking ball. The cracks came to light in Birmingham, the demolition happened soon after, and the real stuff came through during my five years’ exile on the Island.  The unmaking of what I had made was painful…until the arrival of the recovery process.  And that involved more digging than building, more waiting than forcing.

On Saturday The Husband and I tried out the wine bar we recently discovered in our new neighborhood.  We had to drive there instead of walk, and they didn’t have the prosciutto and pineapple pizza that we loved back at Cavatappo on 3rd Avenue and 26th Street.  But they had a spot for us, and it was a great place to sit and relax and envision our completed house and hope for more like-minded couple friends with whom we can frequent wine bars.  And just like the ideas for the blog entries I labor upon twice a week, the elements of this life of ours are reliably materializing before our eyes: already there, and waiting for us to open our eyes and see our place among them.

Falling Up

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It took moving to New York for me to appreciate the season of fall.  (Let’s be honest, it took moving to New York for me to appreciate a LOT of things.)  Being surrounded by concrete and skyscrapers can really make a golden tree pop–and Central Park, in all its autumnal glory, is a sight to behold.  Every shade on the red-orange spectrum is represented, including some I had never known to exist.  Maybe I just wasn’t looking before, but I grew to love fall by living in New York.

As the temperatures in Atlanta have dropped, so have the leaves, and I’ve appreciated the golden hues here too.  But more than any other season, fall and its changes remind me of life in the city.  I think back to what I was doing this time last year, besides working on the Halloween costume: negotiating a respectable salary; wondering if the BF had had the conversation with The Dad yet; meeting AC for weekly dinners at our 30th and Park California Pizza Kitchen outpost; listening to Tim Keller live every Sunday night; counting pennies to pay for toilet paper.  Saying goodbye to that list was welcome in spots and sad in others.

And it leads to a reflection on where I am now: negotiating a respectable salary; receiving an email from The Dad containing a picture of Billy Bob Thornton in Sling Blade with The Husband’s name under it (TH received the email too; this is how my family shows love.  When we got it, I told TH, “He must really like you.”); spending lunch breaks holding my niece as she spits up and farts on me (and no one has ever done so more beautifully); listening to our new pastor on Sunday mornings, then Tim in the car on the way to work on Mondays.

This time last year, I was getting eviction notices from a corrupt management company; this year we are buying a house and planning a project that will both tear it apart and make it our home.  I’m spending Saturdays with The Husband going to tile warehouses and granite wholesalers and design showrooms and actually having fun instead of breaking out in hives like I predicted.  For a time in my life (i.e., the majority of the last five years), I thought I might be a perpetual renter and poop-dodger in the city that never sleeps.  And I had made a sort of peace with that: living at the poverty line (post-taxes) but affording nosebleed seats to the New York City Ballet; smashed like a sardine into an overcrowded can of people but finding reliable solitude on runs around the north end of Central Park; having no backyard but spreading a towel on my fire escape and watching the world go by.

I miss the city, and I let myself miss it.  Because acknowledging the sadness of loss doesn’t take away from where I am now and with whom I am sharing that Now.  It means my heart is big enough for both Then and Now, There and Here.  Things change: I used to hate fall because it meant another nine months of studying had just begun; now it shines with hope and possibility, even as old things fall away. For the rest of my life, whenever I see a tree gleaming with gold in the autumn sun, I will think first of New York, where so many of the gifts I’ve received in my life were revealed.  Including the biggest: a man, bearing no resemblance to Billy Bob Thornton, who made leaving the city a beginning instead of an ending.

So Happy Together

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I bought The Husband a bottle of Prosecco to help kick off his birthday festivities last week (this may have been more of a gift to myself…) and it speaks to where we are in our lives that as of Sunday, the bottle remained unfinished. Once upon a time I wouldn’t let a night out go by without that bottle being drained.  Alas, we are settled and such, and Sunday evening he suggested that we take the still-bubbly remainder and some snacks down to our soon-to-be-former apartment complex’s pool.

With our picnic all set up, we started talking about Halloween.  In New York, October 31st is one of the biggest celebrations of the year: it is fall’s St. Patrick’s Day.  City-dwellers are always looking for a reason to get knee-walking blitzed.  Last year at this time I was hitting the trains and sidewalks in search of the accessories our costumes required.  It was our first Halloween together (ah, the romance) and we were accordingly going with a couples theme.  Because we wanted to, and because when you are a couple surrounded by single friends, you get kicked out of their group costume, if not goodwill.  We had decided to dress up as Coach Eric and Principal Tami Taylor from Friday Night Lights (arguably one of the best shows on television and a couple upon whom I wouldn’t mind modeling our relationship).  I scoured the city for just the right shade of royal blue and eventually ended up paying way too much for a Dillon Panthers anorak at the NBC store, a clothing item that remains in our closet because I refuse to toss it out after only one wear.  Which means that one day, The Husband will arrive at a Little League game inexplicably rooting for the nonexistent Panthers, much to the dismay of our child and the satisfaction of my budget-mindedness.

Anyway, we wore our high-priced costume out on Halloween night to the requisite open-bar party and, in a show of coupledom, snuck out before midnight to watch Saturday Night Live from the couch.  But the four hours of dress-up were worth it because Halloween was such an event.  Complete with a week’s lead-in, like a trip to Blood Manor (New York’s scariest haunted house, so they say) and near-sugar-coma amounts of candy corn ingestion.  So as we sat by our pool last week discussing Halloween plans, we had a precedent set and a tradition to honor.  We eschewed the costumes, because apparently only children do that around here, but we decided to pick a haunted house to visit.  And invite our friends.  Which led to a moment of awkward silence and the question, Who are our friends again? Here in Atlanta, they are mostly family.  And with a bunch of ankle-biters and poop machines filling their respective homes, none of them would likely be up for handing their weekly salaries over to a baby-sitter to spend an hour getting poked by the bogeyman.

Life is different here.

The thing is, we’ve never had a problem with it being Just Us.  Due to the combined factors of being both introverts and each other’s favorite person, The Husband and I are content to while the hours away doing everything or nothing together.  In the city, where singles and couples are smashed together in daily life, forced to frequent the same sidewalks and bars due to the lack of segregation common to suburban life, our behavior was more blatantly anomalous.  There was a forced coexistence with non-coupled people in our former life, so that we always had the option to socialize (even if, over their whispered disapproval, we chose not to take it).  But here in our gated-community-life, connecting with others is trickier.  It requires effort, which is to say, an upheaval from the couch and an actual trip in a car.  And now, there are not so many drinks at a bar as there are BBQ sundaes at a corn maze.  There’s less wild partying and throwing up, more funky diapers and spitting up.  Less paying for cabs, more paying for sitters.  We’re in that holding room reserved for people who are too coupled off to go out in Buckhead, but not saddled down with enough kids (that is to say, at least one) to hang out in playgroups.  We don’t even have a puppy yet, for crying out loud–if we showed up at the dog park we would just look creepy.

I guess you could say it’s still a transitional period.

So while we’re both loving being with family and pathetically keeping eyes peeled for friends who might want to go to the neighborhood wine bar we just discovered, we still spend a lot of time on the couch, talking about getting more connected with our new community.  And we’ve made some headway: The Husband bravely grabbed lunch last week with our new pastor (a remarkable show of being sociable, for which I gave him a gold star even as I breathed a sigh of relief that I didn’t have to go).  But we’re still happiest when it’s just the two of us.  As reflected in the Evite I sent out yesterday, to a housewarming party at our new non-apartment-numbered address on our closing day in two weeks.  So what if the guest list included only two people?  They’re our favorites, and we know they’ll both show up.  With Prosecco.

Home Fires

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Sometimes I wonder exactly what percentage of the time I spend doing stuff I’ll have to confess or apologize for later.  I have a feeling I run on about a 20% efficiency rate, which is even lower than the HVAC system we just had inspected in our new house (Ed. note: contract pending).

Take yesterday, when I ran by said house to meet The Husband, who was there for the entire inspection so I wouldn’t have to be (he knows these things make me bored at best, panicky at worst).  After fifteen minutes, I had reached my fill of someone pointing out all of our new possession’s flaws–I got enough of that in dental school–and signed some papers brought by the realtor so that I could hightail it back to the couch, my waiting Bible, and a cup of coffee.  As the last drop of caffeinated goodness fell into my Crate and Barrel wedding registry mug, the phone rang.  It was The Husband, calling to tell me that I hadn’t signed all the paperwork and would need to go back to the house to do so.  Frustrated with him (for no reason), real estate, and ultimately myself, I hung up the phone as violently as one can a touch screen (finger jab = pain) and slammed the only thing I could, which was my new cup of coffee.  On my Bible.  Well if that isn’t a metaphor, I thought, brown liquid dripping onto leather-bound wisdom.  (All our best efforts are like…)  My only accomplishment before noon: being a gigantic ass.

I went to see The Sis and The Niece later, and the baby smell was wearing off after I left their house and was merging onto GA 400.  Which must explain why, as a car cut in front of me and nearly rammed the front driver’s side (MY SECTION!!!), I yelled out a string of insults at the driver.  Most of them really weren’t fair, considering I don’t know his mother, but for a few moments, the inside of my car blasted with the decibels of my own self-righteousness.  I gave the guy a sarcastic thumbs-up as I passed him, an improvement over the digit I normally use on such occasions, and drove on.  I thought about how The Sis is starting to take The Niece out on excursions in the car now (she LOVES Target) and how much angrier I will be when I have a child in the car and get cut off.  As in, angrier than now, which is both hard to imagine and threatening to my blood pressure.  Serenity now, I thought.  NOW, dammit! Meanwhile, my Bible lay at home in the remains of brown stickiness, unopened for the day.  Time for an on-site tutorial.  Nicole Nordeman’s voice was the next to pop up from my iPod playlist (in between DMX and R.E.M., mind you), and as she sang about how deep the Father’s love is for me, my lead foot eased off the pedal and my heart began to slowly unwind from its mortal coil.  Who I am in traffic is not the truest thing about me, thank God.  I headed home.

I may have a lot of work to do on myself, but not nearly as much as has been done on my behalf.  Besides, as Kanye West might say, “I’m trying to right my wrongs, but it’s funny them same songs helped me write this [blog].”  Dear Kanye: you may have even me beat in the jerk category, but you just nailed grace.

I never need an excuse to be selfish, but I do think that our impending move, demolition-construction project, and their inevitable unsettledness has me on an especially thin edge right now.  And anxiety has a way of tinting our view so that we see greener grasses in the wrong places.  Like New York, where grass barely grows outside of Central Park.  The Husband and I went to dinner at Table 1280 at the High Museum recently.  As we walked out we passed Symphony Hall and I saw a crowd of people in the lobby.  Intermission, I thought, and my mind drifted back to Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.  And in that moment, my heart ached with a New York longing so sharp took my breath away: the bagel shop, the hills of the park, the crowd of people of all colors and backgrounds and opinions gathered in one place to appreciate beauty.  I missed it.

Then The Husband and I got in the car on the way to our spacious apartment and blasted the radio and opened the sunroof and I was okay.

Bipolar?  Maybe.  (Actually, not.  I’ve taken quizzes.)  But it’s clear to me that in this world, I will always be between destinations.  Always in transit, on my way to somewhere: the weekend, a new Chuck episode, a better attitude.  And with a heart that finds and longs for home in multiple locations, I am thankful that I’m not there yet.  Home, that is.  Because of all the places I’m headed, Home–a place I believe to be devoid of traffic and full of baby smell–is the last stop.