Life is No Longer Elsewhere

I was driving with my daughter Isabel a few years back when she said very earnestly from the back seat, “I know everybody probably thinks this when they are young, but I KNOW I am going to be famous some day.” I had to laugh at the accuracy of her statement—at least the first part of it. In fact, it seems that for most men I know part of the “work” of their thirties is making peace with their failure to become famous. Along with fame, I also think that everybody of a certain age, income, and education believes s/he will someday have a job and a stable relationship and a place to call home—will, in fact, have what we call a life.

I am 46 years old and to the casual outside observer, I have a life. I have been married to the same person for almost 16 years, I have a happy, healthy 12 year-old daughter, I have taught at a school I love for eight years, I own a house, I am not suffering from crushing debt, debilitating depression or chronic pain. I have friends. I have hobbies. I have two dogs that love me. Surely these things are sufficient to qualify as a life. Yet, for me life still feels like it is elsewhere.

Years ago I went on a Milan Kundera tear and read every novel I could find by the Czech novelist. I started with The Unbearable Lightness of Being and immediately moved into everything else he had published. In a few weeks I came out the other side of this immersion convinced that Milan Kundera is a brilliant writer. Twenty-five years later he is still on my list of top five modern novelists, along with Phillip Roth, Graham Swift, Vladimir Nabakov, and Haruki Murakami.

To be fully honest, I consumed his novels so voraciously that their plots and main characters bled together into a great big blob of darkly humorous Eastern European existentialism. One of Kundera’s novels is called Life is Elsewhere. I had to google Life is Elsewhere to even remind myself of the plot just now. I know that I read it and loved it, but even after reading the plot summary I could not remember a thing about the book. (Does it make me a bad person that I don’t really care that I am unable to remember anything at all about a book by one of my favorite authors? This is a question for another time.)

What I really want to focus on now is the title: Life is Elsewhere.

This title has come back to me again and again over the past twenty-five years; not because of the power of the story but rather because of the resonance of the idea. For me, life has been elsewhere ever since I graduated college in 1987. First, I went to the Peace Corps in North Yemen. I knew it was a two-year gig and that when it was over I would be moving back to the United States. Once I got back I lived in Delaware, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Maine, and Montana over the course of the next five years. None of these moves felt permanent and none of the places felt like home.

By the time I was 29 and living in Billings I was ready to commit to a place to call home. I was considering moving to Santa Fe, New Mexico to start a teacher certification/Masters of Education program. In the meantime, I met the woman who became my wife. She was a Montana girl and rather than moving to New Mexico I stayed in Billings for another 18 months. Shortly after we met we knew we would get married. We also knew we would be moving. She wanted more than what life in Billings was able to offer. She wanted graduate school and a bigger world of ideas and challenges.

So this is the story I tell myself: I was looking for a place to commit to; a place to put down roots and build a life one connection at a time. But instead of a place, I found a person. And then we moved to a new place and then to another. And now here it is a full 25 years since I graduated college and still I have not found a place to build a life.

Of course, life has been happening anyway. As I said, we own a home and have jobs and a daughter and two dogs. But I have not built this life that has been happening to me. As John Lennon wrote, “life is what happens while you’re busy making other plans.” I have been a participant so far, not a decider. (In this one way I hope to become more like George W. Bush in the coming months and years.)

There have been a couple of consequences that I can see to the way my life has unspooled itself. One is that I have never felt the pleasure that I imagine a person gets from feeling truly part of a place, with roots that reach down into the soil and connections that bolster and support all around. The other is that my long-suffering partner, Erica, has been forced to stand in for the place I want to call home. In the absence of a place to live my life fully, I have substituted a person and Erica has had to be the place I grew my roots and also the connections that bolster and support me all around.

As anyone who has spent more than ten seconds thinking about it can tell you, this sort of relationship cannot sustain. It is bound to crash under the weight of so much need and expectation. Luckily, we have both seen the problem and taken steps to change things. No single person is big enough to provide all the things a place can give—even the smallest sort of place. I realize I have been waiting to get to wherever it is we are going to build our lives for 25 years now and that is way too long.

So, it is with great excitement that I am looking forward to our next move. We are heading to Ithaca, New York sometime in the next few months and I could not be more thrilled. Of course I am feeling a fair amount of stress about selling our crappy house in New Haven and buying a not-crappy house in Ithaca, about finding meaningful work that pays well, and about my daughter’s new life in a new place. But all of these things pale in comparison to the excitement I feel about finally moving to a place with the full expectation that it will be where my life is. I will miss the school where I teach and the families who go there. I will miss my friends in New Haven. But not enough to make me stay. I am ready to put down some roots, to join clubs, to plant trees and asparagus and rhubarb instead of things that grow once and are gone, and to commit to living life where I am living instead of in my head in some future place.

Hot damn. Let the wild rumpus begin.

Update, September, 2014: It took 2 years, but we have finally bought a house in Ithaca and we are loving it. Also, it took a year, but I found a job as a writer working for Cornell's College of Engineering and it is going great. This fall, I will learn how to grow asparagus.

The Perils and Pleasures of Being High

My life is lived mostly at ground level, in two dimensions. I look up sometimes, but I hardly ever consider the spaces much above my head as part of the immediate physical world I inhabit.

This weekend my world expanded to three dimensions for a little while as I was running up the highest point in New Haven. It is called East Rock and it is a 350-foot high basalt formation that, even if I am generous, cannot be said to “loom” over the city. It more-accurately “glances over the shoulder” of New Haven. There is a road that leads to the top and I like to run up this road most Sundays.

This past Sunday I was near the top of East Rock, running along the road that skirts the edges of a cliff in some places and offers a good view of the Mill River valley below. The drop from the road down to the valley floor is at least 300 feet. As I neared the edge, two turkey vultures blasted up into view mere feet ahead of me, riding an updraft from below and startling the poop out of me. It looked to me like someone had yanked an invisible string and pulled these birds up from the valley floor and high into the air in front of me.

I stopped and watched them for a while as they continued to rise without even a flap of their wings. Vultures are not known for their good looks, but these two birds were the epitome of grace as they made the tiniest of adjustments to their outermost wing feathers to affect changes in their drift and glide. Watching these birds reminded me of the third dimension I walk around in all the time. My wife skydives for fun, so she looks at the air above us differently than I do. She certainly sees it as another medium, like water, that humans locomote through. I just about never think of it that way, but watching those vultures made it clear to me that there is a third dimension—life is not just length and width. There is also depth.

As they soared out and away across the valley and toward West Rock I lost sight of them and continued my run.

And as I did it came to me that most of my relationships are also lived in those same two dimensions. There is a length and a width to them, but the depth is something I hardly ever recognize or explore. The times when this third dimension comes most reliably into focus are when I or someone close to me says something honest. Often the truth catches me by surprise and all in a moment reminds me of just how surface-y and full of shit most of my moments are by contrast.

Being honest and saying what is really there not only makes that third dimension in my relationships “pop” into focus, it also provides lift to reach some pretty amazing places if I am willing to stay in them. Choosing to love someone is a brave decision that loses much of its power if, over time, that love is lived out in two dimensions instead of three.

Wreckers of New Haven

The speed and efficiency with which the police and wreckers of New Haven move cars out of the way of the street sweepers is sometimes astounding. It has got to be the single most efficient operation in the city. I sometimes see ten or twelve tow trucks staging up over on James Street by Criscuolo Park. They are always accompanied by at least two New Haven Police Department cars and they move out with all the choreography and energy of a well-planned military operation.

I have witnessed the same precision and speed in the East Rock neighborhood, where I have seen ten cars ticketed and towed in under 30 minutes. It is truly impressive.

While I like clean streets and see the need for litter and leaves to be cleared away so storm drains can remain clear, I do have a major issue with the way the City of New Haven handles these towing operations. Others in New Haven have already reported on the woefully-inadequate posting of signs the day before these out-of-season street sweepings happen. I have often wondered how the companies that do the towing get the contracts (and thus, the spoils).

But neither the lack of notice nor the opportunity for corruption bothers me as much as the blatant and dangerous disregard for traffic laws shown by both the police and the wrecker convoys. I have not had my video camera handy when I have witnessed speeding through neighborhoods and running of stop signs, but I will be prepared next time and I will lodge formal complaints with the city and the state.

Until I catch these police-sanctioned and –led convoys on tape, doing 45 mph on the streets of East Rock, blowing through stop signs, I would like to know if anyone else has witnessed similar happenings. If so, please leave a comment here letting me know. Maybe we can affect some change somehow. I hope it will not take a bad car accident or a killed pedestrian to call attention to this problem.

The recent revelation that the officer involved in this June’s fatal crash in Milford was driving 94 mph and probably racing has made clear the potential serious repercussions of police sanctioned law-breaking. I want clean streets, but not at the cost of serious injury or death.

Public Nuisance?

A few months ago I took out the swath of grass between the street and the curb and put in a raised garden bed.  It had been wasted space that just ended up looking shabby and I was tired of picking up other people's dogs' poop.  I thought some peas, beans, and zinnias might brighten up the space and provide us with some fresh vegetables. 

(This is how it looked back in June when we got the ticket)

The City of New Haven saw it differently and demanded that I remove the garden.  The penalty for failure to comply is a $100.00 fine for each citation.  So far I have only gotten the one citation and I have mostly just ignored it.  When I read the statute under which I was warned, the official charge said "Public Nuisance."  

Here is how the garden now looks, in all its glory.  In a city that is objectively not all that beautiful, is this really a public nuisance?

My Garden is Against the Law

I got an official warning in the mail today from the City of New Haven.  It seems the garden box Erica and I put in a few weeks ago is illegal.  It is in the "treeline."  For a while now I have been wondering what that strip of land is called--the one between the sidewalk and the street.  Now I know it is called the treeline.

We are risking a $100.00 fine if we do not remove the "illegal garden."  

This makes me sad.  I really like our little garden.  It brightens my day and it brightens our block.  As we built it I told Erica we would probably need to take it out one day when the city needed to do curb or water pipe work.  I just didn't think that day would come so soon.

I have left a message with John Cox--the city employee who wrote the warning--asking if we can talk.  I hope he calls me back soon and that we can find a way to save our little patch of green.

Head in the Clouds

I went for a run yesterday morning. Tropical Storm Hanna was forecast to hit later in the day and I needed to get a run in before the weather came. It was humid. Steamy. Tropical, even. When I got to the top of East Rock the wind became slightly more insistent. The air seemed even thicker. And there were wisps of clouds below me. East Rock is only 365 feet above sea level, but it somehow seemed higher with a solid ceiling of grey above and smaller scraps of clouds blowing by below, between me and the rooftops of my neighborhood.
It reminded me of a time In Yemen when I hitched up out of the desert to a mountaintop village and then sat on the edge of the world looking back down 6000 feet at the sand of the Arabian Tihama. Huge birds of prey were riding the updrafts and I was absolutely convinced they were simply having fun in the wind, maybe having a contest to see who could rise the farthest without flapping her wings, (I still am convinced, in fact.)
I saw a tiny speck-of-a-cloud just above the desert sands far off in the Tihama. As I watched, this flimsiest wisp of water vapor blew inland and started to ride the wind up the face of the mountain I was perched atop. As it rose, it expanded and became more substantial.
It probably took about thirty minutes, but by the time it got to me at the mountaintop that tiny cloud had become a storm. I had seen it coming from miles away, yet still I just sat there and allowed the grey to engulf me. The temperature dropped twenty degrees in a minute, the wind picked up, and a fine mist soaked me to the skin. It is one of my favorite memories of my time in Yemen.


Hanna didn’t really live up to her advance publicity, but I do want to thank her for the memory.

Garden Update

Back in the spring I tore out the strip of grass between the sidewalk and the curb in front of our house. I built up a raised garden bed with compost from our bin and some bagged dirt from the store and then framed it in with some wooden posts that I staked down to hold it all in place. I also put some tomato plants into pots on the porch and filled some window boxes with flowers to add color.

Turned out to be a great thing. The garden has been a source of real pleasure for me all spring and summer. I took some pictures this morning and wanted to post them.

Black-eyed Susans, marigolds, and chrysanthemums.















A basil plant that has decided to take over a fair-sized chunk of the garden. I have made a LOT of pesto this summer. Excellent recipe:

3 Tbsp toasted pine nuts
3 cloves garlic
1/2 tsp kosher salt
1/4 cup olive oil
1 cup basil leaves

Grind pine nuts and garlic in a food processor. Add salt and basil leaves. Grind some more. Add olive oil and process into the consistency you like.

Goldfinches have loved eating the seeds out of the sunflowers. They are small, beautiful birds and I can tell when they are eating because they chitter noisily to each other as they eat.





We have gotten dozens of juicy, sweet tomatoes that don't quite look as perfect as the tomatoes for sale at Stop and Shop, but they taste far better. Must be all the flavonoids.











I put in just one pepper plant, since we don't use a lot of heat in most of our cooking. Well, that one pepper plant has put out dozens of VERY hot habaneros--far more than we can use. I am just throwing them in the freezer so far.

Finding Things Beautiful

We have been back in New Haven for a week. Since our return the air has been hot, humid, and unhealthy. The direct comparison forced upon me by spending two weeks in Montana and then returning straight to New Haven in a heat wave has been unavoidable. On many dimensions, Montana has it all over New Haven.
Don’t get me wrong--after five years here, our life has become pretty good. We know people, we have friends, we can walk to most of the important places in our day. But I find that in this first week back I have been focusing on the negatives far more than the positives of life in New Haven. The traffic in New Haven is god-awful and many residents think the laws in place to govern the operation of a motor vehicle are really only suggestions that they are free to ignore. There is a lot of litter everywhere. People in New Haven drop trash all the time. I have even seen police officers dropping trash out of the windows of their patrol cars. There are frequent Air Quality Alerts that make it clear that simply breathing is doing harm to your lungs. Petty crime is rampant. We have had two bicycles stolen from our back yard and Yale sends out frequent e-mail warnings to employees about muggings on local streets.
I don’t necessarily want to be fixated on the things I don’t like about life in Connecticut, so I have been trying to come up with ways to raise my mind up out of its rut and force it into a new track. This morning while running I think I may have hit upon something that might work. It certainly won’t make me magically fall in love with New Haven, but it might get my mind to focus on healthy and positive things instead of my laundry list of things to complain about.
I took the early shift today for my run since it promised to be another hot day and Erica had a seven o’clock run scheduled with some co-workers. I needed to be back by home by 6:30. As a result, the sun was very low in the eastern sky as I crested East Rock. There was a thick band of clouds low on the horizon and their undersides glowed a fiery pink and orange as the rays of the sun shone up at them. A seagull flew over my head and its pure white underside turned the same fiery pinkish-orange color as it flew out of shadow and into the odd, luminous morning light

It was really beautiful. And it surprised me that I saw something that beautiful while running in New Haven. It made me think. On the spot and on the fly I decided to try to find two beautiful things each morning this summer. I have read some of the research that shows that happiness can be learned. Happiness and contentment depend, in no small measure, on where you decide to focus your attention. To a degree, if you look for crap, you find crap. So I am hoping that if you look for beauty, you’ll find beauty.
When I thought about it, I had already seen the other beautiful thing this morning. The clouds had been spectacular before I even saw the seagull. This left me two miles in which to think about just how this “Beautiful Things” challenge might work and to set some ground rules for myself. I have decided that the things I find don’t have to be found in the morning—it can be any time of day. It is really my underlying approach to things that may or may not change my appreciation of New Haven, not whether I find beautiful things in the morning or later in the day.
I have also decided that I don’t need to find two beautiful things each day. Instead, I need to find two things beautiful. It might not sound much different, but as I ran it struck me as an important distinction, and one that is hard to put into words. Off the top of my head the best example I can think of is Erica and Isabel playing new pieces on the piano. To the outside observer walking by our open windows, the faltering fingers, incorrect notes, and accidentally atonal tunes are objectively NOT beautiful. But to me in the dining room, seeing the concentration, determination, and sheer enjoyment on the faces of my wife and daughter as they begin to struggle through new pieces is beautiful.
As experiments go, this one comes with absolutely no cost and a huge potential payoff.