Union Square--Downtown Life

We picked this neighborhood as much for the number of green areas and play grounds as its proximity to TRADER JOES!!! Yes, there is a Trader Joe's within walking distance, or rather New York City walking distance since no one in LA would ever walk this distance, and certainly not to Trader Joes. And Trader Joes here sells the same items it sells anywhere else--I've now shopped in a Joes in cities: Boston, Maryland, and now in New York. Since we still had our car, we drove the few short blocks to load up the hatch with staples, all things one does when starting a new life.

I browsed, putting in bottles of condiments, frozen food items our family enjoys, taking in the bustle of this popular store. There were young people, mostly women, with fatigued parents in tow as they bought food stuff they would certainly need to survive their first year at NYU. Once home, I marveled at how full the bags had been, and yet I had still managed to forget basic staples. This oversight caused some consternation, still used to life lived in a car where each trip, no matter how short, to the market was nerve wracking.

See, here's the thing about life here that is amazing. Yes, there are no supermarkets, those humongous boxes with parking spaces galore, that are 'supposed' to make your life easier, more convenient, when in truth none of it felt convenient or easy. In place of this convenience, what is available here are a series, a never ending series of shops selling food items. My first meal cooked in our new kitchen came to a screeching halt after realizing I had purchased the wrong cheese for the dish. This type of error in LA would require me to abandon the meal entirely since the idea of getting back in the car to drive to the store was absolutely out of the question. But here, my son and I ran down the block to the gourmet grocery store, one of three small shops in our one block, to get the needed cheese, this entire exercise taking less than ten minutes.

The automobile invented for, here's that word again, convenience has, in my opinion, made life in areas, where life has to be lived behind the wheel, much more challenging. It's true your hands don't suffer the brutal ache of carrying heavy bags over many blocks. You quickly realize the need to hoard so much stuff becomes unnecessary since the proximity to replenish every day items is never far enough away to warrant such bulk buying. And in truth, who has the space to store the industrial sizes of items sold at Costco in New York? As I had started to suspect during my purge of all our excesses in LA, I'm now convinced that the sprawl of life in suburban towns has created a false void. Our large Subzero refrigerator wasn't large enough to hold food for a family of three, so that we purchased another smaller refrigerator to store the excess. For a family of three!

Our life here is new, metaphorically and physically. The refrigerator, the machine that reveals as much about a life as any other non-human entity, is uncluttered, free from becoming a catch all for those items purchased and never used. Each time I put a new item on the clean shelves, I'm aware of what is going in, taking note, so that five bottles of unused salad dressings don't line the shelf of the refrigerator door. This keen awareness is applied to every area of our lives since we are, each of us, creating something wholly separate from our past. It is time of deep contemplation, fueled by the multitude of visceral experiences. It is as if your five senses have been somnolent all these years, jolted to life by a cacophony of noises, images, smells, and experiences.

This city, of so many cliches, has elicited reams of writings from writers and artists in rapture with its idiosyncrasies and maddening quirks. And now I, too, join the ranks of those in love with this place that has a personality so separate from the imaginings of its inhabitants. The same shelf of writings extolling the virtues of a city ever reaching skyward has its counterpart on a separate shelf where the writings are more elegiac in tone, a bitterness permeating each line written from those who had been lured by the beauty of a sun-filled landscape. I've been thinking so much about Fitzgerald as I sit facing westward, trying to put into some coherent, artistic order my experiences in LA, particularly his book, Crack Up.

This process of comprehending my life is much like the process of writing itself--echoes of questions, the tiny shards of comprehension creating another louder echo of doubt.