The Grants

There was always a segment on Bugs Bunny lifted wholesale from "You Bet Your Life" when the very Groucho-like host would ask, "Who is buried in Grant's tomb?"

The answer to older audiences should be obvious, but the younger, more paranoid mind, could spin whole paranoid histories while the animated old men whispered their answer to the host. 

I saw the tomb today, the General Grant Nationsl Memorial, a surprise white marble monument across the street from the fourth playground we tried while shopping neighborhoods in Harlem. We performed plays on the stairs and danced amid the columns, eating up time while we awaited the very unusual visiting times. 

General Ulysses S. Grant keeps odd hours. 

Starting at ten and going to four--that's not the odd part--the space is only open every other hour. The custodian and I assume Grant historian unlocks the glass door and what tourists there are file into the great, echoing atrium under the marble dome. White marble dominates. A pair of recessed alcoves opposite one another at the far wall display maps showing Civil War battles (guns) and those in which General Grant directly contributed (guns). Head down either staircase between the alcoves and you will enter the lower space, where bronze busts of other Civil War generals keep watch over Grant and what I assume to be his wife in enormous sarcophagi visible from the upper floor by a great circular hole surrounded by a white marble railing. 

The custodian/historian has a tiny corner for maps, flags and relics, which none of the visitors bothered to consult. 

How strange that we could see the tomb today, to enter a piece of history and, more importantly, to answer the age-old adage with, "Mr. and Mrs. Grant."

Green Haircut

My chores used to include mowing the lawn. I liked it best when the lawn was shaggy. I could see I was making a difference. I feel the same way about haircuts. Living with expanding mushroom cloud of salt and pepper locks in the interim is the hard part. I don't know what I'll do when I hit old age and the old head fur starts thinning, but shaving looks more attractive. That and skull caps. 

Back in Chicago, our condo had lots of living space but just a concrete alley in place of a lawn, or any greenery, really. A couple summers in, I bought planter boxes and hung them off the fence along the rear concrete walkway, planting flowers and vegetables. The squirrels got most of the produce, I think just out of spite. 

How else do you explain the number of peppers with one rodent nibble dropped on the ground? How many times does it take a squirrel to realize, "I don't like the bright growing thing. Eat it/not eat it?" before the squirrel chooses the latter. Forever, apparently. 

In college, I blazed and maintained trails, built bridges and not coincidentally contracted a severe case of poison ivy on my legs. Lesson? Always wear pants, even when the heat makes you sweat an impression of moisture shorts. 

Our fearless leader, Ken Havens, led the gang with humor and an uncanny sense of good scavenging. At some point we went from hauling gravel with a four-wheeler to loading up a heavy duty Ford truck and trailer. Ken got a lot of equipment retired--like him--from the Miami University office of facilities management. He was thoughtful, slow to speak, loved swimming and doughnuts and struggled with carpal tunnel. 

A gentleman on campus once quipped to Ken that he would have loved to buy one of the bat-winged mowers they used to turn what had once been farmland into a luxurious, tamed Kentucky bluegrass lawn. Ken thought the gentleman was hoping to buy one at Sears and didn't want to break it to him that the mower cost forty thousand dollars. 

New York City uses mowers not unlike the University's, only here in Sheep Meadow, like so much in the city, they are dwarfed by a grander plan.

I wonder if there is a grander plan for me, and if some piece of it might call for lying in this great green bed. I certainly hope whatever mower life is using to cut me down doesn't let me get too shaggy before I can. 

Patience

I saw a plant spiraling up the side of a townhouse between Columbus and Amsterdam on 78th Street. The Upper West Side boasts some great architecture but the fact that somebody not only put this here but also has the patience to tend to it while it grew up the side of the building blows my mind. 

How long would it take to grow this monstrosity? (And I mean "monstrosity" in the good way, not the "I'm sucking out all your building blood" way.) The roots start in the ground and the trunk twines through the railing, in some parts growing around the irons. It peaks at the top, and looks a bit like a spiral staircase on the way up. In winter, it probably looks like some dead thing, but come springtime... wow. 

New York is an impatient city despite a history that stretches back half a millennia. People in Manhattan have time or money but rarely both. And the moneymakers don't stay put. Here, someone put down roots, and another lovely thing bloomed. 

The High Line

Do yourself a favor and walk the High Line. It's an oasis of greenery built atop retired tracks sandwiched between the Hudson and the West Village and Chelsea. 

It's a great example in city planning of the Field of Dreams effect. "If you build it, they will come." The greenery added value to the surrounding buildings, which attracted investors who turned to unique design to distinguish from the comparatively blank brick and steel facades that used to line the walkway. The resultant feedback loop turned a former railway into a mile (and someday, hopefully miles) long meditation on the intersection between man and nature. 

Like anything New York City that's free and good, it will be mobbed just at the time you would most want to enjoy it. Elevators and walkways will be under construction at inconvenient times. 

This is the first place on the island of Manhattan where I was able to smell fresh cut grass. I live next to Central Park! How did I manage that? 

Frameworks

I invented the theory of Conservation of Scaffolding in New York City to explain the fact that, in any given moment in our neighborhood, about 25% of the buildings appear to be draped in scaffolding and fabric. I don't know what work exactly gets done on this scaffolding. Candidates include: sandblasting, window replacement, rappelling for fun and profit... (?)

Today, I saw a crew removing some of the scaffolding at the end of our block at Central Park West. Hooray! Then, walking farther west, another set of scaffolding was being erected in front of the Duane Reade at Columbus. Damn.

I love and hate scaffolding. When it rains, scaffolding gives you another shelter from the storm, a place to shake off your umbrella and watch Nature take a shot at scrubbing this city clean. Just make sure you don't bump into all of the other umbrella bearers underneath it. When the sun shines again, though, scaffolding is just one of many, many things that will remind you that you live as a Morlock now, unable to see the full might of the star that gives all things life. On the plus side, you won't worry much about a sunburn while you walk the streets.

Don't try to walk underneath scaffolding without some awareness of the kid riding your shoulders, either. While benign to all except lion hunters and NBA players, all of the wicked angles and jutting work lights pose a danger to your kid, especially after she has given up walking and refuses to walk home one more step without sixteen meltdowns. You might find yourself doing my same dance, weaving between people and vertical bars, allowing yourself to be crushed by forty pounds of pure angry as you duck below the far-more-dangerous horizontal ones.

Then just wait.

Just wait until your kid decides that all of the playground climbing was just rehearsal for the real test of body and soul as she begins to scale scaffolding despite all of your warnings to the contrary. Sometimes, I wish they would cover scaffolding with the same clear plastic spikes they use to keep pigeons from roosting and pooping on overhangs. You wouldn't even have to put it everywhere, especially if it was hard to see, because kids wouldn't know and would start to remember to exercise caution after the millionth time they sliced open their hands.

Maybe I'm wrong about the reason for scaffolding, and therefore my own reaction. Instead of getting upset that crews are hiding these historical facades and blue sky from view, I should celebrate the fact that the buildings are getting their own exoskeletons. Godzilla comes out at the end of the week. It's high time we figured out some way to defend this city against monster lizard attacks. Go, go, scaffolding!

Watch the Skies

The collision of Upper East Side and Central Park produces some strange weather. Cloudy with a chance of steel lightning. Run while you can. You need the exercise. 

O Bathroom My Bathroom

The best public restrooms in the city are widely considered to be the ones at Bryant Park. I learned this from a bus tour I took in Times Square.

Over the last year+, our family has become adept at finding and using public toilets. Finally discarding pull-ups for bedtime, Simone officially ended her potty training shortly in the new year. Hooray! Still, given that this is all a bit new to her, we are dealing with an unknown quantity when she clutches at her bladder and says, "I have to use the bathroom!"

Quickly and quietly, we enter crisis mode.

Few playgrounds in our neighborhood have public bathrooms, which is a real shame. The Diana Ross Playground just inside the park, uptown from the American Museum of Natural History was our very first, and I still remember taking Simone there during a break in the cold weather just a few weeks after moving to New York City. It's so close to the museum, though, that we have at least once used our membership just to use the bathroom. Membership also took a couple blocks off our cold walk home as Simone and I returned from an adventure at an indoor play space in Harlem.

The Adventure Playground at 69th and Central Park West also suffers for lack of bathrooms, although Le Pain Quotidien, a small cafe inside Central Park just above Sheep Meadow has some, often crowded on sunny days.  Farther down, Heckscher Playground offers one-stop shopping for swings, large boulders, sand pits, AstroTurf and rubberized terrain, water features in the summer and not one but two sets of bathrooms, one inside the official playground area and the other outside. (I don't know why they split it.)

On the east side of the park, the Billy Johnson Playground offers a huge granite slide that shows every evidence of having at one point been a water slide, a stone arch, sand pit, picnic tables, baby swings, but, alas, no bathrooms. Parents in need of immediate bathroom relief have to travel about a quarter mile south to Central Park Zoo, where (yet another) membership hath its privileges, or a quarter mile north to the cafe near the Alice in Wonderland statues.

Of course, at any time, any one of these bathrooms might be under repair, cleaned, occupied by other parents or generally genial homeless people who just need to poop. Here, it helps that Simone is starting to go to the bathroom by herself but is still small enough to accompany me in emergencies.

Near Simone's school, Bleecker Playground recently renovated their bathrooms, which are usually fairly clean and stocked with toilet paper. Neighborhood parents use the playground as a dumping ground for still-functional-but-outgrown toys, which is why I was overconfident about bringing and not locking up Simone's scooter, and also why it was ironic that that very day I had just been talking about how honest most New Yorkers are. One stolen scooter and many tears later, I learned my lesson: bring the lock.

Minetta Playground's bathrooms are the McDonald's next door. That's just how it is.

Washington Square Park also recently updated and upgraded its bathrooms. Simone and I once stood in line for the men's room as two people in wheelchairs inspected it for ADA accessibility. I'm all for fairness, but it's hard to be patient while your daughter's doing the pee pee dance on the ground next to you. They promise a family restroom soon, but not now, so their having said that to me felt like a cruel tease. The new bathrooms are a huge improvement over the old system, which was about a half mile hike to a coffee shop.

Sometimes, businesses will take pity on you. New York City real estate being what it is, not even every restaurant has a bathroom. Barnes and Noble on the Upper West Side put its bathroom right next to the children's section, which to me is a win-win scenario, and vastly superior to the bathroom at the nearby McDonald's, which I hate using even if we ate at McDonald's, which Simone never wants not to do. Starbucks is the weapon of last resort, but, be warned, it's EVERYBODY'S weapon of last resort, which means (more) long lines and/or punch key or token access.

Stroller

Charles Dickens reportedly liked to walk, up to 20 miles a day. I don't even come close. Who has the time?

My dad asked me the other day if I was still running. "No," I said, "just some swimming."

But the fact is that caregiving is very active, particularly in the city. We sold our car before we moved. Caring for it would have been like adopting a high-strung dog. You can park on our street, sometimes, except for Tuesdays on the downtown (don't say "south") side, or Thursdays on the uptown (don't say "north"), or if they're shooting a movie, and don't expect to get your car out if a garbage, moving or delivery truck is blocking anywhere along it because traffic will be backed up to the East River (don't say... well, yes, say "East" river).

So kids move around a lot. When my kid isn't watching television, she's usually begging for it, bouncing up and down like a demented spring. The American Academy of Pediatricians recommend they get less than an hour a day of screen time. As our pediatrician noted when I asked him about long term health consequences, "They made the rule in response to an epidemic of obesity. But an extreme response to something extreme is no more correct." So we allow television, computer games and phone stuff. Without it, you're signing up for a world of hurt.

The rest? Let's take that word at its face. The remainder of the day is a patchwork of activities, learning experiences, body moving time and just travel to each of these. To encourage Simone's mind last year, we joined the American Museum of Natural History. Membership gets you right in the door and sometimes past the lines of out-of-towners paying what the Museum recommends instead of what they want, which the rules allow. One of my neighbors pays a dollar each when he and his daughters go. They are still welcome. New York is like that. Simone found her niche--dinosaur movie, Discovery Center, overpriced strawberry milk in one of the many cafes--and got bored. Museums hold less interest for three year olds than a brightly decorated roll of wrapping paper. 

Groupon offered a two year membership to the Brooklyn Children's Museum. We bought it based on the reciprocal membership. Basically, a member at one museum could get in free at another. We could belong to the museum in Brooklyn (an hour away by train) but spend more time at the Children's Museum of Manhattan (walking distance).

Two months later, they ended it. We could get half price admission, but it would still be ten bucks out of pocket. 

Fine. I would squeeze value out of this membership if it killed me.

We can get to Brooklyn by train, but train lines away from Manhattan branch, spreading farther apart to serve an increasingly Wild West patchwork of communities. The Brooklyn Children's Museum is near two train lines, both of which run through our neighborhood, but "near" means different things depending on whether you have a scooter, stroller or just your own sneakers.

Shortly after we moved to Manhattan, Simone gave up her nap. In hindsight, we might have seen it coming. Getting her to sleep on weekends started to get difficult. She still got cranky without one but less so. We discovered after we moved that our downstairs neighbor played the saxophone. Every day. For anywhere between two to four hours, often the same riff.

It nearly drove bonkers. It certainly drove me out of the house, and out of the house was where all the action was. Without a car, I might have stuck Simone in the stroller and walked until she was all napped out, but with my knees still recovering from one marathon and carrying essentially the entirety of our apartment up and down stairs for two months, the idea quickly soured.

So we hoofed it a lot, including to the Brooklyn Children's Museum. Sometimes, I brought the stroller, but as often left it behind, as carrying it anywhere without a stroller check left it either unguarded or a total tripping hazard in the midst of the limited living space that is Manhattan. At first, I thought I could get Simone to nap by tiring her body. I encouraged her to walk, run, skip, jump, move forward any way she could, and while at first I tried to make it sound fun after just a couple minutes there emerged the whining, the pleading, the counting, the screaming and finally the time out, which I wish grownups could take because by then I sure as hell needed one.

I started carrying Simone on my shoulders, knees be damned. One way or another, they were. Simone enjoyed the view. I tried not to slam her into any scaffolding. New York City is covered in it. Crews come in, very efficient, unloading and building their Erector set building skirts overnight, or even during a productive morning. Some of the ones near our building have been up for more than a year. Sometimes, they sandblast. Others, they replace windows. Most often, nothing. Nobody ever finishes.

Me: "What would Manhattan be without scaffolding?"
Brandi: "Finished."

A couple days ago, I walked about three miles with the now-forty pound Simone on my back, plus her scooter, plus my backpack. The day before, I walked more than three miles, and seven the day before. I wear good shoes. Over time, and with good shoes, my knees felt better. We still take the stroller out with us, for breaks, but it's been replaced by a better model, a better stroller.

Me?

Hell, yeah, me.

Generations

In the 1998 movie "Dark City," the protagonist learns that--SPOILER ALERT--the strange bald-headed men using telekinetic powers to hunt him are aliens and that the titular city is dark because it is a spaceship rotated to face away from sunlight. It shares much of its gothic architecture with our city, and not by coincidence.

As a fan of science fiction, I used to dream about life among the stars. Our current understanding of physics does not allow for us to travel faster than the speed of light. The gaps between are inconceivably huge. Therefore, we need to plan for very long trips, and no getting off at Pluto/Charon to use the restroom. That's a minor planet now and we don't trust the bathrooms.

New York City shows me just how hard such a journey would be. You would need a large spaceship just to keep people from going insane. City size at least. Robotech: Macross Saga really nailed it here. Steady acceleration or spin could fake your gravity, but the stresses over the centuries would be enormous, structurally and emotionally. 

This city pushes people. The successful artists are truly exemplary because they had to climb a mountain of crap to get there. Consider the reaction mass you would need to accelerate even a splinter to solar escape velocity and imagine all that energy devoted to the making of the Rockettes or the trimming of the tree at Rockefeller Center. 

So much engineering goes into the smooth operation of the city, it might as well be a spaceship. Great pumps draw water from freshwater sources, clean it and deliver it to each and every home, business and public toilet with more than 66% uptime. (My figures might be a little off.) Electricity ensures out refrigerators never run out of cold and that our Facebooks stay freshly stocked with inspirational cat pictures. Fresh fruit for smoothies and whatever hot dogs are made of for hot dogs truck into the city to be processed into the mouths of eight million people. Trains scythe through its heart. Taxis shuttle across and airplanes land at airports far enough from the city's heart to be convenient for no one. The closing of a bridge lane leads to traffic chaos and national controversy.

Then there are the aliens. 

So many different people, languages, cultures, races, party affiliations, careers, religions and orientations crowd the city. In the Midwest, an Italian atheist speaking Mandarin in a leather shop might feel a little out of place. Here, he's just trying to help the Jewish African American Republican find a prop for her philosophy class. To be clear, these are not the weird ones. "Weird" here is antisocial. Glarers. Those who refuse to join the conversation. Even hipsters are telling you something with their mustaches. 

Amidst the rumble of unreality engines that makes this place possible, it is the silence that is most disturbing. 

Construction Sights

I am thrilled by construction sites and must note these two things:

- That sweet backhoe is a mommy! See how she protects her baby, hiding her behind that great claw? Soon, they will dig a basement and tread out of sight, to emerge by way of connected tunnels as a crane. 

- Pants on the railing, lower right. Whose? Why? Did a worker finish for the day and change into slacks and a cardigan a la Mr. Rogers? Or is this the real crane dad's clothes, discarded after a moment of intimacy between man and machine? Do all construction sites keep a spare pair of pants in case the Hulk jumps down?

Guarded

See the stained glass?

If zombies ever overrun the rest of the country, I think New York City has better than even odds. Did the city already survive an attack? Sure, in its own way. Look closer at the hordes of hungry shufflers and you will see echoes of the same invasion. They won't bite you. (Keep your health insurance up to date, though.) The disease is poverty, and just because the wealthy don't understand how it transfers doesn't mean they don't fear it.

I get it. I grew up middle class, in suburban Cleveland, and while I went to school with a few threadbare kids stayed well above the poverty line. Homeless people scare me. Even if they're not all alike, I tend to treat them as though nature posted a big "Do Not Touch" sign on their backs. One guy in our neighborhood in blond dreadlocks walks around with a cart, makes magic signs with his fingers and curses under his breath. I get why you would want to fence that away. 

Another guy, of similar build but older and pushing a stroller full of knicknacks walked past me the other night on the way back from the gym. I stepped away, frightened for a moment until I realized he was just wishing me a good evening in his own quiet, dignified way. People root through our garbage several times a day, enormous transparent trash bags full of bottles balanced on their backs. New York City made a big recycling push years back, but I wonder if it's not just another way to fine landlords for trivial offenses. Certainly it would hardly be necessary if you could trade in money for cardboard. 

Like a cheap '70s exploitation movie for churches, here we put beauty behind bars, then lock it behind gates, cover it with barbed wire and scaffolding (to repair the crumbling fencing), then wonder why we stare at each other with such hungry eyes. 

Central Park Symmetry

Little Lost Post

I will not do that again.

Yesterday, I started a piece about the importance of maps. Blogger's iPhone app works well for on-the-go fathers looking to cram words in between adventures, and it normally doesn't fail me. So when I started the post, I naturally assumed it auto-saved when I closed it.

It did not. Also, it's worth noting that iPhones make decisions for you about what's worth keeping in RAM while other applications are running. Blogger got the short end of the stick. The unsaved piece went the way of the Dodo.

I've lost more. Fifteen years ago, my hard drive crashed, sending to Hell the only copies of short stories I wrote in college. Part of me knew I would always come back to them, improve them until they could be published. That part of me was wrong. Dead wrong.

I also had a backpack stolen out of the back of my dad's Jeep. Who would steal a backpack? I thought. Well, I'll never know, but the fact of the matter is that someone did, carrying with him or her a semester's worth of notes and drawings in a blank book they probably tossed in a ditch somewhere around Oxford, Ohio. A month ago, Simone's week old scooter was stolen from a playground FULL OF TOYS. We sat at a picnic table for snack time and then I got up to push her on the swings. When I returned, no more scooter. We searched the entire playground and outside and came up empty. A day earlier, we were talking about the surprisingly low incidence of crime in New York City.

Brandi bought the exact same scooter the next day. Sixty dollars well spent. Again. Simone rides that thing everywhere, and I love not having to carry her. We can and have traveled miles on it.

Which leads me back to the lost post. I waste a lot of words. One day I hope to waste them on the same idea, but not today. The gist of it was this: maps are useful, and have grown better since day one with the incorporation of digital maps and GPS positioning, but the best maps we use lie within our heads. In New York City, you can hardly see over the fruit stand at the end of the street, much less the stone behemoths behind it, and if you use a map, you risk vectoring in on a too-specific target. Walking suits me best. When I walk from one place to the next, I feel the geographic boundaries in a way taking the train, car, bicycle, taxi or bus miss. I see the neighborhoods lacking in direct access to healthy foods, are blighted with poverty or the simple crime of neglect.

I am immersed in New York City.

Swimming in it. And lost.

The Medieval in the Modern

When Brandi and I got married, we went to Italy on our honeymoon. Brandi planned the trip. While my talent lies in cramming as much gear and furniture in a moving van, I am far surpassed in Tetris-like mastery by her ability to embed events into a vacation. We traveled to Venice, Rome, Pompeii, past Pisa (no time to stop), Cinque Terre and back to Venice to stay in Marco Polo's childhood home. In a country steeped in history, our favorite was the furthest in the past, Pompeii. We wandered excavated ruins for hours. Yes, the plaster casts of people and dogs are tragic. Ancient Roman porn decorating brothel walls is hilarious and... educational. Some Roman columns were made of brick covered in cement. 

We brought along a book of overlays. You could see the crumbled walls as they stood, squares restored to a geometric clarity realistic only if they had a VERY efficient garbage collection service. 

I like to overlay New York City with its past self, when the narrow streets of Greenwich Village reflected an actual village unto itself. Before fire blasted across close tenements, necessitating the creation of wide streets as gulfs too wide for flames to leap across. When cathedrals dwarfed the lesser abodes of their worshippers scattered at their feet like stone supplicants. 

The function of height now, on this island where everything and nothing is in reach, depending on the price you're willing to pay, is to stack more people, to cram in things and ideas, to treat the space between buildings as virgin territory to exploit and conquer. Height in my imaginary overlay serves as hope. The copper spire rising above the neighbors' chimneys inspires godliness (even if there are occasional unfavorable comparisons to a certain language-challenged Tower of yore) and faith in something larger. 

I suppose you could argue that you will find a similar awe in the structures of today. You certainly can't rewind the clock without massive suffering. I feel sad, though, that such striking beauties lie smothered behind blank brick walls and concrete facades stained with decades of industrial strength pollution, graffiti and thoughtless choices necessitated by relentless capital pressure. 

Someday--perhaps after a disaster, but more likely given the resilience of the human race through a reassembly of the patchwork of historical evidence we have saved--future people might reassemble a snapshot of present day life. Just as the overlays of Pompeii present only the wildest speculation of ancient Roman life, there will be gaps, some large enough to drive a church through. Our task now might be framed as a link from past to the future, ever balanced on the knife's edge between enormities, but aware that, like church and buildings alike, they exist for us. 

Spring in NYC

A lot of New Yorkers complained about the winter. It was cold and long and, by Chicago standards, not too bad. I hate to be that guy. You know the type, the guy from Hudson Bay who says, "You think Chicago winters are bad. Let me tell you what frostbite really feels like..." and then removes his prosthetic nose. 

Well, maybe we don't ALL know him. I don't think I've met him, either. Still, like anything crazy, the best justification crazy people can show is by pointing out something even crazier. 

So Spring sprang. (SPROING.) And finally all this greenery at the end of our street hides the fact that the street doesn't end, that eight million people live here to buy up all the cat food in bulk so that Trader Joe's must establish firm limits on the number of cans we can buy and apple sauce is tightly constrained, particularly if you're in the mood for strawberry flavor. But bagels you can get pretty much everywhere. 

I read many years ago that trees in major cities grow lower than the same species in the forest. Despite all that additional carbon dioxide the city stresses them. I'm grateful for what they manage. All that greenery turns the too-narrow streets into secret passages, tunnels into the next adventure. They make you want to walk among them, to admire a natural architecture millions of years in the making. 

The trees in Central Park show signs of subtle cultivation, limbs hacked away to broaden the leafy rooftops, dead branches and crispy remnants of autumn leaves cleared to keep paths manageable. I wish every street fed into the park, or, on selfish days, only my own. 

Welcome, Spring.

Sunset construction

Diamond-shaped panels on a building that might as well be made of diamonds.

All-too-real estate

This blog changed today. More than the fact that I updated it. It changed to reflect my relationship with the city, which also changed since last I wrote here.

I live in Manhattan, New York City, New York, probably the second-craziest real estate market in the country, next to San Francisco, which has no excuse. I live with my wife, daughter and two cats, neither of whom have ever lifted a paw to pay rent. That won't change any time soon, but dream big and their learning to scoop their own litter will be a minor payoff.

I never wanted to follow in my father's footsteps as an architect. Words always appealed more, even if they didn't pay the bills all that well. What followed were numerous disparate careers that show no sign of settling down, even if I did achieve some small success in each: trail management, English tutoring, graphic design, network administrator, improvisational comedian and finally homemaker. Some day, I'll shoe horn writer in there, too, but I'm not holding my breath.

What I did glean from a childhood skipping around construction sites holding the other end of a tape measure was some appreciation for buildings before, during and after construction. I see them as living things, and on the island of Manhattan, I see them crowded together more closely than the revelers in Times Square ten seconds before midnight. They feed off electricity, water, money and labor, fighting decay and the encroachment of other, substantially larger buildings. In rare instances, they fall over due to negligence or attack, and that is particularly tragic.

Today, we visited the apartment of our daughter's school friend. The family plans on moving come July. What will happen to the apartment? [Tenting fingers in imitation of supervillain.]

Frankly, I planned this scenario since we moved from Chicago: find a serviceable apartment, sell our condo, forgive ourselves, make contacts, and try to talk or work our way into finding a cheaper apartment.

We liked the building from the start. Nice location, not far from Brandi's work and what we hope will be Simone's school, with two bedrooms, a generous kitchen, living room, decent closet space and light. I did not realize how much I missed light until Manhattan turned me into a Morlock. Smaller than our current place, though, so in the make-believe number in my head I figured rent would be lower.

No, no, no, no and most certainly no. Almost half again more, and our rent is killing us as it is.

Even worse than the letdown of knowing this was not the place I had dreamed was the social fact that we simply did not want to admit we were too poor to rent it. Brandi has a great job. In Chicago, we would live like kings! Or at least... better. But Manhattan real estate has a way of eating wealth away like the acid blood of the xenomorphs from the Alien movies. It never ends.

We want to find a place that can hold two grownups, one child, two cats and enough of our stuff that we can sleep, cook, watch movies and not have to do any of these from the inside of the litter box. It might come someday, but, frankly, I'm not holding my breath.