Six in the City
I have three children, all of whom currently live in New York City. There is Roger with wife Valene and their new pup, Pudding (a blonde, long-hair, miniature Dachshund) who live in St. George, Staten Island. They have their eye on moving to Delaware in the not too distant future and are working that move aggressively at this exact moment. Then there is Carolyn and husband of ten years, John and their two lovely daughters, Charlotte (8) and Evelyn (5) as well as good old (10) Abraham Lincoln, a black and white Havanese. They live in Columbia Waterfront in Brooklyn and seem happy to stay there indefinitely. And last, but not least, is Thomas, who lives with Jenna, his five-year girlfriend and very significant other, who live in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn, about twenty blocks from where I sit this moment. They too have a relatively new dog, Hank, who is shy of a year old and is some sort of mutt blend and more energy than five dogs.
This trip east was to see and hug my children and grandchildren. That has been accomplished in part with a bit more to go today. Unfortunately, Thomas and Jenna are off somewhere in Washington state camping in a Sprinter Van and from the look of Instagram, busy hiking up a storm. For an inner-city boy and a suburban Connecticut girl, they both seem quite drawn to the great wilds and the outdoor country life. So, who knows what the future holds for their residence choices. I have stopped trying to outguess my kids at this stage. The one I would have said is more naturally suburban than any of them, Carolyn, is the one who looks most destined to stay in the City. Roger, who wanted the urban life more than any of them seems far less enamored of the urban lifestyle and far more likely to move back towards his suburban roots, somewhere near the beach life that he loves so much. He’s actually just now consummated a lease in one of the hot new towns in America, Lewes, Delaware, which I am told is close to being a Truman Show town as any you will find. And my full-bore City-boy, Thomas, who lived in Union Square, went to pre-school in Gramercy Park, did K-12 in the West Village and has lived in Brooklyn pretty much since he graduated college, seems to want nothing more than to move somewhere to the country. Since he and Jenna have plenty of normal life issues to figure out before that needs to take shape, I’m assuming he will remain a City boy a while longer.
As it turned out, the pre-planned Sprinter trip by Thomas and Jenna has meant that this three-day visit by us to this magical “City of Lost Dreams” has all been about seeing two-thirds of my brood. That means that I have gotten hugs from six of the eight. I was never a big fan of the Sarah Jessica Parker TV melodrama, Sex in the City, and I tend to think my view has been validated by the notable lack, so far, of the active syndication of that show on the cable networks. It may have been other people’s reality to connect the City to the active engagement in sexual shenanigans, but not so for me. Don’t get me wrong, sex played as much a part in my normal lifecycle as it probably does for most men of my age, but it wasn’t ever linked to the City, per se, for me. Among 67-year-old males in America, I am betting that I fall squarely in the normal distribution bulge created by one standard deviation (sounds funny to talk sex in statistical terms). That means I am neither blasé about it nor overly charged-up about it. Lots of worldly pleasures feel good and sex strikes me as just one of them, perhaps not even first among equals any more.
As we all learned in ninth-grade biology, the primary purpose of sex is procreation and while not often a conscious driver for young sex, we can rest assured that the libido is not only connected to the gonads, but also the cerebral cortex, where the primordial ooze showers us in the need to conceive. Where women will generally recognize this as maternal instinct, men are not usually able to think past the blinding sparks of orgasmic delight to understand the root of the drive. They are dogs with bones and that bone needs to get buried at all costs. Few are the young men able to think past that sensation. As we age, some of us get more thoughtful and some just keep on being driven without bothering to comprehend. I often say these days that simpler is happier, but for some the unexamined life and drives are not enough by far.
My visit to the City has been a raging success. I say this because it has reminded my emotional daughter that she hasn’t lost us forever and that the sun also rises every morning. My eldest has been able to orchestrate what he has been talking to me about orchestrating (his move to Delaware, or more importantly, his move the hell off of Staten Island), and he has been able to revel in his success in my presence. My granddaughters are products of this new age when FaceTime and Zoom are more normalized as part of their lives. They seemed happy to see us but less distraught about not having seen us in so long. I realized that for one quarter of Evelyn’s young life, we have been pandemically kept from her. This felt more abnormal to us than it did to her. And as for my youngest, well, I’ve always been a believer that birds gotta fly and that in the same way that I flew the coop at seventeen, never to live under Mom’s roof again, I can accept that while my son will always be my son, he may have less time for dear old Dad as he gets on with his life, as he seems to be doing. I’m all good with that and will take my future connection as, how and when it is available. It’s not that the Cat’s in the Cradle so much as that he’s a Bird on a Wire, and that’s OK.
So I will take my six in the City and be happy with it for the moment. It so happens that I will be able to ratchet that up to seven in Ithaca for the July 4th weekend. Only Jenna will not be in residence and that seems OK too since as much as we love her, she is technically and formally not yet in the Marin Madness fold (even though she is a part of the Snapchat group that coined that very name). We will make up for her absence with other friends and family. We will have Nancy and Pete, Gary and Oswaldo, Candice, and, as of last night’s discussion, even Matthew and Phillip. I’m not sure in the cosmic counting system if two cousins and five dear friends equals a likely future daughter-in-law, but at least it’s a start. Given that Six in the City seems such an appropriate and catchy name for this three-day interlude, I will have to start now thinking about what a dozen in Ithaca translates into in the Catchy Title Department.