I have left New York City once before, in 1998, loading our possessions into a truck and shipping them to the UK where over a surprising short period of time they became scattered, lost, given or thrown away, the dust of our former lives casually forgotten. But never the place itself; we lasted about three years in London, very arduous ones and so we found ourselves making every excuse to return to the USA for weddings or holidays before moving back permanently, we thought, a few months before 9/11 which broke our hearts and changed the city for good. This time, on May 30, we had more to pack having lived in the same building for twenty-two years, even moving apartments within it on one occasion. The psychological shock is tempered a little by the level of organization and physical effort. We had agreed on the move ten months earlier but hadn’t told many of our friends, most are overly emotionally bound by the city, believing it to be the greatest, sometimes the only city in the world and regard leaving it as a sign of defeat. One wrote to me saying “don’t give up” as if our former life was an ordeal to be endured which to some extent it was.
Moving is always traumatic and particularly in my case, where I can be sentimental and maybe even a little socially vulnerable when it comes to possessions, objects can be both repositories of memories and an elaborate form of self-expression. For some of the things I own I love the fact that I know its complete history, imagine the people who designed and made it and talk about them proudly to friends like an expert from Antiques Roadshow while they feign interest and change the subject. I had heard that in some Asian cultures people on reaching 60 started offloading their possessions out of courtesy to their children and lived more simply, with fewer things around them and without the responsibility of being custodians of beautiful objects and so I concluded that ridding myself of as much as possible was the right path to take. Ten days before the move, on the spur of the moment, we decided simply to sell as much as we could, our book collections, our furniture and most of Mary’s clothes. Almost daily we had a slightly world-weary individual appear in our apartment with a notebook scrutinizing what we had and what it was worth and then entire walls of packing boxes were being loaded up into van’s or cars, or our movers were being reinstructed to deliver some items to auction houses before the journey to our home Upstate.
Our movers were from the Baltic region and had extraordinary energy. It took no time before they had assessed our packed boxes critically despite my building them for weeks in advance and announced that it would cost me another 1,500 dollars as I had predictably misjudged the amount of packages and then told me directly, almost threateningly, that they expect a tip of 30% forcing a visit to the bank and an uncomfortable pocket full cash which I carried around resentfully for much of the day. We got off to a bad start, both their truck and my car received a parking ticket from an intransigent traffic warden who resisted my arguments and expressions of frustration and so added yet more to the cost of the move.
The plan was that I would leave for our upstate house earlier in my car and wait to help them unload and instruct them where to leave the boxes. I had positioned a GPS device within the packages allowing me to track the movement of the truck so I would have some notion of when they would arrive. This would be the cause of some alarm later in the day when I saw that the truck was still in Manhattan at 5.00 pm and they had a three-hour drive ahead of them and so I was already anxious about how late and poorly lite the move into our house would be. My worries were confirmed when they arrived close to 9.00 pm on the kind of pitch black night that is only known to country dwellers and I was already tired when they viewed the steep and muddy pathway into the house. They made it clear who was in control and spent inordinate amounts of time huddled in the truck where I saw them smoking and laughing in the darkness under the orange overhead cabin light and with the brittle stars of the night sky casting a cold light over the field above us.
Eventually they started bringing boxes inside, the goodwill of the original tall mover had gone, when I first met him earlier that day in New York he was projecting efficiency and professionalism while his shorter helper was so quiet I concluded he didn’t speak English. Now the roles had reversed, the taller one was making sarcastic comments about the size and weight of the boxes and the difficult nature of the move while the shorter, was playing good cop, and lifting the heaviest pieces alone down the bank. He would emerge with a smile and make admiring comments about our house while catching his breath, hands on hip like a prospective purchaser but it was clear that he was overcompensating for the mood of his sullen partner. Eventually the cash tip was handed over, not quite 30% but still a significant amount of money and I saw them sitting again in the truck for a while and I turned out the house lights to go to sleep. A little later the porch was a chair which should have been dropped off at the auction house, I didn’t care about this minor lapse, but it typified the attitude, they must have quietly snuck down and placed it there. I woke early and started cleaning the mud that they had left throughout and rearranged the boxes and furniture, all in a slight daze as I sleep poorly alone in the countryside always conscious and a little fearful of the night noises around me.
The next day I picked up Mary in Hudson and took her for dinner, our first night without a home in the city and a new life in the country. Arriving at the house in the semi darkness I saw a large form on our pathway, at first in the dim light I thought it was a human baby but then saw it was a very large dead bird, a pheasant or a turkey with its prehistoric neck and empty gaze, I jumped to the conclusion it had been placed there by an angry neighbor – a ritual warning but then, more hopefully, that it had been just hit by a car and found its way through the fence, either way it was it was an unhappy omen I concluded as I picked it up with a shovel, distressed and surprised about its weight, and threw it on a heap away from the house. The next morning it had gone, taken by one of our mysterious night creatures; a wild dog, a bear?
I had plenty of time to think about leaving the city in our home Upstate with nothing to distract me but the sound of the wind scaping though the trees and the blackness of the forest. On one occasion during my walk I heard the sound of a dog furiously barking some way off in the dense woods leading me to retreat as it implied an encounter that I would not want. However, for much of the summer we have strayed back in the city, housesitting for friends, mainly downtown, and on one occasion in the UN tower with views across the East River and onto the art deco “Pepsi Cola” sign which casts a red spell over the cityscape.
I’m writing this on the twenty third anniversary of 9/11 and from an apartment close to when we were living in Greenwich Village at the time of the attack. There is an almost 280 degree view from my desk and with this perfect blue sky it feels exactly like it did that on that day but now with an awkward stillness and mood of expectancy, irrationally I sense the possibility of imminent danger hanging over the city, not that any of the young residents would notice as they pack the bars and cafes on the street enjoying the last warm whispers of summer in the air. What is racing through their minds? Walking down along the Hudson to see the laser memorial which was largely ignored by the throng of twenty years olds jogging in sportswear or cycling, I heard the term “Finance Bro’s” several times to describe some of these young career optimists who are living uneasily in this liberal democracy, they use this city as a playground, and I hear many have inclinations to vote for Trump. I caution myself not to sound cynical towards youth or adopt the standard complaints of the elderly, every generation critical towards the preceding ones, claiming that their youth in the city was at the best time to be there.
jnmanson 