2002-09-02 - 10:01 a.m.
I love Labor day. As holidays go, it has a lot to recommend it. No presents to buy, meals to cook, services to attend, costumes to make, myths to believe in. Just a day off work. It might also be national moving day. I've seen more moving trucks around town this weekend than I usually see in a month, and it brought back memories, because I moved here to State City on Labor day weekend myself, nineteen years ago.
The first time I arrived in this city on my own was much earlier than that. I was sixteen when I talked my parents into letting me take the train from Dismal Seepage into the city to visit my friend and her husband. They were probably nineteen or twenty, but they were married and that was probably why my parents thought they were suitable chaperones. To understand the magnitude of this trip, you have to realize that there was more at stake than just the cost of a four-hour train trip. I aspired to live in the city, but everyone I knew was afraid of the city, and all I had ever heard were horror stories: you will get robbed, you will get lost, the city is full of bad people."The city will eat you alive" my father told me. I also knew it was full of things I wanted, and regardless of what I heard, I wanted to find out for myself. But it was not casually that I set out for my first trip into the big city.
On the train, I sat by the window and pulled out a magazine from my bag. A leering old guy sat down next to me, and kept eyeing my legs in the short skirt I was wearing and looking at every page of the magazine. "You like them short skirts?" he kept saying. I just kept saying "NO" until finally he gave up with the conversational gambits and left me alone. Proud of myself for handling the first bad guy so well, I grabbed my suitcase when the train pulled into State City and went walking the long echoing corridors of the old Union Station. If I ever had a Mary Tyler Moore moment, it was that one: walking along, swinging my little suitcase, looking up at the high ceilings of the biggest building I had ever seen, and thinking "Look at me. I'm a grown up!"
That feeling didn't last long. I met my friends and we had a great evening, and they made me a little bed on the fold out couch in their tiny third floor apartment. But the next day, they had to go to work, and I would be alone to amuse myself in the big city. I went downtown with Peggy, who worked at a big convention center, and then decided that I would go shopping. Having absolutely no idea where I was or where anything else was, I did what I thought you did in big cities. I called a cab. When the cab pulled up in front of the convention center, I said in my most sophisticated, voice, "Take me to the Jones Store, please." The cab driver looked at me incredulously, and said, "Really?" I was immediately infused with doubt. What had I done wrong? But I said, "Yes, that's where I want to go." And so I rode, around the corner to the Jones Store. I'm sure my surprise must have shown on my face, and the driver could barely contain his amusement. I paid with as much dignity as I could muster, and turned to go into the store. Luckily I was not too challenged by the revolving door. I had seen them in the movies, and felt very urbane as I watched for an open space and scooted in the slot, babystepping into the store. But the biggest challenge was still to come. The escalators. I had never before in my life seen or riden on an escalator. And as I shopped on the large open first floor of the big department store, I kept watching the escalator out of the corner of my eye. Watching to see how people got on and off, where they put their hands. Little kids were riding on the escalator, and old people....it can't be that hard. It wasn't that I was physically afraid of the escalator, but I was terribly afraid of looking stupid on the escalalator. I was afraid of making a misstep and lurching forward, so that all the people in the Jones Store would know that I was not one of them. I felt like I had Dismal Seepage stamped on my forehead. Finally, with pounding heart, I gave it a try. I stepped on the first step with only the smallest wobble. Not enough to notice. I'm cool. By the end of the day, I was hopping on and off the escalator with aplomb.
I think I had forty dollars to spend and I was supposed to have been looking for school clothes, and instead I bought some big city stuff. Black patent leather shoes that tied with ribbons, and a long hunk of fake hair, called a "fall" that raised my glamour quotient considerably when I went back to school in Dismal Seepage.
But the whole trip, I barely slept at all. Because the city never really sleeps, it just slows down. And I lay there awake on the fold out couch, listening to the sound of sirens in the night, and wondering what was going on. In a small town, the sound of sirens is so rare and so alarming, that even in the night people get up to go see what is going on. So I lay there wondering if there was a fire, or someone was dying, and if anybody cared. Wondering who was being eaten alive.
Fast forward fifteen years. I am moving, at last, from the small college town where I have lived for most of that time, to State City. I have dropped out of the graduate studies program in which I have toiled for the last two years. I had a garage sale, and said good-bye to my friends. The relationship that kept me here has ended, and every possibility has been played out. I have spent my last two hundred dollars on renting a twenty-foot (because that was all they had) U-Haul truck, and loaded all my earthly possessions inside.
The truck is so big and so old that I am just barely strong enough to turn the steering wheel. On the day we are to move, I am wearing overalls and have my long hair in braids. My son is twelve, and he is perhaps a little bit excited about the trip, but his overall emotion is anger at me. He didn't want to leave his friends and his school, right on the cusp of seventh grade. We climb into the cab of this enormous truck probably looking quite a bit like two children running away from home.
It would be the first time I had ever driven on a freeway or in city traffic. And I was about to do it in a twenty-foot truck that I could barely steer. To say that I was terrified would be an understatement. But I can also be very stubborn, and I knew there was no other way to get there, and that I had to do it. And I did, with my stomach in knots and my heart pounding, all the while talking to Cary and trying to calm his fears.
We were going to move in with my mother for a while until I got a job and found a place to live. And so we unloaded my furniture into her garage, with the help of my siblings who all showed up to welcome us. And then we all cleaned up and went to a Jazz festival held in a big park. And it was then that I felt the huge sense of excitement and relief and awe. Here I am in the big city. I live here now.
In those early months, I loved it so much, I would just drive around and soak up the energy of the place. I loved the stupid horse carriages, and the boys break dancing on the street corners. I loved the weird characters, like the guy dressed up like an Indian who introduced himself to the manequins in the store windows. I even loved the little bit of danger, that feeling of being urban and gritty I got when I lived in a less than desireable neighborhood.
I was thinking recently about how much my perceptions have changed over the years. I have traveled and seen some truly big cities. I've come to realize that even though State City is spread out and hard to drive in, it is not really very urban. It is really more of a collection of suburbs full of people with provincial attitudes. And I have grown tired of living so close to so many people and their many cars. We have been defeated by the city government in trying to save our neighborhood from the developers, and will probably face further defeats. In short, I am disillusioned with this city. And I suppose that happens, but I wish I felt differently about the place I lived.
I'm leaving the door open, in my mind, to possibility. Maybe a new city someday. We keep talking. But never, ever, another twenty-foot U-Haul.
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