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30 for 30. Or maybe 60 for 30??? A photographic chronicle of 30 years of my adult life. Part One. Probably.

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Buckle in.  This is going to be a long one.  Thirty (who are we kidding) maybe 60 pictures for 30 years of life since I left home. If you know me, and I think you do, all 15 of you who read this thing know that I am an insistent chronicler of my life and here, here’s ALL of that. Well, not all of it. We don’t have enough time for that. NO ONE has time for that. But let’s say a bunch of pictures for a cluster of time.

In 1989, when I was 12 years old, and we had just sailed into the heart of darkness, the school I went to gave us these t-shirts that said “class of 1995.”  1995 seemed as far off as Mars.  1995.  The year that would never come.

We blinked an eye and 1995 was there.  These little kids were crossing a stage, receiving a high school diploma and proceeding out into the world.

I’m very prone to introspection and usually do it on this blog.  I guess this is a time of introspection.  When I sat down to write this all out, I thought I could just go with a laundry list of complaints. Well, I didn’t go to the undergraduate college I wanted to and wasn’t happy as a young person.  I moved to DC even before college was over, thinking that was the answer to whatever was going on with me, but that didn’t work out the way I wanted it to.  I tried Europe again, but that didn’t work out either.  One day when I was about 30 years old, I looked around at this forgettable job I had, and I thought — how am I going to form friendships or a start a relationship?  How was that going to work?  Was that ever going to work, when I was in this place that made me so unhappy.  In 2009, I thought — this is my chance.  I need to take a huge risk.  It could pay off or it wouldn’t but I had to at least try.  And it paid off.

When I look back on these 30 years adult life, I can’t get over how incredibly messy it’s all been.  How many seemingly insurmountable obstacles I had overcome and how many insurmountable obstacles I wasn’t able to overcome.  As one of our church songs says, with our backs against the wall, you made a way.  For 22 years of my adult life, I wasn’t a believer, so it was all on me.  But I kept going.  A way always seemed to appear.

Passing this 30 year mark makes me think about how many things I desperately wanted to work out and they just didn’t.  How many times I had to just walk away from things that I had worked really hard to get.  And how easy it was to just restart your life, believe it or not.

Another thing I realized as I compiled this entry is how much of this seems impossibly glamorous.  I talked my way into some pretty rarified rooms, but I spent the majority of my life thinking that these rooms weren’t that rarified and I guess I had gotten into the lower part of the rarified.  I had gone to the White House for work but THEY had been invited to the Christmas party at the White House.  I had seen the president but they had SPOKEN to the president.  

The thing I’ve learned is that people who look down on people that way are not good people.  That might sound trite and naive and people might question why it took me so long to come to that realization, but come to it, I did.  I’m not saying that the people I’m around now are perfect, but they’ve gone through the pain in their lives and come out on the other side better and more at peace with the world.  At our recent church retreat, the light went on the dashboard of my car indicating that one of my tires was low on air.  A dear church friend came over and refilled my tires with air.  He’s a person who hasn’t been in any rarified rooms and it absolutely does not matter, but again, who cares?  Why do we even evaluate a person’s worth based on something that is so stupid?  What good is it going to do you when the air is out of your tires to hear that someone went to the White House Christmas party?  Nothing exactly like that happened to me when I was in DC, but things that were pretty close to it.

I guess more than anything, when you look at this entry, you’d think from the pictures I took that it was all smooth sailing for me, but I can promise you, it really wasn’t. 

On the topic of the hard times, one day in church, our pastor said that we wouldn’t be able to recognize the good times if we didn’t have the bad times and I’ve certainly had my share of those, but what I noticed, is that the bad times usually result in good times following.  I didn’t like high school, but that pushed me out into the world and made me seek out bigger and better things, rather than becoming a townie still going to the same four boring bars over and over again and standing in a backyard, reliving my glory days when I ruled high school. Then again, that was never going to be my future anyway.

I thought my life would get better when I went to college.  I looked around at everyone at college and I could not understand these people.  Everyone was so dark and sarcastic.  And everyone had to drag everyone else for the music they listened to.  I still remember how a kid trashed everyone for liking Pink Floyd’s song Comfortably Numb.  That was something that was pretty prevalent there.  

I can’t help feeling though, some nostalgia for that time in my life.  There’s this revival of 90s dorm room decor nostalgia.  People are actually hiring interior decorators to decorate their kids dorm rooms now, which is… weird.  Everything for the ‘gram, I guess.  College kids in the 1990s, we were broke, so we just decorated the rooms with what we had.  We glued pictures to the walls.  We had crazy technology set ups.  We worked with what we had.

Back then, people weren’t documenting things to the degree they are now.  Well, ALMOST everyone wasn’t documenting things to the degree they do now.  As part of working for the yearbook, we photographed the students dorm rooms.  It has this time capsule kind of feel to it, rooms long gone, lives that have moved on from this moment, captured in amber forever.

1990s dorm room decor at it’s finest:

I’ve talked a lot about what a seismic shift Denmark was for me.  It was great, horrible, life changing and life ruining in a way.  Just like everything else in the last 30 years, I didn’t know what it all meant until much later on.

Again, going with my tendency to document absolutely everything, I photographed Albertslund, this planned community near Copenhagen.  This was the view of the dorm I lived in at the time and the smokestacks of the power plant that also served as a night club:

Recently as I drove up to New Hampshire with some friends for our church retreat, we started listening to music just to pass the time.  I learned long ago not to play my music for people because they would tune out or not like it, so I usually refrain.  

Alas while we rode to the retreat, I felt like I had found a receptive audience, so I played “You’re Not Alone” by a band named Olive.  When I was in Denmark, this type of music called Trip Hop was popular.  Olive is a trip hop band.  I’ve listened to this song on every device I have ever had that plays music.  It was the background music to the whole Denmark experience.  

YouTube has a short clip of the band performing the song on the British countdown show Top of the Pops.  The video hits every single 90s thing.  When I watch it, every emotion from that time returns to me.  

I was trying to find a really 1990s Europe photo but Denmark has looked the same since the 16th century. But then I remembered I had this photo, which I have shared up here before.  This man was a tour guide who told us about socialist Copenhagen and he was a masters student at the time.  You can’t deny that he looked incredibly cool.  I can just imagine the guy’s life at the time, just cool AF.  

This man oozes 1990s Euro cool:

1998 was a rough year for me because I returned to the US and had a kind of reverse culture shock.  And I didn’t understand why things had felt normal for a half a second and now I was back at this place I didn’t like. I know I shot some photos, but they are lost to the sands of time. I guess this started my tendency to put the camera down when I was upset.  

I did pick the camera back up when what I would call the first part of the wilderness years started. I went to study in Krakow that year at the Jagiellonian University, in this language program they had, to learn Polish, because heretofore, I spoke the language like a middle schooler. I couldn’t really write in the language and couldn’t really read in it that well. It was something I felt like I should do. It would be strange if I couldn’t speak the language that my whole family spoke natively.

I took a class where we toured the city as part of a very cool art history class. The teacher was a curator at the Wawel castle, the traditional royal caste in Krakow. We continuously wandered the city and saw all the sights there but occasionally had classes up there. I remember rushing up to class there one day, looking up at Wawel, thinking how cool it was to be able to do this.

Here are some views I captured at the time:

I also managed to unearth a couple of pictures from the oft mentioned wilderness years, including the esteemed Hotel Olkusz, in the jewel of Lesser Poland, the town of Olkusz:

Hotel Olkusz has (or had) this kind of gritty Polish socialist architecture, as did this beauty I photographed in Kielce in Southern Poland:

The wilderness years also involved meeting this character, scoutmaster and priest Pogodny Orlik, or for those of you not fluent in Polish, the Benevolent Eagle. Yes. One of those funny Polish train encounters:

The next year was a bit better.  I didn’t want to finish college.  I was bored and didn’t want to study anymore.  I went to talk to my college advisor and he told me get my GPA back up so I could apply to be an intern in Washington DC.  

Amongst my internship class, I felt like an outsider, my sort of accustomed position. I was never “in” with anyone. There because I was good academically, but not necessarily accepted. I look back on it now and I was sort of a ridiculous person in that group but maybe we’re all ridiculous at that age. I definitely stuck out.

As far as my professional life, I loved what I was doing. I got to work in the policy office of the Voice of America with a group of people who set me up so well for professional life, people I was able to continually go back to for job recommendations and help time and time again. I also got to meet some very influential people and just see what work like that looked like from the inside.

Of course I have all of the average DC photos and over time, that evolved, but I also got some really funny ones when I was first there. Here’s a few from the institution known as Drag Brunch. Oh Drag Brunch.

Pictures:

And you can’t be in DC without seeing a man dressed as cocktail sauce. Yes. I said what I said.

Oh and this one is a picture I took of Steve Forbes at a campaign event during one of his quixotic runs for the presidency. Honestly, I miss the days where BORING people ran for president. The event had it’s own kind of humor to it, with the Forbes family going up on this stage every hour, with Steve telling the same canned jokes and everyone getting a card with Mrs Forbes’s recipe for beef stew. Old Steve was advocating for a flat tax and all the traditional Republican platform items. A classical Republican.

Here’s Steve in all of his 2000s glory:

“I can’t believe that it’s you and you and your friend Steve. Doo doo doo ta doo, Steve. Doo doo ta doo too doo, Steve.” I bet that jaunty little tune was inspired by Steve Forbes. In fact, I know it was.

My real association with Washington starts in 2000. Nothing, and I mean nothing prepares you for life after college and the feeling that you’ve completed everything you have to do in your life and now, you are out into nothing. I had this feeling of total drift after college. What helped with Herman being there was that he actually understood what that all felt like, how adrift I felt.

DC was the time in my life where I really saw that the outside and the inside were not equal.  My outside life was as glamorous as could possibly be.  Here I was seeing every important politician in America at that time.  On the outside, I was thriving.  The inside though, was another story.

I felt like a building with a beautiful exterior, but a completely destroyed inside, barely holding it together.  More often than not, it was me alone in Maryland avenue, with my Milano cookies, wondering where everyone was off having fun.  

I think the photography I did at that time reflected that.  I photographed famous politicians.  I photographed all kinds of weird things.  Interior.  Exterior.  

I’ve written about this many times on this blog, how I saw the politics show and I’ve also probably mentioned how incredibly out of place I felt in this whole thing. Recently, my dear friend Amy was asking us where we were when we were 23. She already had a family of four and was making her way in the world with that. She turned to me and I said — oh I was already on Capitol Hill, reporting. I saw the reaction of the other people in the room, like a bolt of electricity had passed through them. I followed it up immediately by saying how I’d be on C-Span all the time and how one day, I was wearing a brightly colored shirt, in this SEA of gray suits and how it looked like I was this flash of bright color. And how one time, I was at a press conference at the White House. It was a BIG DEAL and the only thing you could see on C-Span was the back of my head. Proof, I guess that I had been there.

When I did my mega scan job of my photos in 2020, I discovered this photo, that has always been one of my favorites, though I had long forgotten where it was taken. It was taken with my Lomo spy camera that I carried everywhere with me at the time. It has this jarring, sort of Mad Men-esque feel to it, like the Don Draper silhouette falling during the intro to the show:

Here are some politicos I photographed. I’ve featured these pictures up here before, but hey, who doesn’t want to flex about the time they photographed a fresh faced Jeff Flake!!!! JEFF FLAKE!!!!

Oh and of course we cannot leave out foreign policy titan Zbigniew Brzezinski. The Zbig. The Zbig show. My graduate school professor Dr Michael Sodaro had once worked for the Zbig and said to me once that all us Polish people want to meet him. My brother in Christ, we Polish people have ZERO representation in the media. ZERO. On screen, we are portrayed as scientists or maids and occasionally criminals but nothing really in between. Our boy had the papacy for a while, but other than that????? Nothing. So when one of us becomes the national security advisor for Jimmy Carter, we are going to gloat about him. We are. And don’t try to stop us.

The Zbig, when he crossed in front of my camera. Pictures I have shared before, but fitting for this life retrospective, I guess:

The impetus to take most of these pictures was mine. I mean I got hired to photograph the Zbig, but the rest of it was kind of driven by my insistent documenting of everything around me.

I was pretty prolific in those days and in the days of film, that was kind of difficult. A lot of these pictures were shot on this super cheap Konica 100 film that I used to get in bulk for $1 a roll. Then I would go to Costco with Herman and get the photos developed for some other small amount of money.

Pretty soon after I moved to DC and got really into the photography, I looked at my photos and realized I wasn’t taking pictures of the obvious stuff anymore. I was photographing the weird stuff and I kind of liked that more. Sure the Capitol is pretty at sunset, but there were so many other things that I could photograph that were equally interesting. Were they traditionally beautiful? No. But I kind of loved them and much later on, I realized that I had this treasure trove of images from pre gentrification Capitol Hill.

I think my friends at the time could sense that I was this insistent documenter. One day a friend called me and goes — gather your cameras. They are tearing a building down across the street from my house. I mean of course. Of course I am heading right over:

I also got a picture of the newspaper boxes with the newspapers from September 11. A sad reminder of that time:

Here are a couple more pictures I particularly love, so weird and random in their subject matter. What is particularly interesting that they don’t look like they were taken in Washington. They are just random things that had caught my attention:

Around 2003, I put the camera down.  I went from documenting every second of my life to very sporadically taking pictures in that time, maybe just a couple of times a year at best.

I had gone back to graduate school that year.  My mental health had taken a dive and graduate school was supposed to solve all of that and it solved nothing.  It made things worse.  

Again, I cannot even express how out of place I felt in that graduate school. I looked around and saw people who had been to prestigious universities and even the Ivy League and here I was, with my little political science degree from nowhere college. I wasn’t sure how I had even gotten into this school. I think it had more to do with my political reporting experience than it did my grades in undergrad.

From the start, I was outmatched academically and socially. These people had done the big stuff. They were on the big tracks to work in the big jobs. I sat there and wished I had the confidence these people had. I spent a lot of time wondering what I was even doing there.

I don’t know why I put the camera down during those years.  Maybe I thought it would be a distraction while I studied?  Some part of me though was just tired of hearing the same things over and over again.  Anyone can take a good picture.  You want to be a successful photographer??? Shoot weddings.  Your pictures don’t have people in them.  And on and on and on.

I kept sort of looking for people in DC who in hindsight were free spirits, like myself. Back then, I wouldn’t have put myself into the category of a free spirit. I saw myself as super goal oriented and career oriented, but I probably gave off a free spirit vibe. As I have mentioned before, my be-sainted brother in Christ, Professor Michael J. Sodaro told me that I was too much of a free spirit to be in that graduate program. “We train bureaucrats here, not poets,” Dr Sodaro said to me at the time. I wish I had believed him at the time.

Truthfully, I kept thinking — I mean you talk about work and school during work and school time, but you are just yourself outside of school, right? You are yourself as a human outside of all of that. You have hobbies, you have weird special interests. You aren’t a political science textbook outside of work. But most of them were. The outside went right to the core. At the time I thought there was something wrong with me but I now realize that those people defined themselves by their jobs and this feeling of power that Washington DC gives people. Suddenly, these people that we had just seen on television was right in front of us and that goes to your head pretty quickly. At least it went to my head for a while. And it also went to the heads of my peers.

I do have a couple of photos from 2003 from when I went to Denmark to see Thomas and Allan but nothing much else.

Denmark in 2003, or maybe 1603:

Like I said, I had put the camera down during this time period. There are scant photos of that time in my life, my room in that little house I shared with the cats on Foxhall road in Georgetown. No documentation of my bedroom or the living room that I spent the majority of my time studying in.

That year, I took a class with Peter Reddaway, a world renowned expert on the history of the downfall of the Soviet Union. That sounds like a lot of fun. No it really doesn’t and it wasn’t. I remember spending hours reading a paper on the differences between Sovietology and regional studies. I also had to write a paper comparing and contrasting the different planned economy to capitalist economy transformation programs that were employed after the fall of the Soviet Union. Those were the days, as Archie Bunker would have said. Needless to say, photography was about the furthest thing from my mind then.

I really did feel like in that time in my life, everything had gotten away from who I really was. I was trying to be something else, but it didn’t really feel right. Again, I had put the camera down, because my life was endless rounds of reading, writing, sitting at this weird little job I had at the time, sleep, aimless TV watching and going to Five Guys with Herman. There wasn’t a ton to look at or do, no interesting places to go, no time out in the world. Everything felt so sterile and boring. I remember having to tell myself all the time — you are in graduate school now. Ok, you are doing this now. It really felt like it didn’t fit though.

I did get the chance to study at the College of Europe as a summer study abroad. Because of my rapidly deteriorating mental state, the significance of getting to study in this place was completely lost on me. We were a cohort of maybe ten people who got to study there. There was a class the year before and the year after and then they just got rid of the program. So we were part of this tiny sliver of Americans that had ever even studied at this college, which was basically a training ground for EU bureaucrats. Eurocrats, if you will.

Now I didn’t really realize this at the time. At the time, I thought that I had just kind of applied and gotten in because they had to fill spots and hey, there I was to fill said spot. In no way was this remarkable to me or did it even merit a reaction. I was a seat filler. Nothing more, nothing less.

What’s interesting about these photos is that I had forgotten about them and they kind didn’t see the light of day until I scanned them during the pandemic.  Brugge was really beautiful.  I had completely forgotten that we had this final dinner for the program that was apparently very fancy:

A couple of Brugge views:

Of course we did the compulsory trip to Brussels to see how Euracracy up close. Here’s a picture I found of the European Parliament I rediscovered during the great scan project of 2020:

One discovery I made during the pandemic was that my beloved Lubitel had a roll of film in it, that had at that point been in there for 16 years.  I knew what the pictures were of, of a day on Foxhall road in Georgetown, where I lived when I was in graduate school, on a snowy day.  I remember the day I took the pictures, that I was home, doing some school work.  I saw my downstairs roommate while I was out taking the pictures.  Crazily, I remember thinking that I wouldn’t look develop the pictures from the camera for a long time.  I didn’t realize I would be living in another city, doing another job, living another life by the time I developed the pictures.  

Pictures that sat in my Lubitel for 16 years:

2005 was the first I guess watershed year.  I finished graduate school. And my dad lost his job in 2005.  I started the long road to fixing my mental health. 

I cannot express what a huge blow it was to all of us that my father had lost his job. It was completely, completely shocking. But what happened as a result, the changes it brought to us and the extreme improvement and change it brought to our lives, I cannot even express.

Because of my dad losing his job, I moved home for a bit to help out. Before that, I went to a language course in Montreal, to learn French.

I loved studying French.  I sat in the classroom, just absorbing what I was learning.  That was really special.  I learned so much in that month and the school was exactly like the one I would end up working in for almost seven years.  I should have taken it as a sign then that I should be a language teacher, but with my dad losing his job, other more pressing matters needed to be dealt with first.

Again, this was a time when I wasn’t documenting my daily life. I really wasn’t quite there yet to pick up the camera yet. I took pictures when I would travel, but even then, not a whole lot. Maybe I just wasn’t ready yet to dive back into the photography. There wasn’t even really a whole lot to photograph around me anyway.

I met two great friends during the program. One is an absolutely brilliant doctor now and the other was a simple farm boy from a shire. I was pretty high on myself and my fancy pants degree in International Relations. The farm boy tells me one day that it seems really strange that I dress like an art student and not some boring DC bureaucrat. Fair enough.

So the pictures from that year are from Montreal. Kind of the highlight, I guess:

I guess 2006 and 2007 were kind of rebuilding years for me.   They were these weird in between years where nothing much happened and I guess that was ok.  Enough things for the time being.  

In those years, I mainly took pictures when I traveled.  I didn’t have a digital camera of any kind yet.  I was using the film camera but really sporadically.  I went on a trip to Belgium and Germany.  Belgium wasn’t that much fun but Germany was a ton of fun.

Pictures from Germany that have never really seen the light of day. UNTIL NOW!!!!!!!

I also got a little writing job in 2006, in New York. I think after all the turmoil of the past few years, all the things that had happened, it was ok to be in a nice, low stress situation. I wrote about private equity, learned a lot about finance and generally tried figure out what was next and what my future held. It would be a while until I figured that out.

The job was fortuitously located in the Graybar building in New York, an underrated gem of a building connected to Grand Central Station. I have a real soft spot for the Graybar building, still. In the years that have passed and it’s been almost 20 years since then, I have passed by the Graybar building multiple times since I left that job and I always think about what has happened since I worked in the building, all that has come and gone in the intervening years. I’ve even walked by there with Arturo and his lovely wife Juliana and it’s absolutely insane to me that I was walking in the same place in 2006 and in 2020, I would be walking by there with a guy I had taught almost a decade earlier. The job was nice too, a soft place to land, and in New York, these are hard to come by.

A couple of months after I got the job, my dad had gotten a new job in Massachusetts and my parents were moving there. Interestingly, I didn’t think this was a big deal. It didn’t feel like a transition or anything that would turn out to be significant in the long run. We had moved around so much, even before I was a teenager that another move was something we had gotten used to. Another place, where we’d be visitors, gently tolerated but never really a part of things in a new place.

What also struck me around that time was that after 24 years in New York, a big moving truck came to pack up my parents house carefully to their new house in Massachusetts was that no one was there to say goodbye to us. They still lived in Westchester, a place I had left twelve years prior. I had gone to elementary school, high school and college in New York and yet there were no roots. This didn’t really hit me until much later on. One day somehow randomly I thought about what would happen if I had to leave Boston, how many people I’d have to say goodbye to and how this just seemed like an absolute impossibility. That was how much things would change after we came to Massachusetts.

Somehow though during that period, the Graybar building did prove a very fortuitous place to work to be able to take pictures and I got quite a few good ones of Grand Central Station:

In late 2007, I made the fateful decision to move to Sweden. In retrospect, I really don’t know what to say about this time in my life. The country was cold and dark and the job I got, equally cold and dark. I thought at the time that it would launch me into life, that my life would just magically start finally.

I don’t know if I really regret the whole experience. I could sit here and trash the people I met and the experience I had there, but I’m not going to do that.

I guess it all shapes us along the way, even the bad stuff. What I did learn is that lightning never really strikes twice and that you can’t just put the same elements into a container, shake it around and expect the same results. Life just doesn’t work that way.

There’s no two ways about it that when it didn’t all work out over there, magically, I was devastated. But there was also a part of me that knew one day, the whole thing wasn’t going to matter at all and other than a line on my resume and pictures I took almost two decades ago on a long lost digital camera, it really didn’t end up mattering at all. And for what it’s worth, I retain one very funny friendship with this character named Jouko from Finland and another woman I met there. She visited Boston in 2013 and told me, straight up that she thought the whole thing that happened to me there was really wrong and messed up. At the time, it felt good to hear that, because I felt like it was all my fault. That was another life lesson. Sometimes you fail people. Sometimes people fail you.

One tiny little bright spot in all of this was one night when we were all sent to dinner with these doctors that had come from all over Europe for some big meeting. There was a huge age difference between me and these guys. We spent a couple of nights going to these dinners and I nicknamed this contingent “the minks” after the episode of Golden Girls when they get the minks, but they won’t breed because they are too old. These minks were old and wise and fun to hang out with.

One mink in particular brought to mind a wise old bearded Viking. We sat across from each other in this van on the way to the dinner and I was trying to identify him. He was too pale to be Danish, too well dressed to be Norwegian and too happy to be Swedish. I figured Icelandic, but I wasn’t sure. The mink sat across from me, silent but looking eager to talk. He told me to guess where he was from, on account of the fact that he had to learn all the Scandinavian languages growing up. I correctly guessed Iceland.

We then proceeded to have a completely hilarious conversation, which started with me loudly proclaiming that I loved Iceland and I had only spent an hour in the airport. The earned a laugh from the mink. He asked me if there was a particular shop in the airport that had tickled my fancy. Iceland was just becoming a tourist destination and I think Icelandair had just set up a transfer point through their country to the rest of Europe.

Once we finished giggling, the mink let me in on the Icelandic secret. You see Iceland will make it as cheap as possible to visit their country and then when you get there, they are going to take all of your money. ALL OF YOUR MONEY. He said this in this funny, conspiratorial way that made me believe this came up at the annual all Iceland town hall meeting, where 300,000 people gathered to share secrets and plot their path to world domination. WORLD DOMINATION. And for what it’s worth, the mink was proven correct fifteen years later, when I spent a couple of days wandering the island, with money being syphoned out of my pockets at a rather alarming rate.

It’s been so long since that experience that it’s an anecdote now. I don’t remember everything exactly how it happened, all the slights, all the bad things. It was an episode in my life that more than anything taught me a lot of valuable lessons.

More than anything, more than anything, I learned that when I thought things were really over, they weren’t. This is a shot I took directly after finding out that the whole Stockholm experience was ending. I remember exactly how I felt when I took this picture, really upset and hopeless. I look at this picture now and realize how wrong those feelings were and still are. Life doesn’t work out the way you want, you fail people, people fail you but really, it’s never really over. It’s over when you stop trying. It’s over when you wall yourself off, but life has a way of renewing things and creeping in, creating new pathways for you.

I wish I could say that to the person who took this photo:

Stockholm, for what it’s worth, is a beautiful city and I would have had a vastly different experience being there if I had been able to find some kind of community. People talk about how Swedes are very arms length with people and this was the experience that I had. Then again, I had no real idea what you needed to build community. I really had no idea how you did that.

I also realized that I wanted to make a career change while trying to start a life in another country. That really turned out to be much too difficult.

But like I said, Stockholm is a beautiful city and I do have visions of one day going there again to experience it as a completely different person than I was when I first lived there:

Oh and I also forgot to include this Teutonic looking fellow:

A dear friend came to visit me when I was in Sweden and we took a train to Oslo, just to check out the vibes there. And it was vibes:

By the time I got back to America, I had already decided to quit journalism but I wasn’t exactly sure how that was going to look, what exactly was next.  

I took a job at this journalism sweatshop in New York in a building where people had sewn hats, probably a sweatshop of its own.  I think a lot about how I had zero interest in living in New York as an adult.  It’s all steel and concrete and coldness.  Everyone thinks that New York is the center of the world and yeah, that’s true to a degree but there’s also a huge world around it.  

The time in New York was meant as a pass through, not a destination.  I didn’t see myself there.  I didn’t see building a life for myself there.  I didn’t know what the next stretch was going to look like, but I knew what I didn’t want it to look like.  

I was tired of reporting about things I didn’t care about.  I was also tired of people talking to me in this solid stream of jargon.  I don’t want to have a conversation with a Bloomberg terminal.  I wanted to talk about normal things.  I really hate it when people insist on just a stream of unending jargon.  

The weirdest thing about that job was the big deal they made about the fact that I was a photographer.  It was just ridiculous.  It was brought up all the time, like as if it was some big deal.  A human has a hobby.  Calm down.  I also had this same blog at the time and that was a big deal too for some reason, even though most people never would have been able to find it, it was in a very different format and I didn’t write a whole lot on it, not like now at least.  Despite having gone through a hiring process, having already been a journalist for a while and having some accomplishments in the field, my writing ability was called into question, including hearing one day that my writing was more appropriate for a blog than for a real publication.  I never really understood why having a hobby was such a problem.

At the time, I thought I didn’t fit the mold that they really wanted.  I mean I’ve been called sensitive, artistic, etc.  Now I realize how completely wrong and just foolish those people were.  “I see a person doing something artistic, so they gotta do an artistic job.”  WOW.  What a startling insight.

I think how I felt at the time was really reflected in the pictures I took at the time.  The colors were dark, the subjects were rough.  I remember taking those pictures and thinking they were great but then much later on, seeing how dark and depressing the subject matter really was.  

That job ended in March of 2009.  I wrote a long time ago on this blog about how that happened, so it’s already been covered.  The one thing though that stuck in my mind was how the person in charge there, a person who probably saw herself as being insightful and wise, said that I would be a success at any artistic pursuit.  I mean the fact that I took pictures was so bothersome to them to provoke such a reaction.  Honestly, it didn’t really matter.  The day I walked out of there was the last time I ever did a media job of any kind and I don’t miss it at all.  

Here’s a picture I took on the day the job I had ended:

Generally, the pictures I took at that time were dark. Dark in subject matter, dark in processing and dark in tone. By then I had a digital SLR and a smaller mini camera that I took with me to work every day. Not surprisingly, during the time when I was working at what turned out to be my last job in media, I shot a lot of pictures of New York. Now though when I look back on it, they do reflect the disillusionment I was feeling at the time with everything. At least the camera was still there for me:

Again, while I was living this, it felt like I was going through hell but now, I cannot reconcile this time in my life with what has come to pass since. I went from being so exhausted from that job that I could barely open an eye on the weekend to getting up at 4am to go skiing only about four years later. That fact alone, that I was in a job that was so psychologically tiring that I couldn’t open an eye on the weekend, made me think that I had to make a change. How was I going to build friendships or a community or anything beyond that if I stayed in an environment like that?

That summer, I took a government sponsored sabbatical.  It was the Great Recession and the Obama unemployment was good.  I really did not know what was next.  I spend the summer getting new pictures into my portfolio after acquiring a Canon Digital SLR.  I was off and running with a new camera.  Again, I felt like I was drifting badly at that time and I didn’t know why this had happened until much later on.  Now I call it my summer of soft serve, Cuban sandwiches and stealing wifi from my neighbor at the time. 

I’ve had a few of these wilderness kind of times in my life, where I was wandering and maybe lost but also maybe not lost. I remember the night they announced that Michael Jackson had died and I was down in Times Square for some reason, really late, just wandering around. People were trying to sell tickets to his memorial service, which was super weird, but be that as it may. More often than not, I would sit in my living room, with my computer angled perfectly to get my neighbor’s wifi and I would sit there and edit pictures. I also used to download shows from the iTunes Store. It was messy and weird but I also kind of needed it.

 
You can see from the photos I took that summer in Boston, New York and on a family vacation to Italy that I had lightened. The way I saw the world was much more positive and things were going to be ok, I thought. Sometimes you land in a situation and you have no idea how or why you got there and you really don’t know until much later on why this happened to you. And this was definitely a time like that.

That summer. That summer that ended up changing everything. And yes, that is Victoria Beckham:

Most importantly though, I was back taking pictures again, come what may. That was a good feeling. Pictures and come what may. Were people going to see or like what I had photographed? Didn’t matter. All that mattered was that I was taking pictures again and that I was happy doing it.

That fall, we took a family vacation to Italy, featured in the pictures above.  Then I had to decide what I was going to do.  I was 32 years old and as I had felt since I was 18 years old, I was hopelessly over the hill.  32.  It was over.  I would make an attempt.  It probably wasn’t going to work but I was going to try.  

Every time I walk over to 59 Temple place in Boston, I remember that walk over to Boston Academy of English to check out this class for this little certificate I had to get called TEFL, Teaching English as a Foreign Language.  I didn’t feel hopeless.  I felt nothing.  I had no idea what was going to happen and that was good. For the first time in my life, I had absolutely no expectations.  

I remember sitting in the lobby of the school. I already knew the place was a total mess, but it was glorious mess. It was like a disorganized restaurant with sarcastic waitstaff, where you get the best burger you have ever eaten in your life. The walls in the school were these outdated primary colors. It was dusty and completely disorganized. But I had said to myself after all of this tumult, all of this instability, that if I found a place I liked, I would just stay there. It was time to settle down. It was time to put roots down somewhere. And somehow, this seemed like the right place.

What’s also kind of funny about all of this was that the entry to the Orange Line is right below where the school was and specifically to go to Forest Hills. Also, one of my classmates was from Boston and was always talking about an area called “Jamaica Plain” or “JP.” I had no idea where this even was and no orientation of Boston. Fast forward almost 20 years and I now live in Jamaica Plain. I think about this whenever I go by that area.

I really did not know what I was getting myself into.  But my classmates in the TEFL class were really nice and very different from the people I had known before.  The school was a disaster, but it was also a community. I had spent so many years in these offices where people barely acknowledged Thanksgiving or Halloween and it was just another day in the office. Maybe people dressed up but more often than not, it was a date on the calendar and nothing more. Suddenly, people celebrated this and it was really fun to be around for that.

For me, working in an office was so dry, so profoundly boring that when I got to this place where I didn’t need to do that anymore, it was like freedom. Office life is so monotonous. It’s a nice day. To the office with you!!!! It’s a holiday. Well, too bad. You are going to be staring at a screen all day. I remember when I worked in that media job in New York, that I would stare at a screen all day and then stare at a different screen when I got home. Teaching was wild from the beginning, but it felt like I did something all day. That felt really good.

Was I a natural at teaching?? Absolutely not. Anyone who knows me or has met me in the past decade and a half will be surprised to read this, but I don’t actually consider myself to be a people person. I’m an extroverted introvert. I get energized from being around people, but I really need my personal time. I need my creativity time, my time to learn new things and to just reset myself. Teaching really strengthened my people skills and that was something I really had to grow into.

I’m also one of these people for whom things that are really difficult for other people, those things are easy for me, but the things that come really easily to other people can be nearly impossible for me to understand. Don’t get me started on anything that involves lefts or rights. I also get really laser focused on things I like to do and I can’t really understand why people don’t do this or why they struggle to understand things. I don’t think I am a natural teacher. I think it was something I really had to grow into but that process of growing into becoming a teacher actually showed me how to be a good teacher. I saw my own progress into the job. This is really starting to sound like a term paper or some kind of weird reflection assignment that an undergraduate would have to write. Oh well.

I wasn’t really sure what was going to happen in the TEFL class. All knew is that I was happy going there every day. I loved my classmates and the things we were learning.

Then we had the day when we actually stepped into the classroom for the first time. What was that even going to be? I had no idea, but as soon as I stood up in front of everyone, I knew I was in the right place. I knew that this was what I was meant to do. I could be my own strange self in front of these people and that I could just be myself and people liked that. I could be funny in front of these people. All the things that came after, it was all filled in later. I knew I wanted to be there and everything else would just fall into line.

In a way, I felt like I was one of those people who has a ton of higher education who quits to open a bakery. I always joke that the Boston trajectory, real, is from Harvard to working at Bain & Co or one of the other horsemen of the apocalypse and then you know, opening a bakery. This is real. Look it up. My trajectory was Washington journalism to international relations graduate school to bonkers ESL school where you had to provide your own copier paper. That trajectory. The later years, that I spent working in that school, for a long time, I felt like were just a situation comedy where this straight laced person steps into this goofy environment where everything is upside down, where the patients are running the asylum and goes — this is home. You are home now.

Anyway, we covered a lot of ground here. Sit down and process your emotions after all of this. Part 2 is in the hopper. I promise. We covered a lot of ground. And in part 2, it really gets interesting. And good. And at times terrible. But also good.

Go West. Paradise Is There

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Go West.  Paradise is there.

I think a lot about our family history.  My grandfather started life in Pechora, in Northern Russia, near the Ural Mountains.  He migrated to Poland when he was 12.  He spoke Polish with an accent for the rest of his life.

At age 31, my mother migrated from Poland  to the United States.  I’ve always joked that I needed to go west, to compete our migration around the globe.  

In truth, I had always been fascinated by the west.  I think a lot of Americans are.  Herman had a clock in his office that had the time for Half Moon Bay, California on it.  I remember thinking that one day, he would just move to California. 

For years, I thought the same thing.  Maybe  I should migrate to California.  Go west.  Paradise is there.  

But one day, I got bitten by the Charles River bug and well, in Boston I shall remain.  As I have said many times, Boston was really the first place that felt like home to me.  We were no longer visiting.  We were home.  

I also found this version of America I liked.  I think foreigners look at America as this monolith of Walmarts, F150s, distances measured in miles per freedom eagle and other sundry quirks.  But in truth, a Texan and a New Yorker are from the same country, but they have as much in common as a French person and a Dane.  Sure they speak the same language, but that’s where the similarities end.  In the United States, state to state we don’t learn the same things.  A person from Alabama cannot tell you the name of the high school exam a person from New York takes and vice versa.  

As for my own experience, I lived in the New York version of America for a long time and quite frankly, it just got tiresome.  Endless stupid gate keeping about what a real New York is, how above 125 street in Manhattan is “upstate.”  One time, talking to some mullet sporting “New Yorker” I heard that I didn’t understand the big city ways because I lived “upstate.”  I was in college at the time but my parents lived in Westchester.  Here we were simpleton yahoos chewing on our hay, not understanding the ways of these grand city slickers.  Give me a break. 

Somehow New England was just more welcoming and a lot easier to deal with.  People in Boston are mean but kind.  Honestly I don’t think they are mean at all, but the bar, it is low.  There’s a documentary called on Netflix about the Boston marathon bombing and right at the beginning, a Boston police chief says that in his mind, there are no finer people in the world than the citizens of the city of Boston and every time I watch that, it hits me right in the feels.  Every single time.  

The New England version of things, to me, is to make things available to everyone.  Wachusett isn’t elite level skiing but it’s available to everyone.  I don’t think any other cities that boast a ski resort available via public transportation from the city for $10.  The city is walkable and comfortable.  

It is a very Euro version of things.  Boston looks like Europe and there are these egalitarian ideas floating around.  Are they always executed well?? Not really but there is some kind of effort to make Boston a livable place.  

Somehow though, I still get the itch to explore other places.  I spent years criss crossing Europe looking for something I eventually found in Boston.  Like I wrote on this blog about a year ago, I got it into my head a year ago that I should spend a day in Salt Lake City, Utah.  

What drew me to this location in particular?  Well, they have some of the best skiing in the world and if you ski, inherently, you must have at least one screw loose.  The normies stay inside on days when it’s negative 20 degrees outside.  But the few, the proud, the skiers, we head directly into that, propelling ourselves up and down a mountain until our entire bodies feel like jelly and then sign up to repeat this the next weekend.  I’ve legit booked a ski trip for the next weekend on the return trip from the other one.  

So I guessed that a state full of people who probably do this on a larger scale must be ok to visit.  And somehow I fell in love with it.  There was just such a different vibe to the place.  New York and Boston, I mean that’s basically Europe.   Salt Lake City, that looks like it was built yesterday.  

I got back after my trip last year and did a deep dive into the history of the state of Utah and well, of the Latter Day Saints.  A couple of my friends said I was off to join their church, but honestly, I like coffee too much, they take considerable liberties with accepted biblical doctrine and it took the Baptists 40 years to drag me kicking and screaming through the doors of a church.  

A Baptist I shall stay. 

Unsurprisingly, the very wise couple who run the church I attend said it best.  The pastor said that of course I was fascinated by the American west being the history freak I am.  Pioneers, manifest destiny.  What’s not to love???  I mean I mentioned visiting the LDS in Salt Lake and the pastor told me to sign up for a year long course about the Bible he was teaching. He assured me these two things aren’t related.  His wife also assured me that there was nothing wrong with exploring the history of the LDS, to realize that there were faiths out there that again, stray from accepted doctrine. 

Still my deep dive continued. I watched Under the Banner of Heaven and this slightly off kilter documentary called Murder Among the Mormons, about a forger named Mark Hofmann who use all kinds of dastardly means to create documents related to the founding of the Mormon Church.  The “mild mannered family man” turned sinister when someone he sold documents to threatened to expose him.  I heard someone say once that you have to be aware of the quiet ones, like Hofmann. See a guy like Fred is just about the least likely person to ever be a serial killer because the guy just openly hates everyone. A guy like Fred, he’s never suspect. But a “quiet, unassuming family man.” Yeah. Think twice. The documentary is also chock full of interesting characters with these old fashioned sounding accents.  Many of them have this earnest Mormon look about them.  Clean cut, trusting.  Perfect marks for someone up to no good.  

My favorite figure in the documentary was a guy named Gerry D’Elia.  Jerry introduces himself as “an undesirable” who had been thrown out of college with a .6 GPA.  He’d moved to Utah to ski.  He described himself as a skier who happened to be a lawyer, not a lawyer who happened to ski.  He wasn’t a native, so he enjoyed an adult beverage here and there, by his own admission.  I like to joke and there is a ring of truth about this, that I’m a skier that happens to be a teacher, not the other way around.  I would say this is how I would describe myself.  I work to have the means to go do my hobbies.  Anyway, Gerry seemed like a really fun guy to hang out with.  I googled him and it turned out he had passed away not too soon after the documentary came out.  What a wonderful character to have had in your life.

YouTube is also full of people talking about the LDS and I watched an embarrassing amount of those videos.  Some were people who had left the church and were critical of it.  Other people found the whole spiritual environment in the state interesting and wanted to explore the LDS as an exercise in comparative religion.  

I think I approached all of this from the perspective of a person who is fascinated by how different America is in every way.  Like I said, I’m a Baptist and I love my church and the people in it.  Still, I wanted to go back to Salt Lake City.

It struck me how there seemed to be this western version of America.  Boston and New York are basically Europe.  Florida is wildly colorful in almost harsh way.  The west though, that really is pioneers and manifest destiny.  

I asked around with my friends to see if anyone wanted to join but I really thought that I have to go alone, so be it.  I decided to attach the couple of days out west with a trip to Florida I now make every year to see dear friends who are basically family at this point.  Salt Lake is on its way to Florida, right???  

I booked the plane tickets and right up to my departure, I wondered what I was even doing.  I booked a four day stay at what is rapidly becoming my favorite hotel on the planet, the Little America.  I planned one day of itinerant wandering, one day of church/museum going and one grand adventure.  Then onto Orlando to sharpen my Spanish and have fun with my beloved abuelas.  

My first stop was O’Hare in Chicago, the first city we lived in when we came to America.  Then onto Salt Lake City for I don’t know, vibes???  I sat at the gate to board my flight and still thought — what am I even doing????  What if this is just super weird???

As we were flying into Utah, I saw this expanse of rocks and sand and mountains and I thought — this is the place.  Me and you know, Brigham Young, but I don’t have a beard and a Wikipedia page dedicated to my 57 spouses.  

I boarded the Trax green line, which obviously runs from Commonwealth avenue to the Little America hotel.  Except this time, a lot of the buildings and streets looked familiar from my self directed YouTube study.  I got to Little America and found myself booked into the tower, rather than in the motel looking thing I had been booked into the year previous.  I got to talking to the front desk attendant and she it turned out she had lived in Massachusetts for 20 years.  I ended up with a BEAUTIFUL room with windows on both sides with gorgeous views of Salt Lake and the Wasatch mountains.  I needed rest and I needed food.  

This was the view from my room:

The next morning, I decided to start my trek.  I decided to walk to the University of Utah.  Sure, the locals told me I was crazy for attempting this but I was determined.  Let’s just say me and my knapsack of camera equipment ended up in some weird spots.  At one point, I ended up in the parking lot of some kind of biotech company.  From the parking lot, I saw one of the ten most beautiful views I have ever seen in my life.  Imagine working in this place.  You drive up to work every day, with the most insanely beautiful view from your parking lot and you head inside to deal with emails and people who use phrases like “getting our ducks in a row” and “circle back” in an unironic way.  

The view from a random parking lot in Salt Lake City:

What I realized on that massive walk was that Salt Lake doesn’t boast a ton of crazy architecture but my God, the nature does the talking.  A lot of the architecture is modern, probably owing to the city’s expansion in the past 23 years since the Olympics. 

I walked around the University of Utah for like vibes or something.  Again, super impressive place.  Lots of buildings with names like “Huntsman” and “Eccles.” Huntsman I know from the chemicals company but Eccles is a less familiar name.  What struck me is that these people seem to have boo coo cash but they give boo coo cash to their alma mater.  It struck me that instead of doing stupid things like fly rockets for some strange reason, these people chose to pump money into the university, making it really attractive to potential students and faculty.

Some U of U views:

Oh and of course, some exotic paintings from the U of U Fine Arts Museum:

After endless trekking for hours, I located a Trax train, the cute little streetcar that runs around SLC.  I walked for about 8 hours.  I got on the Trax train and was back to my hotel in 15 minutes.  That’s what I noticed too about Salt Lake.  Everything is 15 minutes by car or 15 years walking.  

Well but of course we’re going to analyze some of the photos I got from my 18,000 step trek around Salt Lake City:

The next day I decided to visit a church in Salt Lake, just to feel something familiar.  I searched and searched for a good church to visit and found one again, a 45 minute walk from where I was staying or 7 minutes by car.  I get there and I’m just observing everyone.  I hear familiar conversations about community groups and church events.  

Now to backtrack here a bit, I’m a part of a church plant in Boston.  A church plant is a new, kind of start up church.  The married couple who run the church, I’ve been dedicated to them from day one and I really want the whole thing to succeed.  And I’ve gotten an extensive education on how church plants work.  As I do with most topics, I share these facts with people.  Do they want to hear about this?  Most of the time, no.  Do I share it anyway??? Most of the time, yes.  

Still though I’m a bit shy in this situation.  I’m unsure of myself but confident it’s going to be ok.  In typical pastor fashion, the pastor of the church is going around introducing himself to everyone and greeting everyone.  I don’t look like anyone this guy knows but he cordially introduces himself.  I go into church plant representative mode and talk about how I go to a church plant and how it’s great they have their own building because our church rents space.  The guy pulls out his phone and says — what’s the name of the church plant you attend??? I tell him and he goes — we’re talking about sending some people to help out at a church plant in Boston.  I’ve been talking to (a person who is a very close friend of mine).  We both start laughing hysterically at this, how we ran across each other.  The service was very beautiful, with the same songs we sing every week.  Afterwards, there was socializing, where we realized we knew a lot of the same people.  Small world, I guess.  

The next day though was the reason why I came, to see the Bonneville Salt Flats.  Of course after my trip last year, I followed a bunch of pages about Utah and they all featured the Bonneville Salt Flats.  It looked insane.  A dried up river bed that turns into a mirror sometimes.  I bought my ticket for my salt flats adventure a while back and was so excited that I woke up an hour before my alarm.  

We were hitting the road at 8am and I kept checking that I had the right day and the right time.  Our tour guide shows up and goes — we only have one other person, so it’s just us three.  

Again, I’m thinking — oh Salt Flats and then back to Salt Lake and to all of my overexcited bubbling over chatter about how awesome of a day it was to anyone who would listen.  And probably to plenty of people who weren’t listening.  But in true adventure trip fashion, it did not turn out that way.  It was waaaaaaaaay better.  

Our first stop was the Great Salt Lake state park, where we saw some incredible nature and I got to stick my hand into the Great Salt Lake.  I would have loved to go swimming in the lake, but I guess I’ll save this fun for next year.  I have a feeling this is about to become a yearly trip.

Great Salt Lake state park views:

I almost forgot to add the copper mine. This is the Kennecott Copper Mine and the smokestack is the tallest structure west of the Mississippi. The smokestack is taller than the Empire State Building.

We drove down this half apocalyptic highway and stopped at the tree of Utah.  Now you gotta understand.  There was no trees to be seen anywhere. But suddenly we were there at this apocalyptic looking expanse, looking at this insane tree sculpture, surrounded by broken concrete looking eggs.  I was wondering where the apes were and the broken down Statue of Liberty.  

Some pictures of the moment when I felt like I had left planet Earth:

My INSANE enthusiasm for this day kept bubbling over during the trip.  I told myself I wasn’t going to post anything until we got to the salt flats but I couldn’t stop myself.  This was all too weird.  

Then we got to the salt flats and I don’t even know how to describe it.  It was this white expanse that looked like dried up water, which it was.  It just looked super surreal.  Just like I like my nature.  Weird looking.  

Did I take an insane amount of pictures of myself at the salt flats? Obviously. Did an almost 50 year old college professor do a cartwheel on the salt flats? Yes. AND I didn’t break my arms.

Dancing on a dried up salty lake bed. 10/10 experience

Did I take a lot of pictures of the salt flats? How long have you been on this blog??? Of course I took a ton of photos.

Here:

This was this never ending day of just wonder.  Next we drove to Wendover, Utah which is actually in a different time zone.  I crossed a time zone in a car.  Unbelievable.  We ate some really good tacos in Wendover and then drove into Nevada for less than 10 minutes.  Oh and Fred is expanding operations into Wendover, having opened a supermarket there.  I took a picture of Fred’s supermarket and sent it to him.  He told me to have a good trip, like the good Boston uncle that he is.

Meet Wendover Will. The most interesting border marker I have ever seen:

Last, but certainly not least, views from the road trip around the state. Mind blowing doesn’t even begin to describe these views:

Now you have to understand. This is pretty much my ideal day.  I LOVE things like this.  There are people who go on vacation to party and shop and get massages and things like that.  That’s my idea of hell.  I mean that might be an exaggeration but I love ending up in utterly strange places and looking around and just being amazed by where you’ve ended up.  Going to West Wendover, Nevada was just about the funniest thing that happened to me this year.  I don’t really like luxury things.  I think I’ve realized that.  I like simple things, like Krispy Kremes and eating tacos in small towns in Nevada.  I can’t explain this to people.  

To quote my 8 year old best friend, this was definitely one of the best days of my life.  Now my 8 year old best friend said this when he was four years old, that a day before spent eating popcorn and playing with balloon animals and then building a fake staircase out of blocks.  There’s nothing like a day like that in your life.  He had about 1300 days to choose from at that point, but he chose that day. I have considerably more days to chose from and well, this was definitely one of the best days of my life.

In my eyes, going west really showed me that paradise really was there.  It’s my little spot that I enjoy.  It’s a spot I hope to visit many times over the next couple of years.

Don’t Call Me Ishmael — Or Alternatively, That Feeling We Cannot Describe 

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Some years ago — never mind how long precisely — having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sign up for surfing lessons.  I found myself growing grim about the mouth.  It wasn’t necessarily a dark November in my soul, more like a slightly rainy April.  Jamaica Plain doesn’t feature any coffin warehouses and people don’t generally wear hats as commonly as they used to, so the urge to knock one off of someone’s head isn’t that great.  Cato threw himself on his sword.  I threw myself on a surf board.  We are not the same.

All right.  The Moby Dick paraphrasing portion of the broadcast is now done.  I’ve discovered that if you paraphrase Moby Dick, people think you are smart.  I’ve made a career of tricking people into believing I’m intelligent.

Notwithstanding, I am not here to do any literary criticism.  I am here though to talk about my recent water adventures and further, my snow adventures, of which long time blog readers will know there are a multitude detailed here on these pages.  But today we will be discussing sea adventures and tangentially snow adventures, but mostly water adventures.

Like Ishmael, I have always been naturally drawn to the sea.  The two places that shaped me in my life, New York and Boston are both great port cites.  There’s just one thing about the water here.  It’s cold.  Very very very cold.  So draw me in, it does not.  And I’ve always regretted that.  I found a way to slide around on the snow that is at times abundant here, but the water I have yet to conquer.  That is until recently.

To paraphrase an intellectual hero of mine, Milo the Chonk, English accented internet cat, she was heartbroken and broke.  Just where I wanted her.  Well, earlier in the summer, the inevitable troubles of life yet again encroached upon the peaceful expanse of my existence and I went to where we all go now when that happens.  The sea.  No.  Like I said.  Don’t call me Ishmael.  I went to Instagram, home of talking cats, ice restocks, foreboding signs of the fall of the empire and as luck would have it, adds for surfing lessons.  In New England.  Yes.  New England.

As all great stories begin, I plunked down the shekels from my purse and off I went to the sea to prove my mettle against it.  Well, first we had to put our wet suits on, which let me tell you, was really no fun at all whatsoever.  Whatsoever.  Did I mention we were in New Hampshire and it was raining?  Winter surfing.  We had a little practice session on the beach before we got going.  Push and pop up.  And off we went into the water.  Intrepid wanderers, the lot of us.

The wet suits were thick so we didn’t feel the cold.  As is my way, I managed to get onto the surf board backwards.  As is my way.  I manage to somehow end up backwards on everything.  But somewhere in the middle of it, I was struck by this feeling that this is as fun as skiing.  We’re there splashing around in that water, just having the best time.

The first time out I carpooled with another local surfer.  I’m ok with driving.  Not like super happy with it, but ok with it but it was a long drive, early in the morning on an unfamiliar highway.  Halfway through the surfing class, we took a break.  I gathered around the vehicle we had taken with my bulging bag of snacks and sundry other things.  We stood and laughed at the magnificent time we were having.  That feeling.  That feeling you can’t capture.  Not the during, but the after.  

After a couple of hours in the water, my lingering skiing shoulder injury started to act up, so I exited the water and laid down on the beach with my surfboard sort of tied to me.  I laid back and closed my eyes and just enjoyed the sound of the surf.  That feeling.  Again, that feeling.

Was I tired after all of this?  Yes.  Were my arms sore.  Yes.  Did I sign up to do it again, almost immediately?  Your are damn right I did.

This time, we were in Nahant Beach.  Now to backtrack here for one second, New England never ceases to amaze me and Nahant, Nahant amazed me.  Yeah, I’ve seen more beautiful beaches in my life, but my God.  This beautiful place just a (relatively) short drive from my house.

Now things can be disappointing when you do them a second time.  Not always, but they can be somewhat disappointing the second time you do them and I thought this would be true for the surfing outing.  The first time was amazing.  I bet the second time wouldn’t be as amazing.  Or disappointing.  Or just not as fun.

But somehow, it was ever better the second time around.  Crazy.  This time, the water was colder.  We weren’t wearing any booties or anything, so we got hit by the water.  The surfing instructor was hilarious.  And I stood up on the surfboard multiple times.  My fellow surfing instruction group mates wanted to get out of the water early, but me, water baby, would have stayed in a lot longer.  As we finished our day in the water, the lot of us headed up the beach to put our surf boards away.  I was struck by something.  That feeling.  That feeling struck me again. 

It wouldn’t be a post without at least a few photos.  Here’s one of me on the day:

As you can see, my smile is rather big and in an incredible turn of events, I concentrated on surfing, rather than taking pictures. I know. CRAZY. BUT, I do have some pictures I’ve taken over the years of other people surfing.

I’m Bad at Being A New Yorker Now — A Retrospective Memoir Told In A Myriad of Meandering Paragraphs 

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Recently, I went on a very pleasant three week vacation with my parents to the Cayman Islands.  It was a lovely return back to the island, after a trying year.  There will be a separate long, thoughtful blog entry about that journey eventually.  EVENTUALLY.

When I got back, I found out I had a bit more time off, so I decided to go to New York for a couple of days.  The trips always have self imposed guidelines.  I have to travel there the cheapest way possible and I can’t spend a ton of money while I’m there.  I have to do the maximum number of free things.  I don’t get a hotel room.  I sleep on my friend’s futon.  We do a two day literal marathon through the city.  And I have to get the cheapest eats possible.  If there is cloth napkin in sight, I am not interested.  

I kinda love doing these trips periodically.  Sometimes I get back from traveling and I still want to travel a little bit, I go to New York.  Every time I go there, I think the same thing.  I have such a complicated relationship with that place.  So complicated.

I came to a realization on my most recent trip.  I really think I am bad at being a New Yorker.  At this point, I much more of a Bostonian than a New Yorker.  I was in and out of New York for 13 years.  Now I’ve been in Boston for 16 years, almost 20 years including the time of my parents living here.  Again, I am so bad at being a New Yorker.  The city is so huge and overwhelming.  On my most recent visit, I got out of Port Authority and I could not get over the lights and the noise in mid Manhattan.  Consistently I cannot believe that I actually grew up in the city.  It’s wild to me because the city is so big and so overwhelming to me at this point.

To reiterate for a third and hopefully final time, I am really bad at being a New Yorker.  This cannot be disputed.  I am so used to Boston’s spaghetti thrown against a wall arrangement of its streets, so I get disoriented in the grid.  I don’t remember the order of the avenues anymore.  I use GPS to get places.  Don’t get me started on the subway.  There is no way I will ever like taking the subway.  I like the T.  It has this kind of vintage charm.  Maybe because I have so many memories from so many corners of this city with so many groups of people that I have come across here.  

I don’t have the same affection for the New York City subway.  It smells bad.  It is incredibly noisy.  In every other city I have lived in, the terminus stations are place names.  In New York, they are streets in different boroughs.  Living in Boston, I have seen or visited every single terminus on the system.  Well, except Bowdoin, but seriously, who has even been to that one?  A couple of years ago, I got bored and went to see the station to make sure it was real.  But in New York, I have no idea where those places are and it makes sense that the stations are in The Bronx and Brooklyn.  Doesn’t make that system any easier to navigate.  

I’m something of a connoisseur of public transportation systems in the world.  If I am going to a new city and I hear there is public transportation system, I look forward to taking it.  New station names, new train types.  I love that sense of adventure.  As I said in another entry, I was shocked by the fact that I would be boarding a green line in Salt Lake City to get to my hotel.  But any sense of adventure in New York really recedes when I get on the subway.

Oh and I had a really funny moment in the city where I compared New York City to Salt Lake City to my friend who I visit in the city.  That’s when I really knew I was in “I’m not a New Yorker” anymore territory.  I told my friend about how Salt Lake City didn’t smell like gasoline, the way New York did.  I told him about how you could see straight to the Wasatch mountains in Salt Lake City.  Wow.  I am so provincial now.  I’m comparing arguably the center of universe to a city 2,000 miles west that was founded by Latter Day Saint pioneers that could not be more different.  

In my greatest tourist moment, my friend got delayed at his chiropractic appointment and  to paraphrase Moby Dick, having little else to interest me in Midtown and a few nickels in my purse, I decided to go to the top of the Empire State Building.  I hadn’t been up there for a while and really hammered home how I need to finally turn in my “New Yorker” card.  

I’ve heard so many times, to an absolutely nauseating degree that REAL New Yorkers don’t go to the top of the Empire State Building blah blah blah.  Strong eye roll.  That is the most iconic skyline in the entire world.  Why would you miss an opportunity to see it from above?  That has always mystified me.  

I paid the money and went up.  Of course there were tourists up there but it was also a kind of overcast, cold day, so I knew the lines wouldn’t be too bad.  There really weren’t any.  Honestly, I felt lucky to be up there and to be able to look at this skyline from above.  

As I’ve gotten out into the world, when I tell people I grew up in Manhattan, people treat it like it’s an accomplishment of some kind.  But truly, where we grow up in an accident.  In our case, truly an accident because it’s where my dad’s boss moved his lab to after it was initially in Chicago.  I could have grown up in Chicago, if life had turned out differently.  We moved to New York when I was five years old.  When you are a kid, you just go where the adults go.  

There is no way to describe what growing up in New York in the 1980s was like if you weren’t there.  During that time, the first seeds of what we all call modern life were planted.  At the same time, so many 1950s things were in their very final days in the city.  All of those grand dame department stores still existed, like A&S, Gimbels, Lord and Taylor and B. Altman.  Macy’s was almost a poor relation to those grand dames.  These were palaces to consumerism and capitalism.  Those stores were beautiful inside.  Now just Macy’s remains, all the other grand dames shut forever.  

Yet though in the 1980s, some mix of forces created an environment that saw the development of what we now call modern life.  There’s a nostalgic documentary on PBS called “Trader” about Paul Tudor Jones, now a hedge fund titan, but in those days, a thirty something energetic upstart in red suspenders and an Oxford shirt.  And Bruce Willis’s high top sneakers.  As he says in the documentary, the man’s a stud.  Tudor Jones marked the beginning of the non-commodity based billionaire.  Before those days, to be rich, you had to have oil or some kind of commodity, or master something early that no one thought to do.  I watch the documentary periodically when I feel nostalgic for those days.  I remember seeing those guys in the red suspenders walking around New York, ready to take over the world.  

It’s a bit strange watching that little documentary because you see the very beginnings of our lives now.  At one point, you see Tudor Jones cross a street with one of the lieutenants from his trading firm and he reaches into his pocket to take something out.  We assume with our modern eyes that it’s a cell phone but it’s a very fancy looking calculator or a radio of some kind.  So many things are happening in that one scene.  They are almost like time travelers from 40 years hence.  One day people will have these handheld information portals in their hands.  

I love finding things like that that let me relive those days and that bygone time.  I also found a documentary podcast a few years ago called “the Just Enough Family” about the corporate raider named Saul Steinberg and his meteoric rise and spectacular fall.  His meteoric rise took place when we lived in the city and because my father’s idea of a good time on a Saturday was going to Central Park with two copies of the Sunday New York Times, which we would read together as a family, I remember this very clearly.  Saul lived at 740 Park avenue in one of imposing buildings that face the Metropolitan Museum and Central Park.  The protagonist of the story we watched unfold in the New York Times was not too far away from us.  

Steinberg was, and I dislike this terminology because it is really overused, a force of nature.  Some described him as a swashbuckler, which by all accounts is a pretty apt way to describe the guy.  He’s the sun all the other people in the family profiled in the podcast turn around.  I googled him and his wife, a very glamorous woman named Gayfryd Steinberg and all of these beautiful pictures came up.  In particular, I spent a lot of time analyzing a set of photos taken featuring Gayfryd at Malcolm Forbes’s 70th birthday party in Morocco.  That might be the most glamorous sentence ever written.  I don’t think I’ve ever seen a more glamorous and cosmopolitan looking set of people in my life.  I have a couple of sets of photos that I look at when I’m lacking in ideas or inspiration.  That set is definitely among those photos.

I listened to the podcast so many times because it offered an inside view of how those rich people I saw in New York living.  Here we were, these people from nowhere whose lives were very circumscribed by our financial situation surrounded by this profligate, over the top spending.  The Go Go 80s, right?  As a kid, those people looked extremely glamorous.  As an adult, having experienced a few things and learned a few things, I realized that all that glittered was not gold.  

I also remember seeing those preppy kids running around the upper east side, where we lived.  I looked up to them in a way.  I crossed paths with them a lot in my gymnastics classes and on our summer trips to Cape Cod.  In 1986, the city was rocked by a young woman named Jennifer Levin was murdered in Central Park by a person she knew and trusted.  It was called “the preppy murder” and was this murder case that received an inordinate amount of press coverage.  A particularly poignant moment in the documentary was Jennifer Levin’s best friend showing a picture of them together and saying what an innocent act taking the picture was, when less than a year later, Jennifer was gone.  

Jennifer Levin was almost a decade older than me and I wasn’t even a pre-teen yet when the case happened but it is very strongly stored in my memory, due to it having a connection to the area we lived in at the time.  I also remember how she was portrayed in the media, being blamed for this tragic thing that had happened to her.  The murderer, whose name I am not writing here on purpose was, in the wise and angry words of Jennifer’s best friend, portrayed as a symbol of white male beauty power money and intelligence. Mike Sheehan, the square jawed gravely voiced police detective on the case said the murderer had been in jail from the time he was 19 years old and is now knocking on 60, had just wasted his life. The voice of reason in a complete circus.  

The 1980s in New York was this almost volatile mix of preppies, aspiring Wall Street tycoons, graffiti artists and up and coming hip hoppers that gave the city this kind of magic that it no longer has.  What always strikes me on every visit is how every kind of off kilter and fun neighborhood where it was once possible to rent an apartment for a cheap price is now full of those awful empty glass towers where apartments are priced out of the reach of everyone except the most upper income person.  You can’t really have magic if you price everyone out.  That’s the sad part about visiting the city now.  It feels like the magic won’t come back because it’s simply too expensive to try to make it in the city as a creative person.

I wonder a lot too though why I had absolutely no interest in living in the city as an adult.  I think about this almost every time when I visit.  Why did I have no desire to do life here as an adult??? I just couldn’t see myself living in one of those anonymous high rises and going to Gristedes or Food Emporium to shop.  I couldn’t see myself riding that subway every day to some other anonymous office building.  I didn’t want my life to be a string of overpriced brunches and loud nights out.  None of that really suited me.  

I also could not have those same conversations over and over and over again.  Yes, I moved here when I was five years old and I went to high school in the suburbs.  “Oh so you aren’t a real New Yorker.”  I mean I’m sorry that I couldn’t convince my parents to leave Poland five years earlier so I could have been born in New York.  There were some really pressing concerns they were dealing with at the time.  And I could not hear for the umpteenth time that because we had lived in Westchester when I was a teenager, that I was “from upstate.” For some reason in New York, that’s some kind of an insult.  You upstate simpleton don’t understand us complicated city people.  No.  My dad got a job over there and we moved.  In my mind, when people said I was “from” there, they were saying it was ok what happened to me while we lived there.  They weren’t saying that but it was really annoying and I just wanted it to end.  I just never wanted to have this conversation again.  Enough was enough.

When I moved to Denmark when I was 20 years old, I loved it because I was completely disconnected from all of that.  No one cared the year I had moved to New York, so they could judge my “New Yorkness.”  We talked about other things and life, for a split second, felt normal.  

My friends who I visit in New York aren’t natives.  One is from Hawaii and educated in Indiana and then New York.  The other lived in Florida and came to New York 25 years ago.  Both are absolutely better at being New Yorkers than I am.  Both know the subway way better than I do, in that they don’t need to use GPS to navigate it.  They saw other parts of the world and decided they loved New York enough to make it their home base.  I saw other parts of the world and decided I wanted to be somewhere else.  

I look around Boston and I cannot imagine living anywhere else.  Life has opened up into a phase I had never experienced before.  I’m not out chasing anything anymore.  I remember thinking recently how my life settled down one day and all of the doors of the houses and apartments around me just opening.  I spent years living in places wondering who my neighbors were.  

I did spend about 3 1/2 years working in New York as an adult and I found it for the most part to be incredibly disappointing.  I wasn’t offered any mentorship or help or anything while I lived there.  It always felt like people were off somewhere living it up and I was alone in my sad little apartment.  I lived in Mount Vernon, in the Yonkers area of New York.  I guess all the “real New Yorkers” can chime in and tell me I wasn’t living in “real New York.”  Please.  Go ahead.  I can’t wait to hear what YOU have to say about ANYTHING.  I lived in this building in Mount Vernon and I never saw a single human being open a door or pick up their mail in that building.  Not one.  I never saw anyone leave for work in the morning, never saw anyone come back.  I never even heard my neighbors in their own homes.  It was strange, to say the least.  I think about that a lot when I’m hanging out with my community now.

There was also a little “downtown” area in Mount Vernon. There was an A&P there and a bakery, I think.  I went down there one time, I think.  I also did not cook at home very much.  

I lived in Mount Vernon in New York for a year before I moved to Boston.  I had this on/off phase when I lived and worked in New York of about three and a half years in my 30s.  It wasn’t a period for me that was particularly fruitful professionally or personally.  Sometimes I feel like that phase was like the low rated seasons of the television show where it had bad writers and almost no one watched.  It wasn’t even a period of time when I was taking a lot of pictures.  It was just in 2008, when I was living in that desolate building where I never saw anyone.  I look around at my life now and think — how is that even connected to that old life?  I lived in a neighborhood where I didn’t know anyone??? Now I can’t imagine living in a place where I don’t know half the people in my neighborhood.  I could have never pictured in my mind the people I would meet and become friends with. 

The other thing that always hits me when I go to New York is how growing up there made me love nature as much as I do.  I cannot overstate how happy I am sitting on that ski lift every weekend in that landscape covered in snow.  All of these years of skiing have not made that wear off.  If anything, that’s sharpened.  Standing on that black sand beach in Iceland in 2023 and staring at the Mars-like landscape on Antelope Island in Utah in 2024 filled me with feelings I never had in New York, staring at those glass manmade monoliths.  You see the hand of God in nature.  You see the hand of capitalism looking at those skyscrapers.  

Now I go to New York like a tourist, just like I go to Poland as a tourist.  I was born in Poland but I’m a tourist there.  I grew up in New York and went to elementary school, high school and college there and I’m a tourist there too.  I didn’t grow up in New England and had absolutely no connection to this area before I came to live here but this is home now.  And it feels good to finally be home.

Some pictures from my recent visit to New York.  Some really touristy pictures: 

An epidemiologist, York Avenue and Me

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A couple of years ago, some dear friends and I were part of an art exhibit on Roosevelt Island in New York.  Roosevelt Island means a lot to me, as it’s across from where I grew up.  Looking across the river, it still felt like I was living there, still felt like that was our home.  In my mind, it always has been.  In my life, I only count three places as home.  My first home was York and 63rd street, which I will write about here.  My second home was Copenhagen, a place that still elicits strong emotions from me.  And my third home is Boston, where I’ve lived longer than the two other places combined.  Where I’ve lived longer that I lived in New York, longer than all the time in my life I spent in Poland and longer that I spent getting my high school, bachelors and masters degrees combined.

I hear people wax rhapsodic about where they grew up and what a strong pull they feel towards it.  New Yorkers tend to do this thing that really rubs me the wrong way, where they try to measure how much of a New Yorker you are.  Oh so you weren’t born in the city, oh you don’t qualify.  I wasn’t born in New York but I moved there when I was five.  I apologize to those people who are so offended by me spending the first five years of my life outside of New York.  I was a little kid and didn’t realize we would meet later and this mistakes on my part would figure so prominently in our history together.    

Somehow this stupid thing made me feel like I wasn’t a “real” New Yorker and therefore, the city wasn’t my home.  Of late though, I’ve been able to push away the thoughts that it wasn’t my home and have become a lot prouder of where I grew up.  I was talking to my pastor, who is also a dear friend, and he told me not to be embarrassed about where I grew up.  It’s a big part of who I am.  

As I have written about before, when I was 13, we left the safety of our little life on York and 63rd street and moved to a place that simultaneously hurt me and my family in immeasurable ways but also ultimately allowed us to thrive to a degree that we never could have imagined.  Who could have known what to come to pass in 1989 entering this hostile environment that this would directly lead to the best thing that ever happened to us.  But nothing in life comes without a cost and sometimes I think the cost we paid for what we got later on was too high.  

The cost I paid was that our old life was erased from my memory.  Erased.  Us living on the upper east side, on the campus of this university, near New York Hospital and Cornell medical college was erased by a mere move of 30 miles.  Who I was, who we all were was erased by those cruel, racist people.  I don’t remember one person asking me where we lived before or anything about our background.  That was gone.  I remember passing through the old neighborhood on my prom night and trying to point out to someone that that was where we lived when I was growing up and I couldn’t even get the person’s attention.  That was all I needed to know about those people.

In recent years, I have set about reclaiming our past and really appreciating how I grew up and how it all shaped me.  When I talk to people, I say I grew up in Manhattan and leave it at that.  The chapter in the hostile place is erased, as it should be.  A couple of years ago, a friend from high school came to Boston, after he had experienced an incredibly tragic loss.  Another friend joined me meeting him and told me she was shocked because she had never heard me mention anyone I went to high school with as a friend.  By design.  I wanted that time to disappear from my life and for the most part, I’ve been successful in that.

What has struck me and at the risk of sounding extremely self important, was how my parents were working in his rarified medical world but it never seemed that way.  No one bragged or acted like they were better than anyone else.  I often think of an encounter I had as a young person with a man named Roy Vagelos, a name in the pharmaceutical industry who my parents also knew.  To a larger group of young people that I was a part of, Vagelos told the story of how his company had developed a treatment for river blindness, a debilitating disease present in sub-Saharan Africa.  He told of how people had been bitten by flies that carried his parasite and had itched their skin their entire lives.  Suddenly after receiving one or two doses of the drug developed by his company, they were free of this.  The drug was extremely effective.  Right at the end of the story, he recalled visiting the areas affected by the river blindness with “Jimmy and Rosalind.”  Jimmy and Rosalind.  Carter.  He meant Carter.  He said it so quietly and with so little fanfare that you’d have barely noticed that he was talking about the 39th president of the United States.  I remember at this moment thinking — this is who you want to be.  Model yourself after this man, not those people you had been around for years.  That has stuck with me ever since.

Recently, a dear friend who works for his country in New York recently contacted me with a request to share a picture on my Instagram.  I told him I’d do it if he bought me an ice cream at Serendipity 3, an old fashioned ice cream parlor on the upper east side.  We met and had a thoroughly excellent reunion, recounting old times and new adventures.  My heart was full after the meeting.  We also happened to be near where I grew up, so I strolled over there after our little meeting with my friend to show him where I grew up.  It was night time and I found the spot on the Brooklyn bridge where you can see the Queensborough bridge really well, made famous in multiple movies.  

Up from where we lived, there was a stretch of York Avenue called Sutton Place.  It a peaceful stretch of streets that isn’t too flashy on the surface, but has a quiet kind of a beauty.  Everyone has a place they’ve always wanted to live and for me, it was Sutton Place and still is.  Sutton place is also the home of one of the most iconic views in all of cinema, from the Woody Allen film, Manhattan, where he sits with the Diane Keaton character contemplating life.  My friend told me all casual style that he had stayed with his delegation on Sutton Place.  Just a normal set of circumstances where you stay in the most expensive part of the city.  Normal.  

I loved our life in New York and have amazing memories from it.  We lived on York and 63rd street.  My parents’ job was across from our house and their job was across the street from my elementary school.  Near where we lived was Cornell Medical College, alma mater of one Doctor Anthony S. Fauci, who I had the distinct pleasure of seeing speak recently.  

I don’t exactly remember when I first became aware of Dr. Fauci during the pandemic.  Maybe it was when Dr Fauci masked a massive eye roll while the orange clown who shall not be named said something completely insane during the first days of the pandemic.  Soon after, I watched a biographical video about Dr Fauci’s life.  There was something no nonsense and pure about the guy.  

The video details Dr Fauci’s discovery and mapping of the AIDS virus and his relationship with the activist community during that time.  I remember being in elementary school in New York and my teachers wearing buttons that said “silence equals death.”  This was a group of people who were fighting for their lives.  In the biographical video about Dr Fauci, he comes across as this hardcore Brooklyn guy who has such a huge heart.

I also came across this great video of an interview that Dr Fauci did jointly with Larry Kramer on C-Span some thirty years ago.  Larry Kramer was at his fieriest and well within his rights to be that way, as his community was being decimated at the time and he was doing everything in his power to save his friends.  Dr Fauci was in his humanitarian doctor suit, as Kramer called it during the interview and the C-Span host looked like he was going to need a stiff drink after the whole thing.  

The session is on a dead serious topic, the AIDS pandemic but it has its choice moments.  What struck me was how Kramer had some real vitriol flowing out of him at the government’s response to the pandemic.  He had previously directed it at Dr Fauci who had thoughtfully reached out to Kramer and brought the activists into the process to find treatments for the AIDS virus.  During the interview, Kramer was hurling the vitriol and the host looked like he was looking forward to his drive home that night, Fauci dealt with it in a very thoughtful way.  He ended up laughing with Larry and it showed that these two people were truly friends.  At the end of the whole thing, Dr Fauci said something about how slowly treatments are developed and Larry goes — Tony when you talk that way, I hate you.  And Dr Fauci just acknowledged it in this loving way. 

My friends joke that I have a crush on Dr Fauci and hey, there might be a grain of truth to that.  Seeing him speak though was really special, to get a bit corny here for a second.

Fauci spoke at a synagogue near where I live.  Now the man has to travel with a rather menacing security detail.  When I bought the tickets, I got a list of things I was NOT allowed to bring to the event, that included drones and anything that could be used as a missile.  Where I was going to put that in my saffiano leather Dooney and Bourke hobo bag is anyone’s guess.  Needless to say, I was not bringing any of my myriad of cameras, a fact that pained me.  Pics or it didn’t happen, right?  

I had hoped that we would have a little meet and greet with the good doctor, and I could tell him how we knew each other from the old neighborhood.  But alas it was not to be, partly because of the threats against Dr Fauci.  We did receive books signed by “Tony” for each of us.  

Sitting at the event, I was struck by how many NPR tote bags I saw.  Needless to say, I would probably be one of the few people who would be posting about the event on Instagram.  Before the event started, I saw Dr Fauci’s wife and his daughter.  I resisted the urge to run up to them and tell him how much I admired Dr. Fauci.

Dr Fauci took the stage and I could have sworn the man was literally glowing.  I don’t know if it was the lighting, Dr Fauci’s healthy glow, but the man was glowing.  Larry Kramer put him in his play “The Destiny of Me” and called him Tony Della Vida, Tony of Life and that night I really saw why he called him that.

Dr Fauci was being interviewed by Dr. Jerome Goopman, a friend of his and a doctor at Harvard Medical School.  Throughout the night, Dr Fauci told stories about his career as a doctor.  He even said that one point that when he was at Cornell Medical school, that all he wanted to do was stay in the vicinity of York and 69th street.  I almost stood up and yelled out — you and me both Tony!!!!  You and me both!!!!

The thing that struck me during the event was how funny and charming Fauci was.  Yeah, this is a really cheesy love letter to the guy and no I am not a stalker but he made this really funny and intelligent observations on his career, dealing with various less than hospitable people on all sides.  What really got me and brought tears to my eyes was how emotional he got when he described his early work with AIDS patients, trying to save their lives and largely at the time being unsuccessful.  He had gotten emotionally attached to many of them and it wasn’t this cold detachment that you see with a lot of doctors.  He truly cared about those people and that shone through.

At the end of the event, everyone gave Dr Fauci a standing ovation.  At that moment, he really glowed and tears welled up in the man’s eyes.  I wish I had gotten a picture of that, but alas the moment was so fleeting that it will have to forever reside in my memory.

Here are some less than quality photos I snapped of Dr Fauci that night, including the book they gave us with his signature in it:

Here’s a picture of the Queensborough bridge, from that beautiful spot on the East River, which I am sure Dr Fauci also looked at a lot while going to medical school at Cornell:

And finally, here are some film pictures I snapped of New York recently.  Larry Kramer once said that one of the most complicated relationships he’s ever had in his life has been with Dr Fauci.  I have several people in my life who I share similar complicated relationships with, but I only have a complicated relationship with one city and this is New York.  But deep down, I do love the place.