Pumpkin Hollow fell through. They have no budget, even for the shitty salary that they were offering. About a week later, we heard that Berkshire Botanical Gardens was hiring for a similar position - house and everything. We found out yesterday that the position has been filled.
I didn't sleep well that night, in spite of the fact that the bed there was much more comfortable than my futon at Steve's mom's house. Adrenaline will do that to you - I remember not being able to sleep after Aidan was born, even though I had hardly slept during three nights of labor.
I got up every time Aidan stirred. I was so scared that he would pee on the comforter. Of course he didn't, he was fine, and I should have realized that a peed on comforter would be among the least worrisome things for the hotel staff once the blackout was over.
There was a building that rose up over the hotel that somehow had power. It was completely lit up with florescent tube lights and was incredibly bright. It made me wonder if the stars were spectacular that night, with thousands of light polluters like this one out of commission. I fantasized that people were so moved by the stars that night that they demaded that something be done about light pollution.
When the sky started to get light I decided that I didn't need to pretend to sleep anymore and I got dressed and went to see what the outside world was like. The lobby of the hotel was hot and full of weary people. Some were still asleep - even couples on the floor entwined. A ballroom was filled with groupings of three chairs in a row. This is how people who couldn't get a room or couldn't make it up the stairs to their rooms had slept. Or hadn't.
I took a walk to Grand Central. I asked a man sweeping outside of a deli if they would be open that day. He said no - but it seemed like he thought I was asking if he was open right then. The streets were a modest mess. The night before, bars had been open and the crowds drinking on the streets were like New Orleans. Later I spoke to a man who was considering a move to New York. "Doesn't the blackout make you want to reconsider?". He said that he'd been in Times Square all night and that he had a great time.
I walked past the Yale Club which seemed like it was functioning. All of the beautiful windows on the second floor were thrown open. I think that's the library and I wondered if it was full of Yale Clubbers sleeping on chairs and the floor.
Grand Central Station was quite empty. There were a few desprate looking people filing in as I entered. I asked two separate people if they were expecting the trains to start running. Both of them said in a similar hopeless way that they had no idea. I guess that they had no place else to go. It was hot in there and the floor is hard. It certainly wasn't a pleasant place to wait around.
I walked back to the hotel and was noticing that there were these bus stops on Madison that would take people to places like Co-op City and City Island for $4. Nothing that I could see in Brooklyn or Queens though. I went back into the hotel and a man (the manager perhaps - he had no tag) was briefing a small crowd of people on what he knew of the situation. He told us that electricity was already coming back on in some parts of the city, but there were no assurances that we would have electricity soon or even that day. He disclosed that they were going to serve a sort of a breakfast brunch for hotel guests later that morning. I was terribly happy to hear this.
I went back to the room for a little while until they announced (there was a speaker in the hallway) that a "limited" breakfast was being served. Aidan was still asleep, so Mom stayed with him and I ventured down with a large plastic bag to bring back provisions for the family. The night before I had imagined that the power came on in the night and we had a room service pancake feast in the morning. Generally, I'm not that keen on hotel food, but hotel pancakes always have malt or something in the batter and they are the best. Obviously, they were not serving pancakes. There was melon and pineapple, bread, english muffins, bagels, cream cheese, butter and jelly. There were individual boxes of cereal, and danishes and muffins, cut into bite sized pieces. There were plates of sliced up cucumber and tomato. I don't know if everyone there felt as lucky as I did, since they were actually paying for their hotel rooms. I ate myself some fruit, sucked down a cup of orange juice and stocked up on dry goods to bring back to the room.
My mom made the trip down and while she was gone, Aidan woke up. He said he wanted cereal, so we ventured down when she came back. I brought a bowl and a box of cereal down that I had picked up earlier so that all we would need was milk and it was a good thing because milk was about all that was left. We went into the ballroom for him to eat at the tables that they had set up in there and I noticed that the lights were on and things almost felt normal.
Our next adventure was down to the phone banks on the second floor to call Steve since the cell phone batteries were almost dead. Aidan made friends with a hotel employee who was sitting there holding flashlights for people because there were no lights by the phone banks. She was usually a meeting planner. She let him hold a small flashlight and he was thrilled. People were trying to call airlines to figure out flight information. Many did not speak English well. I called Steve's mom's house collect 3 times and noone answered. It was between 9 and 10 o'clock. I was puzzled and later realized that everyone was sleeping. Steve will get heckled for that for a long time.
The next order of business was using the bathroom. Toilets were no longer flushing and there were things that we didn't think we wanted hanging around in the tiny hotel room for god knows how long. I hunted down a public bathroom with windows so that I could see. We weren't the only ones with this idea. I will always wonder who cleaned out those toilets when it was all over - and how they did it.
I thought that we'd just hang out indefinitely in the room at that point. I couldn't get in touch with Steve and had found no transportation to Long Island or even Queens. Then, another hallway announcement: the hotel had two busses, one going to JFK and the other to LaGuardia. They were first come, first serve. I was a little apathetic about it at first. We weren't even legitimate hotel guests, would they even let us on?
Well they did, and there were so few people on the busses that they held them over for another hour. Eventually, we were off and we could see that only a few blocks away the traffic lights would be on, and then off again another few blocks. There was a lot of traffic, especially outside of Manhattan and the driver liked to accelerate and brake hard. I started to crash. I was hot even though the bus was air conditioned. I asked the lady next to me if she was hot - she wasn't. That's when I realized that I was getting carsick. Eventually I decided that I had to get to the bathroom and I asked Aidan to promise me he would stay sitting in his seat. He had to pee and insisted on coming with me. As soon as I got the bathroom door closed I puked and puked and puked. Poor Aidan was standing there in the tiny bathroom on the moving bus watching me from up close. Then I had to help him pee. He was a champ. After that, I felt like I could do anything. When we got back to our seats, he announced to everyone that I had thrown up.
We pulled up to the American Airlines terminal soon after that and a woman who worked at the airport came up to the bus and insisted that no one get off and that we all go back to where we came from because the airport had no electricity, there were no flights, no ammenities, no air conditioning, and no place for people to go. Aidan and I snuck off of the bus in the chaos that ensued. I could hear the bus driver saying that he wasn't going to go back to the hotel. I have no idea what happened to all of those people.
The inside of the airport was miserable. The New York airports are always awful, even when the electricity is on. We waited half an hour to get a pay phone to call Steve during which time I heard person after person being told that they couldn't get flights until Sunday. These people were camped out in the hot airport, many with children. Thursday through Sunday. The blackout was a nightmare for them.
Steve came, we drove home through areas that still had no traffic lights. A lot of the traffic was from the long lines for the gas stations. That seemed so weird to me - why did everyone need gas - couldn't people just stay home for one day? I felt crazy that night - tired but couldn't sleep, writing this blog entry in my head.
Near the bottom of the park, we started to notice how tired Aidan was and how tired people around us looked. We were also swimming upstream – there were a lot more people walking uptown than downtown. I remembered that my first idea for what to do with my mom that day had been to visit The Cloisters. Thank goodness we decided that it would be too boring for Aidan.
Up to this point the blackout had a very mild quality for us. We laughed at our luck and spent a long time just relaxing in the park. It was hot, but not horribly so, and we had the shade of the trees. The atmosphere changed dramatically when we hit the end of the park. We caught our first sight of the effects of the traffic lights being out and the amazing vigilante traffic directors in the middle of the intersections. Because they weren’t cops, the vehicles sometimes defied them and they were in a very dangerous position. We scooted in front of a bus that was threatening to disobey one at a crossing and the presence of a young child made the vigilante’s case a bit more persuasive.
Mostly one could walk the Avenues and cross the Streets fairly easily, because the traffic dominated in that direction – but crossing the Avenues was harrowing. Folks weren’t driving any differently just because there were no traffic lights. Busses, taxis, they don’t know any other way to drive.
When we got to about 45th, we decided that we should head over to Madison, but we turned the wrong way. We suspected our error, but I was sure when I realized that we were across from the Renaissance Hotel, which is managed by a dear friend of my father’s and happens to be in the center of Times Square. There was a crowd of people in front of the hotel, which made us a bit nervous. Could they not go in? Was it so hot in there that they’d rather be on the street? I was tempted to go and check in on my father’s friend, but I had hauled Aidan onto my back at that point and we were in no position to take a detour.
I marveled that I had only recognized Times Square for the familiar hotel and it took me a moment to realize that it was the lack of lights that made it spectacularly unspectacular. I told my mom to take a good look around because it would be a rare thing to see Times Square with no lights.
At 43rd we headed back in the other direction. I couldn’t believe that that morning I had been nervous about having to pee and eat because the train was 40 minutes late. Now I was in the middle of this incredible crisis, having walked over forty blocks and now walking several long city blocks with a 45 pound child on my back, 3 1/2 months pregnant. I must have been operating on adrenaline because, except for some blisters on one foot, I felt just fine.
On the way to Times Square, we had crossed the Avenues where there were police (the first ones we’d seen all day). On the way back over to Madison, we had to fend for ourselves. My mom would march out on the traffic side of us with her arm outstretched barking, “STOP! STOP!” at each vehicle. They did, thank goodness, and that’s how we crossed each intersection with the boy now asleep on my back and me hunched over so he wouldn’t fall off.
Getting to the hotel was a huge relief. The sun was just setting. I deposited Aidan on the carpeted floor of this gorgeous room in the lobby that is usually corded off for special events. Of course he woke up right away, made friends with a young woman who was visiting NY with her family from Egypt (can you imagine coming to NY from Egypt and ending up in a blackout?), and happily ate the Pringles that she offered. My mom was eager to see what our room was like and set off for it while Aidan and I rested. Another woman told me that they had just started to let people go up to their rooms, that initially, everyone had been evacuated to the lobby.
My mom came back and said that the room was great. She had actually taken a quick shower and came back down with a wet towel for us. We didn’t realize at the time what a treat that was. The water didn’t last. We made our way up the stairs, which had emergency lighting. A detour through the second floor was facilitated by hotel staff with flashlights. We came out on the sixth floor where the air was comfortably cool and the hallways were lit. We were in blackout paradise, especially while the toilets still flushed.
The only thing that I was concerned about at that point was food and I was hugely relieved to find that I still had a half a blueberry muffin in the room. I had been wondering for some time if I had thrown it out and had been deeply regretting the half a sandwich that I had thrown out at lunch. I would have been in trouble without the muffin. My mom had some crackers that Aidan was happy to call dinner.
We just relaxed for some time while Aidan played with some airport toys that my mom had brought for him. I got through to Steve on the cell phone and told him we had made it to the hotel. Aidan spoke to him and told him all of the details of our situation from his point of view. Aidan performed incredible, never before seen potty feats. He pooped on a strange potty without his potty seat. (My arms acted as the potty seat for the 20 minute poop and I couldn’t have done it if I had been 7 months pregnant.) He peed in the potty without argument before going to bed. He peed again when he got up in the morning and had no accidents in his sleep. He was incredible.
The bed was a full and the room tiny the way that only NYC hotel rooms can be. Once Aidan nursed to sleep, I transferred him to a nest that we made on the floor out of the comforter and some pillows. My mom and I laid on the bed thinking about how lucky we were. We had a bed, the room was cool and comfortable, we had lights in the hallways, I could have been more pregnant, Aidan had been an angel all day, Aidan and I could have been in the city just on our own and we’d be sleeping in the park probably, we could have been on any one of the TEN floors that were ABOVE the sixth.
(one more entry coming...)
My mom was in New York this week from Texas on business and had Thursday off, so Aidan and I ventured into the city to spend the day with her. It was the first time I'd done anything so adventurous with him since I got pregnant, I've been so sick and nauseous, the latest thing has been a cold, and I felt a little overwhelmed going in that morning.
We missed our first train by ten minutes. The schedule had changed three days before. We came back an hour later for the next train, which proceeded to be 40 minutes late. I can pretty much go with the flow with things like this, but I have to manage visits to the bathroom and my food intake and I feared the extra 40 minutes would throw me off entirely.
Once the train came, we had a smooth trip to Penn Station. Aidan chatted away with a nice man next to him for the whole trip. He starts off by telling people that he's three, then that he lives at Grandma's and that he works with his pop fixing Grandma's house. The conversation could go anywhere after that. He told this man that he had taken the train yesterday to a march (I explained that it wasn't really yesterday) and that he didn't like it.
When we got to Manhattan, we took two subways to get to my mom's hotel near Grand Central. I know the route well because my father managed the Yale Club on Vanderbilt right across the street from Grand Central for many years and I find myself hearing his instructions in my head every time I have to go that way: take the 1, 2 or 3 uptown one stop to Times Square - get on the shuttle, a grey circle with an S, which takes you directly to Grand Central.
In Grand Central Aidan said he was hungry and we bought two blueberry bran muffins and set out a few blocks to The Roosevelt Hotel at 43rd and Madison. My mom stays in The Roosevelt on a regular basis and Aidan and I are both familiar with it. We called her on the house phone and then took the elevator up to her room on the sixth floor. We rested there a bit, ate most of our muffins, and then set out to The Museum of Natural History in a taxi.
We bought tickets to a planetarium show at 3:30 along with our museum admission, so we did some wandering (Aidan's only had eyes for the computers), went and had some lunch, and then saw the show, a sentimental thing narrated by Tom Hanks. Aidan had promised me that he would use the bathroom after the show, so we made right for a bathroom afterward, but once in there, my boy didn't want to go. We had a long discussion about that his pee needed to go in the potty and I didn't want him to have an accident in the museum which ended in him exclaiming, "NO! My pee doesn't need to go into the potty, my pee needs to CRASH INTO THE PLANET EARTH." I was laughing so hard that I decided he had won the argument and we set back into the museum. Then, the electricity went out. We were in the space section, which is all glass, so the full impact of it was not immediately apparent to us. The elevators were actually working as were some emergency lights. And, like almost everyone else who experienced the blackout, we first thought it was a fuse or something. People were pretty unfazed and continued to look around the museum. After awhile I overheard a museum employee telling some people that it was a blackout in the tri-state area. I didn't really believe it. Who could imagine such a thing?
Eventually, they started to gently evacuate the museum and I took Aidan across the street to Central Park so that his pee could crash into the planet earth. My mom bought three bottles of water and we spent the next two hours or more in the park. I felt lucky to stumble across a bathroom. Near the Met, we sat on a bench next to a man who managed to make a cell phone call out of the city. When he got off of the phone, he filled us in on the unbelievable scope of the blackout. We sat and talked with him for some time as people streamed by - some talking on cellphones, but many just holding them as if they were expecting a call.
My mom had a cellphone, but we had to try about 20 times before a call went through. Eventually I got in touch with Steve, who was supposed to have gone upstate for the day, but miraculously, hadn't. I told him that I needed him to come and get us and he sort of stammered, trying to explain that it was impossible, that the bridges and tunnels were closed. The electricity was still on where he was, so he was actually seeing the whole crazy thing on the news. At this point we were sheltered from the intensity of it, since we'd spent most of our time in the park. There might have been a time when being an island that made Manhattan very safe, but nowadays it makes it and the people who live and work and visit there terribly vulnerable.
Aidan played in a small park for a short time and my mom and I discussed whether we should walk to the hotel or try to spand the night in the park. The park was fairly lovely at that point and I was afraid that our electric room keys wouldn't work and then if they did that the room would be unbearably hot. My mom wanted to head back to the hotel, so when Aidan was ready to go, we headed downtown.
We were still sheltered from the chaos of the broken traffic lights because we were traveling down fifth along the park. I never told Aidan what a long walk we had ahead of us. We didn't even think about it much ourselves. We felt so grateful to not be stuck in an elevator or a subway. After awhile I started to notice the people walking with us. Many were exhausted and I started to realize that many of these people had probably experienced 9/11 and that this must be fairly traumatic, in spite of the apparent lack of serious danger.
We stopped to get ice cream from a park vendor and sat next to a woman who had been walking from the 20s (we were probably in the 60s at that point), trying to find a private bus to Brooklyn. I told her that my husband had told me that a sea of people were simply walking across the Brooklyn Bridge (he had actually said that it looked like the Marathon). She said that she had walked so far at that point that she could have been across the bridge by then if she had thought of it.
(to be continued...)
Just a little post to say that I would be super grateful for any hand me down maternity clothes, especially for cold weather - size Med-Large. I'll be happy to swap something or pay your postage. All my stuff is in storage for probably another month, so I might be a slow, though reliable swapper.
We went up to Pumpkin Hollow to check out the maintenance position last Thursday. There was a lot of traffic coming out of New York and what is usually a 2 1/2 hour drive ended up being a 3 1/2 hour drive. We were all weary by the time we got there and I was hungry and nauseous.
The man we were meeting was a gentle older man, possibly around 70, with a sort of a slow, deliberate manner. I really wanted to see the house first, but he took us all over the place first and I finally had to ask to see the house because Aidan was loosing it and frankly, so was I.
Once we saw the house, I suspected that he had deliberately shown us the community's finer features first. The house is modular, and low-end modular at that - so the walls have seams and such and I don't think that they are sheetrock. We're not sure how they would get painted or repaired. The house is divided up into two dwelling units, so we don't even get the whole house. It's really an apartment. There are in fact two bedrooms, but one of them has the front door in it and was meant to be a living room. Most of it has orange carpeting that looks like it is twelve years old and there is a huge wood stove in the middle of the fairly small living room / dining room area. I was crushed. I didn't want to live there. The vibe was awful.
But the thing is that the rest of the community is gorgeous. Steve's work requirement would be 20 hours/week and all of the work is easily within his abilities. If they got grants to do bigger jobs, they would hire him as the contractor. There might be space in other buildings for me to have an office and for him to play music. There would be no contract and we could leave at any time.
I'm thinking that I just need an attitude adjustment. I feel like I'm an adult now and I'm tired of living in college student quality places. I'm tired of being nomadic, but I don't know if I can see us in this space for two years. I'm a triple cancer - my home is so important to me. At the same time I think maybe I'm being a bit of a princess. I've been saying all this time that all I want is a little house on a lot of land. Pumpkin Hollow has 130 acres with a stream and a swimming hole, a spectacular waterfall and hiking trails. I'll be able to walk to yoga class.
We decided to do it if their board approves the hiring. Even if its not a long term solution, we feel like there might be a wealth of opportunities involved. I gave some conditions though: The carpeting has to be replaced with a wood or a laminate floor and the wood stove has to go out to the barn.
Oh it's been so long. I'm feeling human again. I'm still gagging in the mornings, but I feel pretty normal for the rest of the day and I have a huge appetite. I'm picky and I keep craving vinegary Greek food. An order of grape leaves from the local Greek take out place comes with 10 - and I could eat them all in a sitting.
Mental posts that never made it here from the past few weeks included Georgia O'Keefe worthy meditations on the bottoms of toilet bowls (Nobody sees the bottom of the toilet bowl - really - it takes time - we haven't time - and to see takes time, like to have a friend takes time) and the biological reasons for morning sickness (maybe the puking strengthens the stomach muscles for pushing the baby out).
See - it's better that I haven't posted.