emlocke

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  • First Urban Snow

    Just when the days start to feel longer, it sinks in that winter has come.  This is the part of the season that makes people complain and move to LA.  After the white and pink of new snow and cold cheeks and Valentine’s Day, there is nothing to do but endure the sullen and gray afternoons and wonder interminably if the sun has risen yet.

    I was waiting in a bubble of people for the light to change on the corner of 54th and 3rd when snowflakes started to come down.  I had never seen it snow in the city before.  That night, from my bed, I watched flakes falling through the streetlights’ yellowish cast and tried to figure out why I felt so unsettled, like I’d had too much coffee on an empty stomach.  Maybe because I’d never watched a snowfall like this from anywhere but my bed at home?  No, that’s not right; I probably saw more snow through the windows of my college dormrooms in Western Massachusetts and Upstate New York than I did in the four years that I lived officially in my family’s blue house on a hill in Southwestern Connecticut.

    I used to watch flakes blow sideways at the windows and feel like I was flying headfirst through space with tiny stars coming straight at me.  Warm and dry in the house, it seemed like the world had grown very still as it hunkered down to wait for the end of the storm.  We kept a ruler stood on end out on the deck to measure all that accumulated over night.  If it keeps falling through morning, it takes half a day for the family-owned plow trucks to roll out.  I always liked looking at my dad’s and my dog’s footprints in the snow.

    Snow in the city is nothing like that.  I couldn’t see flakes against the dark sky because the city sky is never dark.  When I looked at the rows of windows across the street, I more than half expected to see them filled with rosy faces watching, watching, watching, but everyone was asleep.  The sound of a city plow clanking against the curb startled me awake at 4AM.  Snow was still falling, but New Yorkers don’t believe in waiting it out.  No one pauses at the window and holds their breath.  By the time I walked down the street to catch the train to work, nothing but slush was melting in the gutters.

    Slush, I’m used to that.  The way tires churn it like a frothy cake batter.  The way it looks, at times, both solid and liquid, but is neither.  The way it splashes and immediately makes your cringe and think, ‘wet shoes…’  The way, after awhile, the plow shovels are just pushing it to one side of the gray street and back.

    The monotonous days of winter are upon us.  Nothing more to accumulate here.

  • Highly Notable Events of January 2007

    • Accidentally left for work without brushing my teeth.
    • Drank coffee out of an actual mug before leaving the apartment.
    • Bought new shoes heels.
    • Pilfered a stack of outdated but perfectly readable New Yorkers from a neighbor’s recycling bin.

  • Lately, I’ve been thinking about camp

    It was summer and,
    At seventeen,
    We bickered over who most deserved
    To operate the cotton candy machine at the camp carnival.

    After dark, we took shifts.
    One kept watch for flashlights coming down the hill.
    The rest slipped in and out of the water,
    Breaking the surface of the lake with wet skin,
    Breaking the silence with gasps of laughter and shushing.

    On brisker Berkshire nights,
    We congregated beneath the covered bridge
    To assemble bits of birch and hemlock.
    Sculpting flames like Bernini.
    Our fountain spout fire.

    Some of us smoked up.
    Some of us blew bubbles.
    All with equal authority over our inferno,
    The consensus always, “throw more on.”

    Before lights out,
    We tucked in,
    We dried homesick tears,
    We sang bedtime songs,
    We read insipid inspirational poetry,
    We pointed out constellations.

    After Taps,
    We stargazed two by two.
    With our eyes closed,
    Our mouths open,
    Our hands warm beneath fleece
    With someone else’s name sewn in the collar.
    That’s the buddy system.

    We stayed up too late.
    We smelled like lake water and burning leaves.
    We kept secrets and promises.
    We sang the same songs.

    But none of that mattered
    When it came to the cotton candy machine.

  • Your mailbox is over its size limit

    An excerpt from the infamous interoffice e-mail forum. Pre-Brooklyn, from my commuting days. My mailbox reached its size limit again, and I couldn’t purge this gem of an Emilyism.

    From: Emily
    Sent: Tuesday, October 17, 2006 11:24 AM
    To: ‘Al’; ‘David’; ‘Sarah’
    Subject: RE: I need a nap.

    Cohorts,

    You know how Hobbits have Second-Breakfast and Elevensies? Consider this an Elevensies-Intra-Office-E-mail.

    I am having a good hair day. I also decided that I want to learn to arch just one eyebrow. I think it would be devastatingly clever.

    Today, my mailbox was over limit for the first time. I have never felt so important.

    Wouldn’t stop, even if I could,

    Em

  • My name is Eloise. I go to Pre-K at the Y.

    I thoroughly enjoyed today’s New York/Regional article about the fleet of luxury vehicles that idle outside the YMCA on 92nd street and Lexington, which I read bit by bit on the subway this morning by craning my neck while a man who actually subscribes to the New York Times read an article on the opposite page. It covers the notable increase of these vehicles outside the Y every morning as they drop passengers off on the red carpet that leads up to the pre-school.

    Yes. Pre-school. Not post-school. Not even school-school. Pre-schoolers are being dropped off for the day in hired cars that cost about as much as a year’s tuition will by the time they get to college.

    This article tickled me so much for several reasons. One, the photograph beside the headline is absolutely precious. A little girl wearing tiny brown sandals and a wide-eyed expression toddles forward, her arms posed as if she might be marching, from the open jaws of a Mercedes SUV. A round man in a very black suit and gleaming dress shoes holds out an umbrella large enough to swallow her whole.

    It is the very picture of a young child about to begin a day filled with chatter, play-dough and animal crackers while her parents are off somewhere else (note that this driver isn’t just waiting in the car, he is also am umbrella-wielding escort) engaging in hoity-toity babble, pushing around dollars and dough, and munching daintily on tea and crumpets. Do they know how adorable their little girl looks on her way to school? Only if they had time to read the Region section of today’s paper.

    I also love the fact that this article contains the phrase, “subsequent research,” indicating first that initial research took place, and second that it did not prove sufficient. And what did we glean from the subsequent research? 1) Most of the escorted children have fathers who work in “capital management.” 2) Most of their parents have been married for at least 10 years. 3) School officials have far too much time on their hands.

    I have to say that I found it quite interesting that all of this effort went in to running background checks on the students’ parents and no one bothered to investigate the drivers, the ones who are actually spending time in a moving vehicle with the kids.

    Finally, I am most fascinated by the letter sent home to parents by Nancy Schulman, director of the apparently famous nursery school at the 92nd street Y. As a former student, employee of my hometown public school system, and camp counselor, I have had the opportunity to skim my share of letters from school officials to parents. Most recently, I had the pleasure of reading lines transcribed from a letter to parents of Simsbury High School students, which included, “Please forgive us for going into detail here,” and went on to describe the “front-to-back dancing” that is now prohibited at school-sponsored social events. Like much of the mail that public school administrators send home to parents, it blamed students and society and encouraged parents to “have a conversation” which their society-ruined students.

    The best part about Ms. Schulman’s letter is what sets it apart from all the rest. According to the article, “The letter…reminded families that one assessment Ms. Schulman and her colleagues are asked to make by lower-school admissions officers is whether the applicant’s parents have been “cooperative” with the school’s requests.” She scolds the parents! You tell ’em, Nancy!

    This whole scenario reminds me fondly of Eloise, the rambunctious six-year-old who lives at the Plaza Hotel with her nanny, Nanny. Where are Mom and Dad? Absent, absent, absent. Meanwhile, their far-from-demure daughter runs helter-skelter about the hotel, generally wrecking havoc in every possible way.

    Now, I know it’s just a picture book and I know nobody wants to read about the Eloise who lives at the Ho-Jo’s over in Jersey City. The point is that, while it’s clear that Eloise loves living at the Plaza, she would be equally happy to wreck havoc on a less glamorous setting. Maybe more so. Little Eloise can’t tell the difference yet.

    I only wish there were a way to preserve the look in that little girl’s eyes as she is delivered into the world from the climate-controlled backseat of her Escalade or Beemer or whatever. I hope that she doesn’t forget that “paper cups are very good for talking to Mars,” as Eloise taught us, the very moment she enrolls at whichever private private private Kindergarten her parents have selected.

  • On My Best Behavioral Impulse

    The Uniball Vision Elite. That’s the name of my favorite pen. It comes in an array of colors, including jeweled hues of pink and purple. The cap makes a very satisfying sound when I click it on an off to pass the time during the weekly staff meeting. But most of all, it has a lovely…there should be a word for this…it has a lovely write to it. A smooth, crisp write.

    I’d say it’s been about ten years since I started having the impulse to color in my own lips with a pen like the Uniball Vision Elite. That’s a very indefinite estimate because I don’t remember the impulses themselves, or when or where they took place, as well as I remember actually having them. How badly I wanted to trace the rise and fall of the crest at the top of my top lip. How hard I had to resist the urge to fill in the curve at the bottom of my bottom lip.

    I confessed my desire to my mother once, half teasing when I asked her, “haven’t you ever wanted to?” She suggested I restrain myself. Then she suggested using a lip pencil to fill the void, but I didn’t bother. If I had been fighting the urge to rub a greasy, flaky crayon across my mouth, I probably would have just gone for it. Pen has a different texture. My bizarre urge is as much about tracing my lips with a pen as it is about feeling the ink run on my skin. And there is no practicing with ink.

    In the last decade, I’ve given this whole situation a lot of thought, and this is what I’ve come up with: There is absolutely no reasonable way to explain my own entirely abnormal thought process and I am certifiably insane and destined to spend the better half of my adult life bound up in a straight-jacket with very, very dark lips. Come on over and take me away. I’ll sign myself in, just give me the damn pen!

    Alternatively, there is the theory that the pen-to-lips impulse may have stemmed from one of two events. It might have started around the same time teen beauty magazines entered the scene and became a regular part of my reading material. Visually impressionable and faced with so many human lips, how could one not fixate on our mouths’ lovely lines? But I tried taking a pen to the glossy girls on the pages of Seventeen and YM, and I wasn’t satisfied.

    So there’s this other thing, and that’s the drawing and painting class I took at the private school in town for two weeks during the summer after sixth grade. I met a boy named Lawrence, who may or may not have been my first gay friend, and I painted two canvases. I still have both. One depicts a rock, a stone, and a pebble on the cross-bar of my borrowed easel. The other is a somewhat warped rendering of my right hand as if it were painting itself. My hand is wearing a different jelly bean nail polish color on each fingernail, just as I was, as every girl who read teen beauty magazines was, that summer after sixth grade.

    I wasn’t really a fan of the painting assignments. Let me rephrase that; I really wasn’t a fan of the painting assignments. First of all, both were pretty steeped in earth tones, so I had very little opportunity to use my favorite colors. Second of all, rocks? Please. Stop holding me back. The next Starry Night could be right beneath my surface and you’ve got me painting rocks. (I never was very good at the whole ‘taking lessons’ thing.) And I didn’t want to stare at my own pink hand for hours on end, especially when I wasn’t doing a very good job of transferring its likeness to the canvas (I just told you, I wasn’t very good at lessons!)

    My teacher, a man with tough, wrinkled skin and salt and pepper in his long ponytail and in his arm hair, sensed my displeasure. The unrelenting pout on my lips might have tipped him off. One afternoon, he pulled a metal stool alongside my easel in the cool corner of the art room. He watched me press the royal violet paint I’d blended for one of my novelty fingernails against the fibers of the canvas. I was awkward with the brush, unfamiliar with the nature of my media. I was also pretty grouchy.

    “Do you know why women paint their nails, their lips, their eyelids?” he asked me, brushing his fingertips over his own features majestically as he named them. I said nothing, just offered a petulant shake of my head in return for his efforts. “Because all of these things come from the inside. The nails grow from inside the fingertips,” he placed one hand over the other and spread his fingers out like roots sprouting from a seed. “The lips curve out from the mouth,” his fingertips bloomed from where he held them close to his face. “The eyes open up from inside,” he held his hands up, palms out, as if he were seeing them for the first time. “Don’t you think?”

    “I’d never thought of it like that, but yeah.” I could not hide my awe behind my pre-teen sullenness.

    “Oh, don’t listen to me,” he said, swinging one leg over the seat of the stool and pushing it out from under him with the ball of his foot. The metal scraped against the cement floor. “I just made all that up.”

    I was mad at him for tricking me and I wanted to grab him by the elbow and tell him that he was wise and right, right enough to send his ideas in to some magazine so everyone could read them. And now I’m twenty-two and I don’t really read those magazines anymore, but I still think about what comes from the inside every now and then, when I’m looking in the mirror. And when I jot a note or write a draft or sign my name with Uniball Elite Vision, or a pen with an equally great write, I imagine pressing the fine tip to the pout of my lips. Maybe I’ll go through with it one day, just to see what it would feel like.

  • On My Way Out of It, Thoughts On New York

    Before I moved to New York, I felt small. Not in a bad way, just in a one person surrounded by the whole entire world kind of way. Just one girl, a pinprick of a being on the planet, an all-encompassing globe of a place. And the world is a big place. Overwhelmingly large, in fact, but full of potential. So big that it seems as though it could be boundless.

    I’m a New Yorker now. Sounds great, right? Um, of course it is. But when I moved to New York, I think my world got smaller. This city is so big that it became my world all by itself.

    Maybe for some, New York is a world enough. It is amazing that so much exists within the city limits. But to work, shop, eat, dance, sleep – to live within those city limits also means existing within boundaries, and I’m just not used to thinking about a world with boundaries. So sometimes I feel like, when my world got smaller, so did I.

    It’s like this: Is it possible that somewhere out there in the world, another person is listening to “You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet” by Bachman-Turner Overdrive? Sure. Is it playing somewhere else in New York? Maybe, I guess. What about here, on this Manhattan bound F-train, in the ear buds of another passenger? Nearly impossible.

    It’s ironic that a place renowned for being larger than life can reduce one of its inhabitants to such isolation. Maybe that’s the true significance behind the great irony of NYC: so much squeezed into a space that is, geographically speaking, quite small. I might be the only person in my zip code who’s still listening to BTO, but I can’t be the only one who is feeling a little squeezed.

    That’s a comfort, I think, as I wait for the uptown 6. I’m watching and listening to the other subway passengers, a humming swarm all migrating north or south, all on their way to somewhere. I hear snatches of chatter, but it’s not eavesdropping because this is New York, and this is a subway platform, and this is how we communicate.

    There is a girl to my right telling her friend how much she likes snow. Over the Guster that’s now playing on my iPod, I hear the friend say that her super was adorably overzealous about the first snowfall of the season, about half an inch this morning. I picture a balding man in a thick sweater vest, scraping merrily at the dusting of flakes on a stoop.

    I’m not part of their conversation, and at the same time, I am. I try to remember the last conversation I had with one of my friends in the middle of a crowded subway station. It wasn’t unlike this one.

    Because talking is what we all do. We talk about people. Family, friends, enemies. People we don’t know. People we like. People we want to be like. Even when we’re talking about things we read or heard or saw or tasted, whoever wrote or yelled or asked or sang or did or baked is part of the conversation.

    New Yorkers. There are eight million of us, and we’re all talking about each other. That’s something we all share. We’re all participants in an ongoing conversation about all that’s seen or heard, changing or happening in this city.

    There are always going to be those times when I crave camaraderie, and I continue to be surprised by how hard it is to find in New York. A few weeks ago, an unpleasant odor had southern Manhattan all a buzz, and I thought, “This is it? The smell of natural gas is going to bring us all together?” But the air cleared, we stopped making wrinkly-nosed faces at one another and asking in spontaneous unison, “do you smell that?” and we were all sort of on our own again.

    At times like those, the only thing to do is affirm your own presence. No promises that someone else will do it for you. So here I am, on a waiting train in Grand Central now. I have my feet up on the seat across from me. I’m wearing my mom’s pearls. My sweater has a hole in the armpit. My iPod has shuffled to Toad and the Wet Sprocket’s “Good Intentions.” I’m using a black pen to write all of this down in a tiny blue notebook, using my immoderately large bag as a lap desk. I’m on my way out of town for the weekend, but I’ll be back in New York by Sunday.

  • From a Mile Away

    Consider this Part II:

    People are usually surprised:

    • That I’m a slow reader
    • That I wear size ten shoes
    • That I’m a pearl-wearing Bon Jovi fan

    People are usually not-so-surprised:

    • When I’m late
    • That, when I met John McCain in college and he asked how I was voting, I told him I supported John Kerry
    • To learn that I’m very close to my parents

  • Between the Eyes

    One of my greatest New York pleasures is window shopping after happy hour. The heady combination of a few cheap cocktails cruising with my hemoglobin and the natural high that comes with aspirational browsing the twinkly-lit store displays is delicious. My toes feel so good, it’s as if they are imagining what it would be like to settle down in those emerald velvet ballet flats. And while the alcohol inhibits income bemoaning, the plate glass inhibits my hand-to-wallet coordination. It’s pure delight. It’s all fun and games.

    Until someone gets hurt.

    More specifically, me.

    I leaned in a little too close to peer at a very ornate bath caddy –one of those baskets that extends across the tub to hold the razors and scented scrubs and TV dinners of people with bathtubs big enough to accommodate a whole person. I was looking because I’ve always thought those things were silly. I ended up looking pretty silly myself, all watery and a little purple between the eyes after the bridge of my nose – the crooked bump that I hate – made direct and aggressive contact with the very plate glass meant to protect me from the merchandise.

    For the record, tearing up after a nose injury doesn’t count as crying. It’s an innate physiological reflex response to pain in the nose, which is served by the same cranial nerve as the eyes. I’m not purple anymore, just a little tender, so I don’t think my nose is broken. I guess I can’t use my window shopping accident as an excuse for re-constructive surgery.

  • Emily on 8th

    I’m not used to the creaks in these floors yet. The day we got our keys, our landlord turned on all the lights in the living room and he, Caitlin and I stood along one wall and peered down at the glossy wood floors as if we were hoping to see our reflections in a fountain of youth. “This apartment was one of the few where the floors were worth saving,” Jeff said with such open regard for parquet craftsmanship that I silently vowed never to speak foul of the style again. At least not in this neighborhood.

    I knew I was living in the Fairfield County of Brooklyn when I saw, in the gutter, the Monday after Thanksgiving, a squashed, rotting, stuffed tomato. It’s impossible to know just how it landed there, but at least I can be sure that if hooligans are throwing produce out of car windows in this neighborhood, it’s going to be classy produce.

    As classy as the gentleman who said, once he had caught and steadied a lady friend who tripped in the gap where tiles were missing in the subway station stairs, “Honey, you didn’t break your heel did you?” That gap was patched up with cement by the time I got off the train after work and climbed up those stairs to the corner of the street that has started to feel like home. It didn’t sneak up on me. I haven’t been looking over my shoulder for the welcoming committee. Just: off the train at the end of the platform, up to the street, down the block and through the gate, which I can finally open with minimal clanking, up the stoop and through the front door. Up the stairs and down the hall, all “home again, home again, ” keys on the hook, notinyourpocketoronthetableorunderyourpurseorbythetv, and across these creaky floors.

    Maybe they just haven’t gotten used to me yet.