Marathon Shopping Trip: Another NYC Story

In NY, we didn’t have a car, which—come to find out—adds a layer of complexity to life, if you’re used to having a car, that is. I don’t know many people here in CA that don’t have a car, or at least access to a car. I’ve had a car of some kind—usually a truck—since I was 18, and what you realize when you no longer have a car is just how much your car becomes an extension of you. An augmentation of your capacity and ability. I can haul that couch for you. I can take us to lunch. I can be there in twenty minutes. Until you can’t.

Take grocery shopping for example. At the beginning of each month, Liz and I can go to Food-4-Less, spend 200 or so dollars on 10 to 15 bags of groceries, load it up in the car and take it home. But what would happen if we emerged from Food-4-Less with our 10 to 15 bags to find that there was no car to load them into? Answer to follow.

So while in Brooklyn, without a car, our shopping was pretty limited. Sometimes we’d go to Trader Joe’s downtown and each carry two bags back to the bus stop. Often we’d get groceries delivered, which was easy and convenient and got the job done, but ultimately it’s what you’d expect getting your groceries from plastic packages (thumbnail pictures of which you’ve clicked into your online cart) stuffed neatly into a cardboard box and shipped to you. There was an element of hominess missing, and the majority of the time there just wasn’t food in the apartment, leading to lots of Chinese takeout from the place around the corner.

Until one day, we came up with a plan. Actually, we came up with a plan to rehash a plan we’d come up with previously. Previously, we had taken the train to Target, loaded up hundreds of dollars worth of household goods (i.e. pillows, towels) into two carts and hauled it all back to Crown Heights in one of the numerous car service cars or taxis lined up outside the store. Why wouldn’t the same work for the Path Mark across the street. So in the interest of filling our fridge and cupboards with fresh and familiar foods, we set out.

In all our shopping excitement, there were two things we failed to notice until exiting the Path Mark with our overloaded shopping cart: First, the belly-button high cement pillars lining the outside of the store that we had passed through upon entering and which, we could now see, prevented, with their spacing of eight-to-ten-inches-shy-of-the-width-of-a-shopping-cart, the removal of the Path Mark shopping carts from the Path Mark premises, a detail that only becomes a problem when coupled with the other thing we had failed to notice: no cars. No car service cars, no taxis, no regular cars. Nothing. The avenue, stationed no more than ten feet from the stone-pillar barrier behind which we were now trapped, an avenue generally lined with taxis and car service cars and thus the centerpiece of our plan and its rehashing, was empty, and it was at this point that I recognized our third failure: failure to recognize the implications of administering our plan on the very day of the New York City Marathon.

I knew that the New York City Marathon was happening that day. But I didn’t know that the New York City Marathon was one of the largest marathons in the world, with over 40,000 marathoners. Here’s a picture:

Most importantly, I didn’t know that the New York City Marathon covered all 5 boroughs. Meaning that it covered Brooklyn. Imagine all those people in the picture headed for the Path Mark at Atlantic Terminal.

We weren’t the only ones, though. Shopper after shopper exited the sliding doors only to join us at the barrier and gaze out at the cab-free street, evident in their eyes the very question burning so hotly in us: how the hell were we going to get all of this stuff, which we just spent ten percent of our income purchasing, home? I could sense a panic in the air. It was like the Titanic. As our precious milk and eggs began to slowly spoil in our sun-soaked cart, I could feel the thick urgency in the deserted souls surrounding us; could sense, at any moment, carts would begin ramming into cement, plastic bags tossed across the street like grenades, roast beef stuffed into shirts or consumed viscously on the spot.

I decided to take action. The bus stop was four blocks away. It wouldn’t be easy, but we could do it. I instructed Liz to “Grab it, Grab it all,” and five to seven bags clutched in each of our four hands, plus one gallon of milk, we set off, at a light trot.

Taped to the bus stop pole was a sign. B65 Route Suspended for Marathon. Our arms burning with ache, the now-stretched-string-thin plastic of the bag handles digging into our fingers, we moved on. Tried the 63. Same sign. We moved on, desperately, with no destination, forsaken by MTA. For miles. Forced to stop every block and lower the bags’ weight to the sidewalk, reenergizing before continuing. Calls, from me, to “Leave it! Dump it! Dump it all!” Liz, sitting Indian-style on the sidewalk, gathering the contents of a broken bag around her like toys in a sandbox, crying back, “No! We can’t! I won’t!”

Eventually, a bus. We got on it, not caring what bus or where, just that it had seats, until it went 20 blocks in the wrong direction. Rerouted, due to Marathon. I wanted to cry. Instead I fumed, shut down. We nearly broke up. Liz, who always saves the day, talked to the driver.

We ended up waiting for an hour or two in the shade of a building for a 65 bus that took us home, arriving at twilight—five to six hours from the initial implementation of our plan—to unload our groceries. That’s it. The end.

Liz requested I announce that despite all of these stories, we had a great time in NY.

Apparently, I’m Seven Months Pregnant

The books, as we will collectively refer to them, all claim as a symptom or side-effect of the seventh month of pregnancy a heightened propensity toward clumsiness, as I can attest to, given the accumulation of debris I have left in my wake this past week.

This mass destruction, which by Wednesday had me hyperbolically declaring I had broken half of our wedding gifts, was foreshadowed the previous month with my thorough shattering of a pair of martini glasses with one can of kidney beans. I had begun drinking martinis (vodka martinis) earlier that week, mostly because we now, after the wedding, possessed martini glasses, and having washed and dried the two glasses I set them side-by-side on the counter, directly below a well-stocked cupboard from which—in the process of searching for a snack, probably macaroni and cheese or cookies or peanut butter—I nudged and dropped the aforementioned beans, the can pulverizing both glasses simultaneously. Now sits atop the baker’s rack a lonely and forsaken bottle of vermouth—because what fun is drinking a martini from a milk glass?—the vodka having been reallocated to my customary pre-martini-glass-owning white russians.

I had forgotten this incident by the time the true devastation began this week, innocently enough with my dropping and shattering of a juice glass but followed ominously an afternoon later with my annihilation—during the process of washing—of a lovely trifle dish (also a wedding present) inside which Liz had created an equally lovely Fourth of July dessert. My feelings of mourning over this loss mixed with those of frustration and fatalism when, an hour later, upon attempting to turn on a light (by the pull of a cord) the glass cover which I had earlier and apparently faultily reinstalled after the changing of a bulb came crashing to its demise.

The sound of shattering glass from the other room had become so frequent Liz took to responding only with silence.

Silence that harbored frustration of its own, I found, when my spilling water all over the dinner table—and dinner—resulted in a bit of a fight.

We made up though, and the following night, when I spread pesto across the kitchen floor from a dropped bowl, it was chalked up as comical.

Liz—whose own seventh month clumsiness is seemingly more muted—was gracious and kind, too, while body-blocking the crystal vase (also from the wedding) that would house the flowers I brought home the following afternoon, gently stating, “Oh, I’ll do it,” and later when unassumingly offering to herself wash and dry the two pitchers waiting on the counter, an offer that seemed to implicitly include everything else, ever.

Invasion of the Furniture Risers

There are fourteen individual furniture risers in my house at the moment—of three different types. Forty-eight hours ago, there were zero.

This all started on Friday, when Liz and I began to put together the baby’s room, which previous to Friday had been a guest bedroom.

Here’s a picture of the room Friday morning:

Here’s a picture of the room now:

663 — Notice the ironing board didn’t move.

My job Friday was to assemble the two major pieces of furniture that we have thus far purchased: the crib and a dresser that we had hoped could double as a changing table.

The crib turned out perfectly nice, as did the dresser, though in the case of the latter it became apparent during the course of its assemblage that it was not quite as large as we had imagined based upon the context-less picture provided on Amazon. If the picture had included, say, a watermelon sitting on top of the dresser, or a rabbit, we would have realized that the dresser was closer to knee-high than hip-high, with the accompanying discrepancies in regards to proportion. In other words, the dresser would be a dresser, but it wasn’t going to also be a changing table.

This seemed acceptable to me, but Liz, who made frequent worried checks as the dresser began to take form, hoping that upon leaving the room and returning the item would hit a growth spurt, felt that she had failed as a home-shopper, and thereby as a wife and mother and human being, and that she needed to find a way to fix her mistake and redeem herself, resulting in an almost immediate trip to Home Depot to purchase the following:

Little furniture riser disk things, which, when stacked and placed under the dresser’s legs, raised the dresser several inches, but failed, as I pointed out, to expand the proportions of the item in question, leaving the top surface still far too narrow to serve as a changing table.

The issue rested until that afternoon, when Liz declared her intentions to do some shopping at Ross and Marshall’s, a trip she returned from with the usual Ross and Marshall’s fare, along with a set of four zebra-striped furniture risers (these significantly taller than the little disks) seen here:

These newer, much more decorative risers did indeed raise the dresser even higher, though, as I again pointed out, failed to make the necessary alterations to its proportions necessary for its use as a changing table.

Liz’s desperation came from the fact that her spending whatever-the-dresser-cost (which was not much) was predicated on its serving as both dresser and changing table, and if it came to serve only as dresser, she has wasted money.

The extent of this desperation became apparent Saturday morning, as we conducted an impromptu yard sale to liquidate some of the furniture we had removed from the guest-room-now-baby-room. A van pulled up to the front of the house and a young man crossed the front lawn to hand over a box. The box was labeled Amazon, and upon opening it with my keys I found it to contain this:

A set of four furniture risers, quite similar to the previous set, but without zebra stripes.

In fit of nervous laughter, Liz admitted that she had ordered the just-delivered set shortly before her trip to Ross, where she purchased the zebra stripe set. She reportedly just couldn’t wait.

When the nervous laughter, now emanating from both of us, finally died down, I suggested that Liz write a short story about a woman that keeps buying more and more furniture risers. She starts with a dresser, or something, that she wishes was taller, then the chair next to the dresser, then the kitchen table, and the dining room table, and the cat box, and then it would get sort of Barthelmeean, or something, or like magical realism, and the woman would put furniture risers beneath every piece of furniture and appliance, including the refrigerator, and then beneath her pets, and her spouse and children, and the house itself, and then her neighbors, everyone but her, and her neighbor’s houses, and the White House, and beneath the President and his Cabinet, and the Great Wall of China, and the Moon, and then…I don’t know. I don’t know how it would end.

Applebee’s and Funeral Homes

A kind of a weird thing happened the other day at Applebee’s. Maybe others have had this same experience. You walk in, and the hostess enthusiastically asks what the occasion is. Then, once seated, the waitress asks the same thing. This actually first happened to us about a month or so ago. “So what’s the occasion tonight?” asked the hostess. “So what’s the big occasion tonight?” asked the waitress. In either case, we didn’t really know what to say. “Dinner?”

This strikes me as a bit strange because…well…it’s Applebee’s. It’s like the McDonald’s of payday. Does it require an occasion?

It’s actually a bit lofty on their part, if you think about it. You’ve come into our easily-visible-from-the-freeway restaurant chain with its strategically placed ambience and colorful food (and too often balloons). Surely some monumental and discussion-worthy event has occurred in your life.

So as we were crossing the parking lot on the way in to Applebee’s two nights ago, I thought about asking Liz, “Hey, remember when they kept asking us what the occasion was for coming to Applebee’s?” But she beat me to it. And when we got inside, it happened again. “So what’s the occasion?” But this time Liz was prepared. “Someone died,” she responded. There were no follow up questions.

As awesome as this was, someone actually had died. Two people. Monday before last, Liz’s great aunt, Marian, passed away; that Friday, my grandmother, Genevieve, did the same. While it’s nothing like losing someone to tragedy—both lived long and fulfilled lives—it’s still a heckuva shock when it happens.

At my grandmother’s funeral service last Thursday, I had the honor of delivering her eulogy. It wasn’t easy; in fact, I dreaded it for a day or two prior. But I’m glad I did it.

In the eulogy, there was a part where I talked about all the time my grandmother and I spent driving around Lodi. How she’d drive me everywhere. How I’d walk from school to where she was working and wait for her to get off and then we’d drive around town running errands and eventually drive home. I also commented on the irony of the period, many years later, when I drove her everywhere.

Today, we took one more drive through Lodi together. I picked her up, and we drove home.

By the way, when you walk into a funeral home, no one asks you what the occasion is. They just sort of stare at you, assessing how likely you are to flop onto their floor and begin wailing.

Mike Tyson

We used to have one cat. Rooster. Rooster is a Maine Coon, which is a breed of cat that weighs 15 to 20 pounds and resembles a raccoon, but puffier, and more cat-like. Rooster weighs closer to 20 pounds than 15. When he lies on his back in the middle of the floor, as he often does, he looks kind of like a really big sea anemone with a cat head on one end.

Now we have a second cat. Mike Tyson. Mike Tyson is a girl cat (Rooster is a boy cat). Mike Tyson is a stray that turned up at my wife’s work. Liz(my wife)’s office mate starting calling her (the cat, not Liz) Mike Tyson because she was missing part of her ear. At some point, she had been caught and spayed and then earmarked to indicate this. Technically, then, she should be Holyfield, but as we soon came to find out, the name actually makes a lot of sense.

It makes a lot of sense because Mike Tyson is a very loving and affectionate cat that likes to show her love and affection by biting. She also shows dissatisfaction by biting, as well as excitement and frustration. In short, Mike Tyson, like Mike Tyson, likes to bite. She bites fingers, mostly. And toes. And Rooster. And the carpet. Sometimes she just starts biting the carpet.

Mike Tyson is a calico. Apparently calicos are notoriously naughty. I didn’t know this until recently. My grandparents had a calico cat for a while when I was a kid. Her name was Buttercup. I don’t remember much about Buttercup, except that one day she got caught in the automatic garage door. That was the end of Buttercup.

So I haven’t been blogging for awhile…

So I haven’t been blogging for awhile, mostly because shortly after my last post I received notes back from my editor, and have been spending much of my not-at-work time working on my novel and little-to-no time on other things like keeping up with yardwork or grading or eating right or blogging.

But I sent the manuscript back this week and am looking forward to getting back into the blog swing of things. I already know what my next post will be about: cats. Our cats. I don’t have any actual data on this, but in my little mind I imagine something like sixty-two percent of all blog posts are about people’s cats. In some the cats are metaphorical, but in some the cats are just cats.

P.S. The big news since my last post is that my wife, Liz, and I have learned that we’re going to be parents. We (possibly) learn the sex this coming week, and have names (first and middle) picked out for either possibility. If I knew how to upload the grainy black-and-white photo from the freezer door to this webpage, I would.

First Week in NY Part 3: Scalpers and Batteries

Our first full day in NY, having arrived really late the night before (actually, really really early that morning) at our new apartment, we woke up early A) because we were hungry and B) because I had convinced Liz that we should get up early and go to Central Park and stand in line for Al Pacino’s final (free) performance in The Merchant of Venice (weeks later the show would move to Broadway and charge hecka hundred dollars a ticket), reminding Liz, who seemed more enthused about A) and less enthused about B), that if we were going to move across the country and be all adventurous and fancy, then this (B)) was precisely the type of fancy, adventurous thing we should be doing (as soon, of course, as we had fulfilled A)).

So after walking from our apartment for several miles in we-had-no-idea what direction towards we-had-no-idea what and finally finding a McDonald’s, we sat satisfied (at least, in regards to A)) over Sausage McMuffins with Egg and I figured out how to use Liz’s phone to GoogleMaps walking and subway directions from our location to Central Park, and after circling the same block numerous times in search of the indicated subway entrance, and walking up and down the steps of several such entrances and crossing streets and questioning annoyed MTA attendants in attempts to get on the correct side that would go in the correct direction, and then passing our stop twice, once one way, then the other (cuz we were on the A, not the C)—all behaviors that would become frequent motifs in the days to follow—we arrived at the Park, made our way to the Delacorte Theater, where we found the line that began at the box office and ended…ended…ended…0.7 miles and 13 minutes later at the Jackie Kennedy Onassis Reservoir, Liz and I both thinking, at the same time, we would later learn, how nice it was to live in a city where this many people—and look, from all walks of life—would camp out in the Park—for days, it appears, in some cases—for the love of theater. The love of Shakespeare. It was so nice that we weren’t the least bit annoyed an hour later when we made it kind-of-almost up to the box office but the tickets ran out, just before we were approached by the first scalper, a stringy blonde girl who appeared to have given up on eating and now needed money to buy things that were probably not food (she reported that after waiting in line for twenty-six hours she had decided that she didn’t really feel like going to the show and would we like to buy her tickets from her), the first of about forty scalpers that would approach us before we escaped the Park, most of whom employed the muttering-under-the-breath method and all of whom we had passed on our wistful 13 minute walk to the end of the line. The excitement continued as we crossed Central Park West to the Natural History Museum, outside of which we witnessed a “scalper fight” that Liz remembers better than I do but that consisted of a meth-ed out scalper boss lady shouting at her cranked-out scalper minion—who had waited all night but got tired and bailed shortly before the line started moving—that now she wouldn’t have enough effing tickets for her effing buyers and so forth.

The next two hours we spent in search of a Kmart, the hour after that, having found Kmart, searching for the Kmart’s entrance, and the hour after that lugging several bags of Kmart merchandise (those big bags they have, the ones you could put a toddler in, if you know what I mean) and a box of cat litter up and down a busy NY street in search of a subway entrance, finally giving up and paying way too much for a cab ride from Lower Manhattan to Brooklyn, unaware we had been in Lower Manhattan and unaware we had been super close to a number of subway entrances.

As the sun set on that first day and we realized we had no batteries for the pump on the air mattress we had just purchased at Kmart, I stood on our stoop and gazed toward that Big Apple, resigning myself to the fear-laden knowledge that the following day we would have to face her again, in search of batteries, not knowing—having seen only our small stretch of Crown Heights—that Brooklyn offered real stores that sold real things, and either she would consume us, body and soul, or we would emerge from her clutches victorious, batteries in hand.

First Week in NY Part Two: The Apartment

In a previous post, I mentioned things that Liz and I learned on our first day in NY, specifically what it feels like to carry a 20lb. cat long distances and that NY crowds are different from CA crowds. Here’s another thing we learned: everything in NYC is smaller. Or, perhaps more accurately, more compact. For example, there are no houses. There are homes, but not houses. The homes are in buildings, and all the buildings butt right up to the next building.

Another example: there are no parking lots. Or at least no big expansive parking lots like we have in CA, where no matter how busy Safeway is that day you can find a spot—though a longer walk—with an empty spot on each side. There are parking lots, but no big parking lots, is what I’m sayin’. Not even those big parking structures or garages that are all over San Francisco. What there is is little lots—little little—in little enclaves between buildings, and in these little enclave lots are these elevators that take your car (not that we had a car) way up into the air. That’s what they do in New York: put it up higher. Everything is stacked. McDonalds and Target are all 2 stories. Or 3. School playgrounds are on school roofs.

The reason for this, of course, is that New York City is compacted with people, all of whom have stuff, into an area significantly small relative to other areas containing the same amount of people and stuff. As we learned as we arrived at our apartment our first night in New York, dropped off at our stoop by a cynical cabbie at around one or two in the morning after a full day of travel. We had subletted the apartment sight unseen—other than a couple of photos, but you know how that goes—from a pleasant Frenchman named Jean Louis who writes enthusiastic emails and who was studying Arabic in Spain. I didn’t actually get a good look at the place for the first fifteen minutes, during which I battled through four trips up (and down) the three flights of narrow, steep, rickety stairs, transporting in each trip one of four sixty-plus pound and awkwardly-shaped (when climbing stairs, that is—hell on the shins) suitcases. Once I caught my breath , I joined Liz, who had had fifteen minutes to begin perusing the joint, in perusing the joint.

We still had our poker faces from the cab ride over in full deployment, and neither of us said much. Here are the highlights: First, it kinda smelled. But then, New York kinda smelled, especially in the summer, and in both cases, we got used to it. Second, the lesbian couple that Jean Louis had rented to before us seemed to have been rather slobbish. As a result, everything in the apartment, from the TV remote to the hardwood floors, seemed to be coated in an unidentified grimy film. The couple had also had a dog, and though unidentified, there seemed to be an element of dog hair subtly incorporated into the grimy film. Also, there were food remnants caked to the inner walls of both the microwave oven and the oven oven. This, eventually though, would be remedied by a methodical, obsessive, and desperate process of cleaning on Liz’s part (other than the oven oven, which we never opened again).

Beyond all that, the principal characteristic of this apartment was just how tiny it was. Tiny tiny. The entire apartment—a one bed, one bath—was at least slightly smaller (if not just smaller) than the living room of the house I live in now. I lived in an apartment in college, and our Brooklyn apartment was about the size of the front room of that apartment, which doesn’t include that apartment’s kitchen, two bathrooms, and two bedrooms.

The kitchen of our apartment in New York was big enough for two people to stand in, but only single-file. If I was in the kitchen, and then Liz came into the kitchen, and then I wanted to leave the kitchen, Liz would have to first leave the kitchen, let me out, and then re-enter the kitchen. The refrigerator door could open about 43 degrees before hitting the counter on the other side.

Our bedroom was exactly the size of one Full mattress, a dresser, and a small walkway for humans who wished to access the bed (again, single-file only). Of course, that first night there was no mattress, but rather the space later to be filled by our mattress was occupied by a stained futon that the next day we temporarily replaced with an air mattress that required re-inflation at intervals of every 2.5 hours, participants rising and standing sleepy-eyed in the single-file walkway area as the mattress regained its form.

Yes, Liz and I looked over our quaint, tiny, filmy new home and didn’t say a word. We were tired and—unbeknownst to us (or perhaps known but lacking specifics)—we had other problems to begin enduring the next morning.

Hamsters

My friend and fellow University of Nebraska MFA Graduate David Atkinson posted a link to an article about a man with too many hamsters, noting that it reminded him of a story of mine.

Here’s the link, and below is the story. It goes better for the hamsters in the link.

Lonely Days Are Gone

It started with one hamster because he was lonely and wanted companionship and his landlord would absolutely not allow a cat or a dog but instead suggested a bird that would stay in a cage such as a parrot but the lonely man’s aunt had had a parrot when he was younger and quite possibly she still had it or probably it died but maybe she got another one he really didn’t know he hadn’t visited her in quite awhile which saddened him since he now knew what it felt like to be lonely but at any rate it had always seemed that the parrot was taunting him and it wouldn’t shut up and the thought of it reminded him of his ex-wife and that quickly turned him off of the entire bird idea so he opted instead for a hamster but of course after a few weeks the hamster was not as peppy as he too had grown lonely and needed companionship so the man went out and got another hamster that the first hamster could hang out in the cage with but the first hamster was kind of mean to the new hamster and wouldn’t share the food with him and one day the man found the second hamster dead so he threw it in the trash and went and got another hamster but this time also got a bigger cage with a retractable partition so the hamsters could play together during the day but be separated at feeding time and the hamsters seemed very happy and so the man felt happy but that night he was awakened by a lot of scratching and thrashing coming from the direction of the trash can and it turns out the second hamster hadn’t died after all but had passed out due to malnutrition but since there was plenty to eat in the trash can he was revived and so first thing in the morning the man went and got another even bigger cage with yet another partition and he put his hamsters in it and all seemed very content but one day after some time had passed he came in to find that the third hamster had had six baby hamsters and it seemed that the first hamster was helping her take care of the babies which was enjoyable for the man to watch but eventually he began to notice that the second hamster acted as if he felt left out like a third wheel so the man went and got more cages with more partitions and a girlfriend for the second hamster with whom he got along great but time passed and passed and no babies so the man took them to the veterinarian who told him that no babies were born because both hamsters were girls but this confused the man because when he had just the first and second hamsters they did not get along and had no babies so he brought in the first hamster and the veterinarian told him that that hamster was also a girl and this is when the man realized he had the first and third hamsters mixed up because hamsters kind of look alike so he went back home but not before stopping at the pet store to buy more cages with more partitions plus boyfriends for the third and fourth hamsters and over time all the pairs had babies and the babies grew and formed new pairs and more babies and before he knew it the man had lots and lots of hamsters and was very busy feeding and cleaning and buying cages and retracting partitions but the man eventually realized that the hamsters had not kept him from feeling lonely and soon after he spent a week locked in the bathroom crying and no one fed or watered the hamsters and they all died.

First Week in NY

I claimed here that the next post would be about our first week in NY, but I think I’ll stick, for now, with our first day, maybe just our first hour or two.

We flew out, as mentioned, with all of our stuff packed into 4 suitcases and with a cat (in carrier) as a carry-on. We had drugged Rooster (the cat) at the airport in Sacramento, the drugs not knocking Rooster out but rather putting him into a trance under which he spent the next ten hours uninterruptedly plucking at the mesh screen of his carrier at three second intervals, creating a race between the plane landing and Rooster plucking his way through his carrier and running free and high around said plane.

But the carrier held up and made it to LaGuardia intact, around midnight. One thing we learned that day—and would be reminded of several months later, walking through Brooklyn for a vet check-up—is that a 19 pound cat plus a three-quarter-pound carrier equals 19.75 pounds, and 19.75 pounds feels like a goddamn lot of weight when you’re toting it through an airport terminal.

Another thing we learned is that New York crowds are not like California crowds, and after somewhat reluctantly bumping and shoving my way through men, women, and children and one-by-one collecting our 4 overweight suitcases from the baggage carousel and depositing them onto a cart and bumping and shoving (now with the aid of a cart loaded with 200 plus pounds of luggage) our way out the sliding doors, I spotted an open cab across the street and in a fit of adrenaline—charged by an arduous hour of cat-carrying and women and children bumping—I lifted all 4 of our 50-plus pound suitcases—2 handles in each hand—and awkwardly jogged toward the cab’s open trunk.

The cabbie did not recognize the address of the Brooklyn sublet we had rented sight unseen (our key had been FedExed to us by our friend Joe), but as we came closer to what our research indicated to be our neighborhood and our apartment, the cabbie began to repeatedly inform us that, “No, you don’t live here. Not here.” Not “You don’t want to live here,” but definitively, “You don’t live here.”

“This is what we call East New York,” he said, “This is the worst part of New York. You don’t live here.” Now to get the whole picture here you have to consider that we’ve quit our jobs and sold all of our stuff other than the contents (more or less) of the 4 bags in the trunk and it’s nearly one in the morning and very dark outside and this guy is repeating over and over, “No, you don’t live here. Not here. You don’t live here.” The thoughts that Liz and I were having about the situation and the hypothetical conversations our minds were each having with the other as we sit silently in the cab are probably fairly easy to imagine. But our faces? All poker.

As we got closer to the apartment, the cabbie’s mantra changed from “You don’t live here” to “Past Washington. Past Washington is nice. You live past Washington. You don’t want to live this side of Washington. Past Washington is okay.” When he got to Washington, he cut over to Dean, the street we lived on. I looked out the window at the address of a building. Then at the next one. “Other way,” I said, “It’s the other way.”

The cabbie drove us to our apartment in silence. Liz and I looked at one another: Poker.