Autumn Shades

Better than a shoe dream was a dream gig. Saturday night we went to Tarrytown to see Ian Hunter play.

We drove two hours through blazing fall colors on the Taconic Parkway, one of the loveliest drives on earth, unless it's raining or snowing at which point I think it becomes pretty treacherous. We were taking the road at peak leaf-changing time, so that every bend and dip and rise led to yet another "aaahhh" and "ooohhh" at the golds, oranges and reds. From me, anyway. Eric, being English, confines himself to curt nods.

Tarrytown is a monied version of small town America - lots of strollers and shops and the Music Hall dominating the Main Street. We went into Sweetgrass to say hi to John Wesley Harding who was opening the night's show. I almost gasped when I saw he was dining with Eleanor Friedberger from the Fiery Furnaces. The sweet indie princess said "hey, we have the same hair" to me and I immediately felt cooler than I have in probably ten years. If you feel like an anachronism...just wait it out.

We marveled at how quickly we were served, and how good the food was - in France we'd gotten used to judging the quality of a restaurant on whether we'd get food poisoning or not. I did miss those low-cost pichets of wine though - the price of a simple glass has nudged up to nine or ten dollars.

Tarrytown Music Hall is an antique vaudeville theatre - you can't call it "restored" because it looks like they didn't have enough money to do much more than clean the place up and turn on the lights - it is glorious in its untouched shabbiness. As we were picking up our tickets, a nice man came up and said he knew we'd be there because I'd written about it on my Twitter! A fan of both Eric and I, he made us feel like secret stars. I didn't even feel bad that the ticket envelope misspelled my name.

We were admiring the decorative touches of the theater when we ran into James Mastro - he plays guitar in Ian Hunter's band. Next thing we knew we were whisked backstage to meet the man himself and he is such a sweetheart, such a nice man. I felt like I was in my own version of Rock Dreams, seeing him and Eric chatting. It was good to see the other guys in the band that I knew from back in NY, Andy Burton ace keyboard player and Mark Bosch.

Wes did a great job opening and Eleanor came out and sang a song. When IH and band came out to play I realized we were sitting right in front of his piano - a perfect spot even though I loved when he picked up the acoustic too. Wow, he still has total charisma and one of the greatest voices - the way his melodies fall and then climb is so tied with that voice, to hear him now in person was almost too much for me - how many drives have Eric and I done to "Mott"? Lyrics that contain all the wisdom of the universe, he just tosses out there with a knowing laugh - hell! He is 72. There is hope. It was great to hear all the old favorites but some of the newer songs were just as powerful, Man Overboard especially.

I was so captivated by his performance I was almost able to ignore the texters, talkers and bathroom-goers all around (at least I think that's where they were going - they all looked like they took too good care of themselves to be smokers) - when did people become so constantly busy at concerts? And the dad with his ten year old sitting right behind us, giving a song by song commentary until the poor tyke was practically in a coma. Let the kid have his own experience, if that's possible in this day and age! Still, the band managed to inch the volume up. And in end there was enough devotion and focus in the room to bring about two encores.

We hung out way too late and the two hour drive after was longer without the fall foliage. Eric did the driving while I looked out the window at moonlight on the Catskills, wondering if it was all true, that we were really here in New York, or would I wake up back in France, wishing I could be out in the world?

An orthodox Jew in khaki shorts emerging from a rest area men's room and a crumpled envelope in my coat pocket reading "Rugby, Amy" confirmed that this was real life.

The Ecstasy & The Agony

The day started off good - at 8 AM I found a shopping bag full of luxury ladies shoes on the sidewalk near my brother's apartment in Greenpoint. Prada, Robert Clergerie, Stephane Kelian; red suede, khaki, calfskin.

For a second I thought I must still be sleeping, dreaming the perfect dream. But I knew immediately they were too small. They always are. Still, I gathered a few choice pairs up - maybe my brother's girlfriend? She can walk anywhere in heels, and they looked closer to her size, seven.

I clutched them to my chest and then remembered: bedbugs, the scourge of New York City. Was the shoe bag a dirty trick, the result of an infestation? Someone's powerlessness turned to anger to a chance to play God? Was the infestee at this very moment up at her window with a morning cup of coffee, cackling at any fool stupid enough to grab herself some soiled high-end bounty?

Or maybe the bag was fallout from a breakup - a jilted lover reaping his revenge, hitting his gal where he knew it would hurt the most?

I took a closer look at the shoes, being careful to hold them away from me, and weighed the possibilities. They were definitely several seasons/years old. Probably a closet purge that took a benevolent turn when selling on eBay or through consignment seemed like too much trouble.

And I was so happy to be back in the city with all its stories, all the possibilities. I'd missed New York.

* * *

"FUCK YOOUUU!!" Honk Honk. "YOU FUCKING BITCH - YOU FUCK, FUCK YOOOUUU!!!"

Me? I looked up at the garbage truck shuddering to a stop next to me at the light. "Me?" I mouthed to the red-faced driver of the truck.

"YOU - YOU FUCKING BITCH - YOU BIIITCH!"

What had I done? Yes, I'd gotten on the eastbound L.I.E. in error and had just exited and was sitting at a stop light. But where had the garbage truck entered into the equation? What had I done to piss this guy off?

And the word "Bitch" carries the weight of intent and that confused me even more. Whatever wrongs I'd committed had been carried out unconsciously. His use of the word was making me feel doubly bad.

The guy continued to honk and scream and I raised my hands, a question, what did I do?

This only enraged him more. "THAT'S RIGHT - YOU! YOU FUCKING BITCH!!!" He mimed a steering wheel in his hands - I'd been driving. That was my crime.

My look of shock and dismay only set him off more. All that time in France had made me as placid as a Limousin cow. "FUUUCK YOOOOUUU!" he yelled, and raced off as fast as his dilapidated piece of shit garbage truck would take him.

I caught my breath and made my turn.

Yeah, I'd missed New York.

Immigrant Song

I haven't fallen off the face of the earth.

Just been wearing a pair of rubber cleaning gloves for a month - they make it hard to write.

I loved how Patti Smith was on our flight from England when we arrived in the US. I saw her getting into her seat up in business class. (We were in steerage, in honor of my grandfather who arrived at Ellis Island back in the 20s, all alone at the age of 11). It felt like we were being shepherded into the US by a high echelon Rock Air Marshall. The top would be Chuck Berry.

Then she stood directly in front of us in the line while we waited for Eric to go through US immigration for the first time. I've never met her, always been afraid to, too in awe to. But she seemed cool, standing there two feet away with her guitar on her shoulder, checking her phone. ("Excuse me?" someone says. She turns around, wearily expectant. Oh the price of punk poetess fame. "There's no cell phone use until after baggage claim, ma'am.")

We slipped past as she shut off her phone and the agent jokingly let Eric in to the United States, playing around with Eric's precious MBE, the sealed, US immigration-issued Mysterious Brown Envelope we'd been told to present, unopened, on arrival or risk blowing the whole thing. We'd been manically guarding it for three weeks. It was stunning, how lighthearted they all were in immigration at Newark. Polite, genial even. We almost expected them to offer us coffee and donuts.

I missed that. I missed the stupid fun we have in America. Like the young woman who was selling a stove on Craigslist. She gave us her address, and mentioned how when getting directions off the internet that one of the streets had changed its name. She wasn't specific with the street name.

As we passed Greg Browder Way on the right for the fourth time it finally made sense.

"It says here 'turn right on Cheesecock Road'."

I'm in love with the ease of things in America. You want to rent a car? Buy a bed? Get copies made? Send this, receive that? Building supplies? A $50 stove from Craigslist? A $40 dehumidifier? Easy - any time! Eat, eat, eat - fresh, local food, or unhealthy crap. Just say when. Every night around twenty to seven I find myself getting anxious, wondering if we have enough food, a bottle of wine. Then I remember the 24 hour supermarket a few blocks away.

Choice! Beer World down the road and the Wine Cellar right next to it with stuff from all over the world. Usefully within walking distance for when the snow sets in?

I love our new town. It's across the river from trendy, happening Hudson. Near Saugerties and Woodstock with their rich hippie daytrippers. But this is the land that time forgot. Small town America with enough of a freak quotient that nobody marks you as an outsider. The first time we looked around the place, the only people on the old-fashioned main street were a cop putting a handcuffed biker into a police car. I think they were laughing. Even if you are an outsider, everyone is friendly. The postal workers all came out to shake hands with us when we told them we'd moved in to town. The insurance agent clapped Eric on the back and thanked us for our business, apologizing again for not being able to insure the house during Irene.

"Let's go out for a beer sometime!" Then we saw him across the street in the local attorney's office. "I just need him to help me (cough) clear up a few things," he said sheepishly.

Irene the hurricane is just plain "Irene" here. Everyone was affected by the storm: water in basements, trees down, businesses closed temporarily. The weird weather continued until a few days ago: torrential rain every other day and the Catskill Creek that flows through town and the huge Hudson River just minutes away rising. There's been a swimming pool in the backyard where the Previous Owners had an above ground swimming pool, a circle of water several inches high where for the last year or two a nasty piece of plastic sat collecting moss and dead leaves.

The Previous Owners - we have an ongoing relationship with this shadowy entity. The house needs a lot of work. The Previous Owners didn't intend to sell the place but lost their grip and had to let it go:

"Why, why did you put this outlet at the top of the door frame?"

"Did you have to wood panel that room? And what's with the toilet nook?"

"Nasty vinyl tiles - on the ceiling?"

No stove, no refrigerator. Just a food-encrusted early model microwave cemented into the kitchen cabinets.

At first we gave Previous Owners points for building a bar and having a sound system in the basement. The building inspector said it was all a repository of life-threatening mold and should be removed as quickly as possible.

I walk around in paint-splattered clothes, looking longingly at the purple suede vintage shoes I forced hopefully into my suitcase over two months ago. There are lots of shows and concerts and markets and events happening at this time of the year and we'll get out to see something soon.

Fixing up a neglected house is the price of admission for living in one of the prettiest places in the world that's also conveniently located in the hugely populated Northeastern US. Tall tall trees with leaves changing color, the dark Catskill mountains on one side of the town and the enchanted Hudson River on the other. There's a bird sanctuary around the corner and deer, foxes, even bears have been spotted on our street. We watched a white skunk - weird prehistoric-looking creature - strolling by. I had to explain to Eric what it was, how they spray their distinctive, lingering scent when threatened. My older brother was sitting outside smoking a cigarette and noticed the creature sitting a few feet away. Eric's christened him "Mike". Like the name Dave in England, every other guy up here is Mike. The rest seem to be called Gary.

Ran into an old neighbor from Williamsburg our first day. We're two hours from the city but it feels like being there in some ways: the NY Times, Post and Daily News for sale in the gas stations, the accents of some of our neighbors who moved up from Brooklyn years ago, the Breakstone's butter and bagels and delis and friends coming "up from the city". I love being in New York again, to hear talk of Albany and Governor Cuomo. To see the aisle of pasta and Italian grocery items - I missed it more than I realized.

I just got a call that the contents of the shipping container are being delivered on Tuesday. What was in that thing, anyway? We've been camping in the house for over a month with folding chairs and restaurant table borrowed from the swell guy who owns the local coffee place (who is named neither Gary or Mike but Robert, so there goes that theory.) Once our own stuff arrives I think we can say the moving odyssey is over. There's still a lot more to do on this place, but I look forward to getting back to doing things I have a vague memory of doing before, like music and writing.

I might even wear the purple suede shoes.

Hacking It

"So you couldn't hack it in Europe," said the British border agent as we headed from Calais to Dover with one last vanload. She'd asked what the purpose of our visit to the UK was and we'd told her we were moving our household goods out of France and over to the US via a shipping container from England.

Couldn't hack it in Europe?

This was not the time for a debate on semantics. But her statement instantly rankled. I felt judged.

Hack it? It's not something you do in France. There was nothing to hack there. The very idea of moving from the US to "Europe" speaks of removing oneself from hacking it. The old ways are too entrenched and ingrained and there's no cutting through, only finding ways around. Maybe that had been part of the problem with the place. If I was ready for an underfunded early retirement, maybe it could have worked.

Now, getting out - that's been a different story. That's like coming up out of the jungle with a machete, whacking vines and undergrowth and worse out of the way to reach daylight. It was so effortless, getting there. Kind of like treading lukewarm water, being there. But getting out?

Maybe because no one sells their house quickly in France, or anywhere, these days, we'd had it too easy. Not enough challenges. Not enough hack it. But since the house was sold it's been an obstacle course. Trying to satisfy the strict US visa requirements at the same time as trying to find and fund a house in upstate New York from thousands of miles away. Packing and moving a houseful of music equipment and some furniture to a friend's garage in England, and then a storage facility big enough to bring a shipping container to. Seeing the cost of the container jump from six down to three and up to eight thousand dollars, and then back down at least a little.

The US house purchase went through just as a hurricane watch started for the eastern part of the country and all insurance companies stopped writing home insurance policies. And they said the high winds and possible flooding were headed right for New York City.

"The house is a good two hours from there," I said, worrying about friends and family in the city being sent to shelters and worrying, just a little, about the storm bearing down on our uninsured new home.

But there was no time to worry because Eric, who had driven a rental van back down to SW France, filled it with the last of our boxes and furniture and headed for the port at Calais, had been involved in a traffic accident. He'd had to leave the now-undrivable rental van full of our stuff not far from where we'd broken down almost five years ago and travel back to England by taxi. (And as foot passenger on the ferry, though I like the idea of him rolling off the boat at Dover in a French cab.)

The hurricane spared the city and a few hours later I started seeing posts on Facebook about trees falling and catastrophic flooding near Woodstock and and on up into Greene County. Our new county. There were films on the internet of houses and even whole villages being taken out by floods.

We found out the next day the house was okay. A lot of people weren't so lucky - that part of the country was declared a disaster area. I felt guilty calling to get our electricity turned on, knowing how many people had been without power.

And finally we rented yet another van and took the ferry back to France, one last time, still trying to believe that moving everything to England first had been simpler and cheaper than trying to ship from France (and the moving companies all confirmed that it was). We drove to a garage near Lille and transferred our stuff from the disabled van into the working van and returned to the car ferry. No tearful farewell or regretful last looks - just a determination to complete the journey without using a public toilet or eating anything in a French service station, ever again.

The border agent was looking at me, holding my passport in her left hand and the ink stamp, instrument of my freedom to hack it, in her right.

So you couldn't hack it in Europe? I gave her a sickly smile and nodded.

Groundhog Day

Where'm I at? Is it today or last month?

The house was sold almost three weeks ago and things were rolling - we went to England pre-riots and played gigs that all were enjoyable and well-attended. Even the one in Mildenhall Football Club ended up being fun. Got to see Eric's gorgeous granddaughter. Then we went to Paris for the final visa appointment at the US Embassy.

And since then we've been in weird semi-existence with Eric's passport in the ether. You hear about how tough the US is on immigration but I was sure we had everything they'd asked for and Eric had even tested negative for syphilis and chicken pox. No - they still need more. We've been trying to get them the additional paperwork they require, at the same time turning everything around for the US house purchase - all from the French countryside where getting things done is sometimes possible if it isn't Tuesday afternoon, or Monday morning or any time Wednesday or Thursday before 3:30, but not after 5:30. Multiplied by August.

We had to break down and get a French mobile - the final straw was trying to make a call from the only payphone within miles, the one attached to a wooden toilet cabin that serves a small camping area. While I tried navigating the bank voice command system, shouting "PERSONAL", "REPRESENTATIVE!" "NO" and practically screaming my social security number and other pertinent details into the ancient receiver, some poor camper was whimpering, groaning and eventually releasing his bowels on the other side of the wall. "Would you like to make a deposit?" "SOMEBODY ALREADY HAS!"

Later at the library, Eric and I tried to get on the internet to find a Fed Ex place while a safari-suited man across the table kept clacking his dentures. Why was it that the harder I concentrated and the more frustrated I got, the more his clacking intensified?

The only Fed Ex depot around was fifty minutes away - Eric drove us there in thirty.

"What's that burning smell?" I asked.

He took a turn on two wheels, clipped a chicken, roared past an old lady on two crutches and navigated the BUSES ONLY lane. "Somebody's brakes," he answered nonchalantly. Hmm - and I'm vouching for this man.

Still, there have been some lovely dinners and moonlit rambles with our friend Emmanuel - we're staying at his place in a tiny hamlet next to an ancient church. One of our paperwork deliveries showed up by UPS yesterday and we'd stationed ourselves outside the house so the delivery guy could find us. We had wagers going on whether it was the hamlet's first UPS delivery ever - he confirmed that it was.

The new owners of our old house are loving France. They adore the house - we went over for dinner the other night and their stuff looked so cute in the place. The kids have been swimming at the nearby lake every day, playing in the garden, riding the rusty old bikes we left behind.

They had to go away for a little while. And since we already paid for the phone and internet in the house up til the end of August, and canceling the service early to move away outside of France involved sending a registered letter and signing an attestation and packing and mailing the router via Chronopost and probably a trip to the mairie and another embassy somewhere, they said "hey, why don't you just come by and use the phone and internet here, at your old place?"

Which is where I'm sitting now. All the neighbors that we said our tear-filled goodbyes to a few weeks ago have gotten used to seeing us again. Like that old TV commercial "I thought you died." The double-takes have turned back into howdy neighbor waves.

It's like we never left.

Skeleton Crew

We're camping out in the house now. There's four mugs, a couple of dinner plates. A towel or two apiece. A pot, frying pan and baking dish. Two laptops, a couple paperbacks, a television that will soon be made redundant, the 4th season of Peep Show, some garden chairs and a wobbly old table. Suitcases as nightstands. And all our musical equipment - we have a gig in Le Dorat on Saturday.



The rest has made it up to England. Like a modern divorce where everyone co-operates, this is a modern house sale - the new owner came down with a load of stuff before the final completion date, and offered to take a load for us. Shipping from France is complicated - of all the ports in this country, right now only one will do container shipping of personal goods so getting space is difficult and expensive. So we go through England - that's where we'll put everything in a container for the US.



Packing has been all-consuming, that and healing. I'm going back to the fine doctor in Bordeaux tomorrow, hoping that he'll give me the okay to put makeup on.

It's been pretty bizarre, having a nurse come to the house every other day. I feel like I should be wearing a turban and being taken out for a spin in a wheelchair. Feeling guilty about using what feels like a luxury, I'd asked at the hospital if they couldn't just show me how to take care of things myself. They insisted that it was more consistent with an infirmiere. I can see now that it also helps keep someone in employment in rural France. In a few days I'll say goodbye to her. Then we'll have a little get-together with our friends and neighbors, and the new owners. Strange, melancholy, exciting, terrifying. Did I say exciting?



Two months ago it was "will we outlast the bottle of balsamic?" - now it's the expiration date on the milk bottle. We'll be going off before it does.

Packing

I'm sorry things degenerated for a while there into the equivalent of a TV clip show - sort of like that early Simpsons episode where Homer ends up in the hospital and instead of an actual story line, they just revisit past episodes? I remember what a shock that was, but how they turned it into comedy gold. No such luck here.

Ashamed to say I even sunk to re-using a photo from a post a year or two ago. But all that's behind us now, because I'm on the mend. Maybe I had a sort of revelation one night when I was feeling sorry for myself. It went something like: "Oh fuck it. Just...FUCK IT! I'm alive, I'm reasonably healthy if kind of banged up, I've got a lovin' man beside me, my family's all doing okay, we have a buyer for the house. What is, is."

Thought of stopping the blog temporarily because things are in such a state of flux right now, and it's hard to concentrate. But I'd miss it. Just as it's never a good idea to question the meaning of life while applying eyeliner in a dank basement dressing room with only beer crates for company, so it's best not to examine too closely why I share details of my life in public while sitting in a roomful of moving boxes.

More soon.