Once a New Yawkah.....

....always a New Yawkah. And even if I don't really talk that way, I could. Born in Brooklyn and educated at New York University, Big Apple juice runs in my veins. I've tried living in plenty of other places, and have never really fit in. And everywhere I go, people ask accusingly, "Are you from New York?"

A job too good to pass up took me to Berkeley, California in the early 1980s. Great weather, exceptional peaches and a big salary kept me happy for a while, until I went to a dinner party thrown by an editor at the paper where I worked. By then I knew a few people, but only to nod at, so I was happy for a chance to perhaps forge some friendships in a social setting. Things went fine during dinner, and then our hostess announced that it was "hot tub time." I confessed that I hadn't realized this was on the schedule and had not brought a bathing suit. She giggled, squealing, "Don't be silly, we don't need those!" I looked around and saw the sports editor disrobing. Over in the corner was the night copy editor, totally naked. I feigned a headache and left. Sorry, but where I come from, we don't group-strip on the first date.

Salt Lake City is in the middle of a dramatic mountain setting, with big skies and fabulous sunsets. A fun place to run--at a high altitude so you really get a workout--I liked it quite a bit. Until those tiny little things started irking me: No delicatessens. No black people. No Jews. Inversions in January that covered the city in fog and pollution. The nauseating "lake effect" odor of rotting plankton and brine fish wafting through our windows at night. My son being the only kid with black hair in his school. The Mormon Church buying Main Street. Little things like that. After four years we chucked it all and set out in search of a decent Reuben.

A Reuben sandwich: Worth clogging your arteries.

Returning to Washington, D. C. seemed like the right thing to do, since it offered countless work opportunities for both me and my husband, plenty of dark-haired and dark-skinned kids for my teenage son to hang with, and lots of pastrami. It was also hot all the time, and humid, with violent thunderstorms and even more violent drive-by shootings and tourists clogging the roads most of the year and those snooty bigots sequestered in the one white quarter of the city. Factor in the government and its workers slowing down everything, their inefficiency hovering overhead like a weather condition, turning the renewal of one's driver's license into an occasion for a Valium, or at least a few stiff drinks, and we were done.

Now here in Maine for the start of our fourth year, we wholly embrace its fresh air, lack of crime and traffic, stunning water views and the tastiest fish anywhere, consistently, day after day. (The crummiest haddock from the supermarket is sublime, having been caught an hour ago.) But still, there are things one could wish for. As one neighbor put it when I invited her and her husband over for dinner, "Oh, we don't do that sort of thing here." But here we are and here we will remain, for the foreseeable future. It's just too hard to give up this easy living for the frenetic pace of Manhattan. Still, it's where I feel the most at home, and I do miss those crazy cab drivers, and the street vendors and bodegas and the steam coming up through the grates on a cold winter day and the subway and museums and Chinatown and Little Italy and....oh well.