Transitions...

In her essay  “Wear Sunscreen,  essayist Mary Schmich wrote that everyone should ;  "Live in New York City once but leave before it makes you hard. Live in Northern California once but leave before it makes you soft."    I never really understood  the full meaning of that until now.  Partly because  I had always incorrectly attributed the quote to  Armistead  Maupin, but mostly because I had never lived in New York.

Now having lived in both places,  I understand what she was talking about.  `

I lived in the San Francisco Bay Area  for 16 years. Eight years in downtown San Francisco, and then after seven years in  Southeast London,  We moved back and lived another 8 years  in the East Bay in Downtown Oakland.     Then a little over a year and half ago, we  moved to New York City, living in Midtown Manhattan, just a stone’s throw from the United Nations.

I have always described Northern California as “an easy first date” .  San Francisco throws its doors open and happily takes whoever wants to come in. It is one of the few major US metro areas where you can still  live easily without  owning  a car.   Yes,  the Bay Area is expensive,  but  logistically  it is a very easy place to live.   So much so that  after a while you start to forget that the rest of the U.S.  isn’t  like that.  Places where Winter isn’t when temperatures dip into the low 60’s  and in summer  people need this thing called ‘air conditioning’?      As a result, living in  Northern California quickly becomes  comfortable

Or, as  Schmich puts it,  it can make you ‘soft.’

New York City is  the opposite.  While like SF,  people can  live here without the need to own a car.  Riding transit  in this city is part  reality show (Urban Survivor) and part National Geographic special.  

Consequently, New Yorkers with the means to, spend large amounts of money on car services to take them pretty much everywhere.  The streets are full of massive fleets of  back SUV’s with tinted windows driven by people  in black suits  with white shirts and  thin black ties.   The fact that this results in more time spent in traffic than if you had just got out and walked,  is pretty much irrelevant. Also, the hallmark of NYC Traffic is drivers who  use their horns  like drivers in other places use headlights.

New York is an argument.   Every day you will find yourself in a  confrontation with some aspect of living in this city.   Apartment hunting here  makes The Hunger Games look like little league. People will rush on to the subway to get seats like they are half price IPads on Black Friday.    

Restaurants  are  about  the “experience”  far more than the food.   A dear  friend of ours works at one of the most expensive restaurants in this city.   It is a place where people seem to go there more to publicly demonstrate their ability to afford it,  than to actually enjoy it.

New York will fight you every day.  The line from the song is completely true, if you can make it here,  you really can make it anywhere. It’s largely why people in this city are the  aggressive,  often rude,  always competitive, amazingly resilient and successful  people that they are.   

The energy of this city is palpable,  intense,  exciting,  relentless and  frankly exhausting.  Which is why most New Yorkers you see on the street have the intense look of someone who is  about to come down off of a Red Bull high.  

Or as Schmich puts it,  New York can make you ‘hard.’

Don’t get me wrong,  New York deserves all  the hype.  It is  an amazing city, that truly never sleeps.  Its self-image as the center of … everything is well earned.   But it is a place where the driving cultural force appears to be  FOMO.   (Fear of Missing Out)  I have seen people jump in a queue outside of a store on 5^th Avenue with no idea what it was for.  But people were lining up so it must be something,  and you don’t dare miss out.

Times Square is awash with “content creators / influencers”  all trying to film the next great  viral  tick-tock trend.  Where in the 70’s and 80’s  you  might have been  asked you if you were  “looking for good time”.  Now you’ll get handed a QR code and be asked to  “like and subscribe”.    

As a result, you know the moment you have transitioned from being a visitor to New York to someone who lives here is when you will happily go ten blocks out of your way just to avoid Times Square.

There is a great moment  from Stephen Sondheim’s “Company”  (which may well be,  the greatest musical where one of the central characters is  New York City - with all due respect to Bernstein).  During the song “Another Hundred People”, where one of the characters tells the lead she is moving away saying: "there's a time to come to New York, and a time to leave" 

Now our apartment is once again a sea of boxes and strapping tape with piles of belongings to sort through into Pack- Ship or Toss piles.  As we pack for  yet another move, this time, back to my hometown,  Madison, WI.    

The original reason for the move to New York, was twofold;  First, to be closer to my parents  whose health was declining.  Flight time from SFO  to MSN under the best of circumstances was 6 hours plus, with the ever delightful connections in either Chicago or Denver. Second, was  to take a new  job in the financial / professional services sector,  the industry where I began my career nearly three decades ago.   

Then a year and half in,  two things happened.   The first was the sheer stupidity of the Trump administration.  Which  has made life and doing business very difficult for international companies who rely on global workforce mobility.   (Even for my employer which to put it bluntly,  has very close ties with Trump.)   So  having my role based in the U.S,  really didn’t  make sense.   So  we parted ways with a friendly handshake and  a very large check, for which I am quite grateful.

The second thing was my dad’s health took a  serious  and  sustained  downward turn.  So, we made the obvious choice to move to Wisconsin.  A decision that was made even easier when I was offered a  very interesting and challenging new job with the Wisconsin State Government .   

Friends  and colleagues have been full of  praise for our decision citing what a “good son” I am.   I have had to smile at that.   I think  if you were to poll my parents  for adjectives  to describe their experience raising me,  “good Son”  would make the list,  but probably not on the top half of it.

This past week  my dad passed away.   An event that has altered the context  for the move but not the core reasons for it.  Now the focus  shifts to my Mom,  and surprisingly,  revisiting my own roots.    

I was joking with my Mom that  we are going from living across from the UN, to living across from a  Kwik Trip.   A move that some would consider a definite step up. 

I guess we will soon find out.  As the Wisconsin state motto says….

“Forward”.

A Letter to My Hometown...

 Dear Sun Prairie, Wisconsin

It has been said that your hometown is the forge out of which the person you are today was made. I find I struggle with that sentiment, and probably always will. My relationship with you, my “hometown” is, as Facebook might describe it… “complicated”. So, I thought it’s a good time to clear the air about a few things.

For years, I dreaded coming back to visit you. Did everything I could to avoid it even, and as a result felt really guilty about it. Why? That’s what’s complicated.

For the past couple weeks I have been back visiting. (There hasn’t been time  time to see friends this trip and I apologize for that.) The purpose of the visit was to spend time with my Parents. My Mom and Dad now live in a senior living community on the far East side of Madison,  just down the road from you, and are both in their mid 80’s.

One of the primary motivations for moving back the United States eight years ago, was to be closer to them. Having a number of lifelong  friends  who recently have lost one or both of their parents, I am keenly aware that I have fewer days ahead with them than there are behind.

So now instead of being 4,000 miles and a 9-hour flight away in London, or 2,000 miles and a 6 hour flight  way in San Francisco,  I am now 940  miles and a 2-hour flight away in New York City.

But returning to Dane County is always an odd experience for me. It’s like one of those Science Fiction movies where someone travels in time then gets back to the present and starts to notice how the timeline was changed. 

Things are mostly familiar, but there a few glaring differences that make it clear that the place you returned to, is not the same place you left.

The thing you notice right off the bat, is how Sun Prairie is just so much BIGGER. Growing up here in the 70’s and 80’s there were  5 elementary schools, one Jr. High School and one High school. Now there are ten elementary schools, three middle schools, TWO high schools and two… of whatever Phoenix Academy and the Sun Prairie Virtual School are.

On a previous  trip back here in 2022, the front page of the Wisconsin State Journal sports section had  a full-page story on the first ever football game  between the  Sun Prairie East Cardinals and the Sun Prairie West, Wolves.  A game that was played not just on Ashley Field, but rather AT Ashley Field IN the Bank of Sun Prairie Stadium.

My family moved to Sun Prairie when I was in first grade. I went from Pier Elementary School in Fond Du Lac, to Northside Elementary in the fall of that year. I remember at the time, thinking how, Sun Prairie with its proximity to Madison felt like a real “city” compared to tiny, small town Fond Du Lac.

In time, however, that feeling would wear off.

I have said my relationship with Sun Prairie is a complicated one, and that is very true. But let me be clear, I feel very lucky to have grown up here. It was a wonderfully safe, and yes for the most part, fun place to be from.   Sun Prairie Public Schools, while certainly not perfect, were better than most and gave me a well-rounded education that has served me  in life. I had and continue to have amazing and wonderful friends here. Friends who played a huge role in my becoming the person I am today.

Sun Prairie, Wisconsin is and will always be my ‘hometown’. It is where I am from.

But…

One of the nice things about getting older is that old friends can be honest with each other. So here goes...

I am from here, but I have never ever felt like I belonged here.

Growing up here was living in a place that made it very clear, that … “noticeable individuality” was something that would make your life difficult. It's safe to say that "back in the day" I was not someone who was in with the "cool kids". My varsity letter (yes, I have one) was in Extemporaneous Speech. (Yeah, I know... you actually can letter in that, who knew?) So, I didn't fit in very well. I was an awkward kid with mild stutter, who wasn’t interested in sports, had a graduate school level vocabulary and interests that greatly differed from most of my classmates.

And for better or worse, back in the early 1980’s,  Sun Prairie was  not a place that smiled upon being "different". As a result, even as a young child, it became clear that I would always, to a certain extent, be on the outside looking in. Consequently, coming back here is an emotionally mixed experience.

Don't get me wrong, I had (and still have) amazing friends and great memories. Yet it really was a whole different life. Growing up here as a gay kid was pretty much a daily exercise in terror. The ultimate put-down was to say something was "gay" or to be called a "fag". And you  saw kids who were even slightly effeminate or "different" getting tormented on a daily basis.

There was no such thing a Gay-Straight alliances, or “Safe Spaces” for LGBT youth. Back in High School,   when I was one of the editors of the Cardinal Courier, the school newspaper an organization called “The United” , (a groundbreaking nonprofit support and counseling organization that served Gay and Lesbian teens in South Central Wisconsin) contacted us. They wanted to buy an ad in the paper advertising their crisis counseling phone  line for Gay teens. The reaction was… stark.

Teachers and classmates that I had thought would be somewhat progressive were suddenly “seriously concerned”, angry even that we might be “promoting the homosexual lifestyle”, and even potentially pushing some poor confused soul into it, just by running an ad for a crisis counseling hotline.

The experience taught me a very clear lesson. Mainly that Sun Prairie, while not a bad place to grow up, would be a very dangerous place to be grown up.

There would never be a first date, a dance or a kiss stolen at a locker in between classes. To even attempt such a thing would be suicide. Literally.

Thankfully one of the “alternate timeline” changes you notice coming back here is the daily reality for a gay kid at Sun Prairie East is, (at least to a certain extent I think) far better today.  Yet, I will confess, even now decades later, driving around town is an exercise in both wonderful nostalgia and mild PTSD.

So, my dear Sun Prairie… I now regularly come back. As much as I would have liked my Parents to have moved out to California to be with me and my husband, and my sister and her family. The aftermath of the Covid pandemic made that big  of a move, too difficult for them.  

So,  I am resigned to the fact that they will always live  here in Dane County. So, I will continue to come back.  Often even,  and  I am happy to do so.

I am grateful to be able to say  that I am from here.  But I am also able to make peace with that fact that I did not, still do not,  and never will,  belong here.

Not a bad thing, just the truth.

Go Cardinals… I hope you beat the Wolves.

Love,

Dave