Thirteen Boxes

The boxes take up nearly all the floor space. I count them quickly.

‘Twelve?’
‘Thirteen,’ the delivery man says.

I count again. He’s right. I sign. He leaves, grumbling one last time that the building needs an elevator.

Each of the boxes says ‘Cassidy, New York’ in red marker, and something about that makes the move more real than any other time during the three months it has taken them to get here. I open the first one, slicing through brown tape to find books – my books, the same creased spines. The fact that they are here, that we have all made it to the same place, is amazing and thrilling. As I gently take them out, I imagine their journey across the sea, on docks, in warehouses. It took me seven hours to get here, less, but three months seems more like the kind of time it should take to move from one country to another.

Last October, packing these boxes, I was somehow shielded from the reality of what was happening. I knew I was moving to New York – of course I knew – but even as I was busy dismantling my life in Dublin, some part of me didn’t fully get it. Like a child who doesn’t understand time and space, New York ceased to be a real city and instead only existed in my head.

New York has existed in my head – and my heart – for a long time, long before I ever set foot here. And yet, I never thought I’d live here. I thought New York was destined to forever be the place where I’d wished I’d lived. But life can take us in directions we don’t expect, or maybe directions we’ve always been coming in, and for me that direction was across the Atlantic.

It’s amazing how easily a life can be dismantled. Houses can be rented, cars can be sold, businesses can be wound up. Bit by bit, the tiny little details and grooves of our days, our weeks, can be taken apart and packed up or given away or let go of entirely. Until what you have left fits in thirteen boxes.

As I empty the boxes I find things I’ve missed, but I will never find everything and that’s the hardest part. To make room for your new life, you have to let go of so much of the old. Family, for instance, can’t fit in a box, or friends. How do you pack up a yoga class? Or Dun Laoghaire pier? It’d cost a fortune to ship and besides, someone would be bound to miss it.

It has become a favourite story of the media, emigration, another oozing scar from our Celtic Tiger mauling. On television, we watch families wave off children, sisters, uncles, friends, as reporters hover, waiting for a sound-bite that will sum up a nation’s loss. The story is boiled down to its simplest form – the grief of leaving – but it is not simple at all. How can leaving be the whole story? Shouldn’t we focus on the arrival too? The opportunity it brings? The hope? If we let the cameras keep rolling beyond the security gates would we see a little glimmer of this? Would we see tears dry? The same children, sisters, uncles, friends, picking up luggage, hailing taxis, walking up the steps of an apartment building, smiling, glad to be home?

As I write, I am acutely aware that unlike so many others, I was not forced to leave. I know that makes it different. Leaving is hard enough when you want to go and my heart goes out to those who left because they had no other choice. But, even then, leaving can only ever be half the story.

Here, in New York, things are starting to feel a little more like home. I have a social security number, a bank account. I have started to receive junk mail. My thirteen boxes are all unpacked now, space found – miraculously – for everything in my apartment.

And today, 104 days after I arrived, as I walk down Ninth Avenue I know I have more with me, than the contents of those boxes. There is ice in the air but the sky is blue as any June morning and something about the light reminds me of Sandycove. True, the sun reflects on glass and steel instead of water and rocks, but I can see that too, all around me, I can almost see it.

Because even though Sandycove is three thousand miles away it’s much, much closer than that. Like so many other things that wouldn’t fit in the boxes, I packed it somewhere else, somewhere there is no weight restriction. Dublin and New York will always be in parallel, they will never meet, but in my heart, there is space enough for both, for all the people and places and things I love, wherever they are.

And for me, for now, that’s enough.

Bar 82 Reading NYC March 5th

First New York reading of What Might Have Been Me took place in Bar 82 in the Lower East Side on Monday night.

To see the reading and find out what the title means check out the video on the Facebook page.

http://www.facebook.com/#!/whatmighthavebeenme

Commenting on this blog!

I know a lot of people have previously been unable to comment on this blog so I just wanted to let you know I have adjusted to settings so everyone can comment freely!

As you can see I don't always post that often but more frequently updated content such as book reviews, info on readings and events etc can be found on one of my two Facebook pages...

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Thanks for reading!

Yvonne

A tribute to a special teacher

About fifteen years ago, when I lived in London, there was an advertising campaign to encourage people to become teachers. The ads ran in cinemas and they featured head shots of men and women who looked straight into the camera and slowly said a name, before it panned to the next person. They were young and old, these people, their faces were different shapes, different colours, but they had something in common – whatever name they said made every one of them smile.

“Mrs Sanders.” “Mr Singh.” “Ms Watson.” “Mr Johnson.” At first you didn’t know what the names meant, that was the idea, but when the screen faded to black, one simple sentence ran across it, in white letters: ‘you never forget your favourite teacher.’
Watching those ads, in the darkness of the cinema, I said a name too. I said it in my head, in the silence between the other names. Her name would have sounded good as part of the ad, I always thought, it would have fit in well.

Mrs O’Neill.

The fact that she was my English teacher strengthened her odds of being my favourite teacher, of course it did, but the thing is, I didn’t love English, not then. Not yet. Sure, it was OK, it was certainly better than a lot of other subjects, but I didn’t love it. At home, I loved reading – I read everything – and I loved to write, but school English was different. School English was old fashioned, complicated, written in a language I didn’t understand by people who I had nothing in common with. English had nothing to do with my life. Of that I was absolutely sure.

So, there I was, fifteen years old with my mind made up and Mrs O’Neill changed it.
I feel like I can remember the first day I took my seat in her classroom and that she changed it right there, that day, and even though I know that can’t possibly be true, it feels like it’s true. I feel like I can remember opening a new copy of Hard Times, starting to read and thinking “more of the same” right before something changed. Before everything changed.

In the two years in Mrs O’Neill’s class, I seem to remember more than the rest of secondary school put together. I remember her explaining what Dickens was doing when he chose the names Bounderby and Steven Blackpool and Thomas Gradgrind, explaining it in a way that made it into a conversation, where we had a voice too, an opinion that counted. I remember acting out MacBeth, the day Mrs O’Neill turned the classroom into a courtroom and how I got so into being Lady MacBeth’s defence lawyer, I was gutted when the double class ended, even though we got her off.
In my memory, Mrs O’Neill always had our attention and yet I remember too, her writing “sex” on the board, to get our attention. In a convent secondary school, it was a technique that was always going to work.

Of all the things that I remember about Mrs O’Neill, though, what I remember most in her class is being seen, being encouraged, being understood. Mrs O’Neill was the first person who noticed I liked to write, who told me I was good at it, that I should write more. She was adamant that I should choose the creative writing essay from the list on the exam paper rather than pushing me in the deathly dull direction of the ‘factual’ essays which had always been drummed into us all as the way to score higher grades. Goodbye, ‘Discuss Ireland’s unique role as an island on the edge of Europe.’ Hello, ‘A thing of beauty is a joy forever.’

Maybe English had more to offer after all.

After I left school I chose English for my degree. I read Jane Austen and Robert Frost and Samuel Beckett. Bertolt Brecht and Caryl Churchill. I learned more about what I liked to read. It was after college when I moved to London that I went to my first creative writing class, the first of many, many classes. I had lots of teachers. I learned why I liked to read the things I liked, what made them good. I learned that writing was hard work, that it wasn’t as easy as I used to think it was back in Mrs O’Neill’s class, but that in some way I didn’t fully understand, I had to do it. To keep doing it.

My first novel was published in May 2010. I felt a little silly, sending a launch invitation into the school, wasn’t sure if Mrs O’Neill would get it, if she’d wonder why I’d asked her, but I sent it anyway. On the evening of the launch, walking down towards the bookshop, things felt a little unreal. In the windows there were posters of the cover of my book, with my name on it, inside, a whole bay of shelves was devoted to it. Someone had put it in the ‘best seller’ section.

I stood with my parents by the window, next to one of the posters while some friends took photos. I wondered if anyone would show up, if it would be half empty. Peering through the glass, I saw there was at least one person there already. It was a woman, who had picked up my book, was reading it. She had her back to me and it was a back I recognised, I thought I did. The woman was still reading when I came in, she only turned around when she heard me behind her. When I saw who it was, I hugged her without even thinking about it, like it was the most natural thing in the world to hug a teacher I hadn’t seen in almost twenty years.

The fifteen year old me would’ve been mortified, she’d have sworn that that would never happen, never in a million years, especially in public. But then again, as it turned out, she didn’t know everything.

I don’t know if they make ads any more about teachers, if an advertising campaign ever ran in Ireland like the one I used to see in those London cinemas, so many years ago. But I know that if I am ever asked to name my best teacher, my favourite teacher, the teacher who has had the most impact on me, that from all the wonderful teachers I have been so lucky to have in my life, there is still only one name I will ever say.

Thank you, Brenda, for everything.

A little post about a big park

It is 91 days since my last blog post, the longest gap so far. Since I last posted I have rented out my house, wound up my business, sold my car, packed up, sold, stored, gave away and shipped my stuff and been through the complexities and uncertainty of US immigration. I’ve bid goodbye to my family, my friends, moved into a new home, started a new job. Oh, and I wrote and edited the final draft of my new novel.

The point of this list is not to line up my excuses for your approval – although they are good excuses, goddammit – but instead to frame what I want to post today. You see even though I have ragged notes and folders on my computer about how the last 91 days have felt – leaving, arriving, leaving, arriving and everything in between – these reflections are not a blog post yet. I am still too much in the eye of the emigration tornado to write about it, the whole subject too big to fit into paragraphs, sentences, words. So instead I want to write about something smaller. I want to write about Central Park.

I am living nine blocks from Central Park, in the same apartment where I stayed this summer. Between June and September I only managed one trip there: a sunny Sunday that involved a near capsizing on the lake and a botched attempt to go to the Boathouse where there was an angry protest and a giant blow up rat outside.

In my last 20 days here, I have been to Central Park five times. Three of these have been in the last six days. Because six days ago, I remembered running.

If you’ll bear with me I’ll digress, for a minute, from the park. At home – in Dublin – I run all the time. I am a regular early morning fixture along the seafront between Teddy’s in Sandycove and Bullock Harbour. No matter how hard it is to drag myself out of bed to go running, I have never wished I hadn’t made the effort, never been convinced my day would have been better with an extra hour’s sleep instead. Two years ago when an operation knocked me off my feet for a couple of months, running was what I craved. Above my desk I have a photo of Haruki Murakami in his running shorts as a reminder of one of my favourite books.

So it’s pretty obvious, I love to run. But sometimes when I’m somewhere new, somewhere different, I forget obvious things and it takes me a while to remember.

Last Friday, I remembered.

Friday was a holiday here, Veterans Day. At half eight in the morning, Ninth Avenue was emptier than usual, quiet, by New York standards. I raced across avenues and up blocks until I got to the corner of Eighth and 55th where the lights caught me. By the time I reached the entrance to the park on 59th, I had run for ten minutes. I was out of breath already, unsure of which path to take and a little afraid of getting lost.

My feet took me the way they wanted, the way some part of me seemed to know or remember. Down the path covered with a carpet of yellow leaves that blew first one way, then the other, tumbling, co-ordinated in the wind. I ran past trees, still damaged from the October storm, past bathrooms, a playground. I took a right under a bridge that I’m sure I’ve seen in a film, or an episode of Law & Order – hopefully it wasn’t where a body was found. I ran past a man playing a saxophone, turned left and ran uphill, towards the Dairy, my legs and breath co-operating despite the lapse of time since they’d last done this.

I could take you on every step of my run; down towards the lake and the Bethesda Fountain, past the woman singing a Four Non Blondes song to no-one, a man taking a photo of his dog. I could take you right around the park and back again but instead I want to take you to the end.

One of my favourite things about running is the end, so much so that I sometimes suspect that ‘having run’ is what I love, more than the actual act of running itself. Once the end is in sight I can push my body harder for that last stretch, pump the last dregs of energy and power into my limbs in a way I never could sustain if I knew the distance stretched out and out ahead. At home my trigger for the last spurt is when Teddy’s comes into view. Last Friday I found myself doing the same thing, pounding back towards the gate I’d come in forty minutes earlier, running faster than I’d run all morning.

At home, at the end of my run, I know what to do. I get my water from the car, check my time, warm down and sit on the wall looking out at the sea, breathing it in. On the corner of 59th and Eighth, my next move wasn’t so clear. Across the road was Columbus Circle, the statue of Columbus himself, fountains arranged around him. Waiting at the light I got my breath back and noticed that someone had added two life-size metal elephants since I’d last been there.

I crossed over, sat down on a bench, pulled my legs up to sit the way I always do. I closed my eyes, could hear the water. I peeked out to see the shape the jets made, closed my eyes again. All around me, New York City was churning, like the leaves caught in the fountain’s spray. Outside me there were sirens, traffic, horns, water falling, leaves blowing, voices calling.

Inside I saw the line of horizon at the edge of the sea, dawn unfolding, peeling back layers of colour in the sky. I kept my eyes closed and saw the lake I’d just run past, the palette of trees reflecting in the water. I sat there, kept breathing, Sandycove, Central Park, a slideshow in my head, appearing, disappearing, taking turns, sometimes blending together.

And when I opened my eyes again, New York was still there, had never gone away. I walked up to the elephant, leaned on it to do my stretches, the way I always do my stretches, waited for the light to change and jogged home.

Downdogs and downpours...

The title of this blog post came to me earlier this evening, as I stood on my yoga mat in Bryant Park and raised my arms and my gaze to a rectangle of cloud overhead. I know I should have been staying present, but it was hard to do when the clap of thunder from somewhere behind us sounded like a skyscraper falling and the raindrop I felt on my skin become raindrops, became rain.

The teacher gave instructions louder, then faster. She held her microphone close to her mouth. Down dog, warrior one, warrior two, side angle. As our mats got wetter, we slid through the poses. People ran to shelter as she implored them to stay, calling after their departing backs if they remembered what it was like to play in the rain. Tree pose was to be our final asana before being officially rained off. Left side first, then right, we swayed in the rain. And just as we were about to pack our bags, the sun came out and we started all over again.

That was my second yoga class this week. The first was a birthday bash for Anusara yoga, which was fourteen years old at the weekend. Anusara is the type of yoga I mainly practise now and it’s hard to explain what’s so special about it. There’s lots of different parts to it and one of the elements I like best is the focus on synchronicities, the connectedness of life, something they call “stepping into the flow of grace”. That makes it sound really gentle – namby pamby yoga – but it’s anything but and on the way to this class taught by two of Anusara’s leading teachers I was as intimidated as I was excited. Handstand awaited, I was sure of it. The splits. Crow pose into tripod headstand and back out again.

By the time I got to my mat I’d concocted the yoga sequence from hell, was planning my escape route to the bathroom when things got too tough. But things never got too tough. Instead, the ninety minutes felt like nine, as they took it in turns to guide us through poses that were grounding, gentle, challenging, fun. Gratitude, abundance, joy, those were the themes and the feelings too. I thought of my yoga teachers back home, how much I owe them, how I wished they were there, how in a way, they were.

Leaving the studio with a smile on my face and an ache in my hips I got talking to one girl visiting from Paris, a girl who heard my accent and asked if I knew a yogi in Ireland who stayed with her earlier in the year. A yogi in Ireland who was one of the two teachers I’d just been feeling such gratitude for.

The funny thing was I shouldn’t even have been at that class, wouldn’t have been if I hadn’t missed the workshop I was supposed to attend the day before. I missed it because of the rain, a Sunday downpour that lasted all day. I know how ridiculous this sounds. I am Irish, after all. I know rain. But I didn’t know New York rain, rain that falls so heavily and so suddenly that rivers flow at the corner of each block, ankle deep, shin deep, rivers that become impossibly wide to jump so the only option is to put your already soaking runner into the middle of the water. I didn’t know the kind of rain that causes subways to detour, traffic to drive in diagonal lines and park across pedestrian crossings in a way that can actually make it incomprehensibly impossible to cross a road.

Like everything else it does, New York does rain to extremes and the day before I’d found myself cursing the city as I saw it rear its ugly head and it bothered me, that feeling, that I could hate the city I loved so much. But as I said goodbye to my new Parisian friend I smiled because I’d forgiven New York already. And swinging my unopened umbrella I realised I loved the city again, more than ever and that maybe, sometimes stepping into the flow of grace, means getting your feet wet.

Hot in the city

It is hot in New York.

Since yesterday, it has been hot. Last night, in Times Square, my ice cream ran before I could eat it, lines of vanilla and chocolate sprinkles sticky on the paper. Neon lights were off, electrical fuses blown from over worked air conditioners. The sun was long down, but the heat stayed.

It is hot in New York.

It escapes from everywhere, this heat, from every brick, every slab of sidewalk, the metal carts on every corner. Occasionally, there is heat on top of heat. A gust of wind at the corner of 52nd like a giant hairdryer, the mistake of walking over a subway vent in the street. This morning at the flower garden the gate wouldn’t close, the heat had inhabited the metal and someone shouted in a panic to leave it open, leave it open.

It is hot in New York.

I walk four blocks and stop for water twice, more expensive today, than last week. When I say this to the vendor, he gets defensive, uptight. Tells me how the price of ice is increasing, ten dollars, he says he pays for ice now. He takes me around the side of the newsstand, to see it, this expensive ice in blue and white bins. He waves his hands.

It is hot in New York.

Walking along 47th street my feet slide in flip flops. There is a Starbucks on every corner and every one is full, people sitting on the floor, their backs to the window, showing patches of their sweat. The one I am in is out of venti cups for iced drinks. There is a calm in the coolness. I get a seat, a coveted spot, only it is a trick, this window spot the sun finds. My finger sticks on the mouse pad.
People talk about the heat in a way that we talk about the weather at home. There are photos posted on Facebook of iPhones displaying temperatures of 102 and 111 and 108. I find this comforting, to know it is worth taking note of, this heat, to know it won’t always be like this.

In the post office, I meet a woman from England. She has lived here for many summers. She says it is early in the summer to be like this.

August, she says, now, August is hot in New York.