Rambling
Itinerant, I’m a line of Carol King. So far away. Why can’t anybody stay in one place anymore? I carry keys to five apartments around with me, and none of them fit in the locks of where I stayed the weekend. Now I’ve nestled momentarily into my new apartment in the Bronx. It’s a two-bedroom on the 19th floor of one of three of the ugliest buildings ever built. I can see one the other two, our identical twins, out the window above my desk. And a broad view of Bronx, a swath sweeping down towards the Verrezano. I survey a field of lights irrigated by the lines of the 6 and 5 trains. The subways slink through the dark streets populated by blossoms of orange lamps. Above, the clouds reflect the ground. Thick, they hover like dulled orange sherbet. This is the Einstein apartment, free housing a part of the Summer Undergraduate Research Program. The bedrooms are big and there are closets and in the kitchen there is enough room for two people to walk past each other. There’s even a bathtub. All you can ask of a place in this city, even if we are in the most remote part of this outer borough, almost closer to New Haven than New York, an idea which actually appeals to me. Or perhaps best to be somewhere evenly between the two towns. Manhattan and New Haven, my comfortable old stomping grounds by now. I am prepared to enjoy this adventure. For a New Yorker, I feel oddly out of element in this part of the Bronx where there is more sky than is ever rationed out to one street downtown where you have to be happy with the heavens coming in strips, corridors of light caught between the canyons. And the stores are different from Soho. No J. Crew or H&M in sight. My roommate and I didn’t pass one chain as we set out in wind and storm, explorers in search of necessities, toilet paper and food. Instead, small groceries, a butcher’s, dusty appliance stores. We walked up Morris Avenue before ducking the rain into the small Big Deal supermarket as most likely to have variety. My roommate more displaced than I. To her, this was an exciting street. She’s from a small town in Indiana and is much too beautiful to be a science nerd (nice features, hair unnaturally straight and unnaturally blond). Attempting dinner, the kitchen felt woefully unfurnished. After boiling water in a pot with no handles with no potholders thought to have been brought, almost burning my hand trying to pick it up, I was relieved when my roommate, the girl who manages to have “Christ” in both her first and last names stuck her head around the door and asked if I wanted to go for pizza. When we came back we met our third roommate. Layne, a tall pleasant girl from Albuquerque who wants to check out barns in the New York area. She refuses to go to med-school if she cannot bring her horse. She’ll survive without it for the summer, and thankfully she brought a shower curtain. Right now, we’re hanging around the all white walls apartment, occasionally receiving a couple of callers, other SURP students attempting to be sociable, but who don’t come with cards like in Jane Austen. No internet now. So you probably won’t receive this wandering post till tomorrow when there’s orientation and I find out what world I’m doing, which lab, what the framework of my day will be like. Just rambling on a little more to thank you Dad for new music. Can tell I’m going to become addicted to the Emmylou Harris with Mark Knopfler tracks. Belated love from the Bronx.
