Changes

It's only Tuesday night and already so much has changed in everyone's lives. One of my friends, my very best friend that I always brag about having in my life, completed her radiology technical program interview yesterday morning - go Andrea! It's a competitive program but my friend Andrea is nothing short of amazing, beautiful, brilliant and competent. Clearly she's a candidate. I called her from the subway on my way home from work because I never had a good chance to send her a note in the day, so we chatted until I transferred from the 7 to the N and shot underground and lost a signal. Yesterday Craig and I ate a bunch of wheat products (after a whole day of wheat products - wheat bread, wheat thins, et cetera, we filled our bellies with wheat pasta! Thank goodness we don't have the dreaded gluten allergy...) because I suppose we've decided wheat consumption equals weight loss, which may or may not be true - we need to confirm this with Kara, his younger sister who should be our personal dietician, as that's what she does for a living and we really need one! Then Craig got on the phone with our dear, very dear old friend Timmy who informed us that his wife is due in October. Timmy with a baby! And Kara's due soon...Aubree and her husband signed papers for their new house today...our co-worker Paul proposed to his girlfriend...there are so many people we know and love having babies, having houses, growing up...and here we are in the Upper East Side of Manhattan still trying to figure things out, New York-style. But I'm not in a rush, really. Well, I say that as I just rushed through heavy commuter traffic (on foot) to get home and settle in for the night. Different kind of rush, which goes without saying. Above pictured is a glorious snapshot of the beginnings of spring in New York. This was taken on the West Side near 72nd Street and Broadway. This past Saturday we indulged in Central Park and the West Side while the sky shone blue. Sunday we loaned our glass tabletopped dining room table and chairs to a co-worker who will hang onto them for the duration of our stay in Manhattan. He drove to Manhattan from Long Beach in our company's vehicle and we loaded it up. Saturday, before heading to the Park, we purchased the previously mentioned pub table and two stools, which is not a permanent fixture but surely shall alleviate some of the space problem we have in the living room. The table won't be delivered until this coming Saturday, so I've been careening around the corner from the kitchen into the living room (where the table used to be) enjoying the amazing space opened up by that clunky piece of work I purchased back in St. Louis. Changes, changes...I spoke to Craig's niece Hannah on the phone last night and she is just a genius for a 4.5 year-old. Her voice was clear as day and her transitions from topic to topic were even mature and progressive, for her age! At one point Erica called out something to her and she called back, "Mom, I'm on the phone with Kristin!" Ha! That's the first time I've uttered my name in a post but it's to honor Hannah and her adorableness. We're going to try to travel to Indiana to see everyone this summer.*I'm sort of giddy and bubbling over with stuff right now, mainly because the spring air is rejuvenating every last rotted bone and muscle in my body and I'm feeling alive and well again, but I do also want to mention that while we were in the Park Saturday, I played my latest favorite song on repeat on my iPod and felt an overwhelming sense of hot passion for my City. The song is called "Leaving New York" and it's R.E.M.'s (which travels me clear back to being young and loving R.E.M. with old friends) and while it's not the most fantastic song ever written, the chorus lyric, "Leaving New York, never easy," or "Leaving New York's never easy" filled me with the most genuine sense of understanding I've had for a song lyric in a really, really, really long time. (Granted, I could really care less what the hell Michael Stipe meant by that line, whether it was literal or figurative...for me, completely literal!) While we were at the Park, I sat on a bench overlooking a t-ball game in the grass amongst children and a more serious softball game in the diamond beyond, cutting up xeroxed pages of an old Ferlinghetti book to paste into my journal, listening to that R.E.M. song and deciding that leaving New York is the last thing on my mind for the time being. While I'm here, I am here...not anywhere else, not in any of the multiple cities I've lived in previously, not moving anywhere else anytime soon, at least in my mind, because I will otherwise spend so much time fretting over leaving this center-of-the-universe that I will forget to enjoy it while I've got it. I guess the lesson is this: leaving is inevitable, but why bother with it before it happens...let the good just wash over you while you're in it. And I am in it here in New York City, boy am I in it.