With unpacked bags strewn around the house and an "airport" connection all our own, I feel like the Odysseean voyages are over and we're finally home in our version of middle class heaven -- Ithaca almost on the Pacifica, an apartment with two full baths and a ratty garden. California is beautiful and the air on the coast smells so much better than the air in Brooklyn or Paris for that matter -- eucalyptus spiked with bit of the occasional night blooming jasmine, a hint of the Pacific. We were the subjects of Walentas' billion dollar real estate empire in DUMBO (down under the Manhattan Brooklyn Bridge). I remember when the York Street subway station was so dangerous that in order to get to my friend's studio, I had to call him from the public phone on the platform so that he could come down from the loft where he worked to watch me walk down the street in safety.
This is of course, no longer the case. Laptop toting commuters, mule wearing creative types and the entourage that keeps their lives working mill in and out of the F train station. But the long corridor still makes you feel as if you've walked through 100 feet of dirt to get out to the sunlight and the sound of dumptrucks, pouring concrete for more expensive digs outfitted with Restoration hardware fixtures.
Paris was overrun by tourists during the day and no future suburban kids at night, toting bottles of Coca Cola yelling menacingly about their latest escapades with girls. The RER or suburban train was not air conditioned. In the badly ventilated cars, an air of quiet desperation settled on the commuters: the African immigrants were on the move to their inner city jobs from the outer ring suburbs. In Taiwan, because of the subtropical heat, even the subway stations are air conditioned. Public transport is not an insult to the working classes. It is a triumph of modernization. Wireless connections abound in the spanking clean stations.
The London subway bombing produced an immediate effect the following day, military checkpoints sprouted along the Seine, but American and Italian tourists took the river boat tours anyway.
I saw an American woman in the metro who seemed to be suffering from bloating of the face and hands. Then I realized that she was just chubby -- I hadn't seen such corpulence in many months. But before I indulge in fattism, my own family could not help but comment upon my weight gain and displayed that uniquely form of American health consciousness which makes of thinness a state of virtue and purity lost to those of us whose Rabelaisian appetites condemn us not only to credit card debt iniquity, but a state of moral slackness that "helpful advice" is meant to address. "We are only concerned about you," they pipe up when and if challenged.
Back in the land of business philistinism, what my husband and I do blurs with the activities of the mentally ill and delusional -- we talk about things "no one understands." And yet, in front of family, we have never talked about our "work." Where is the money in our work, is the question on their minds. Despite the bad customer service and the disastrous state of affairs of the French University system, there is a recognizablle place for those of us who do research that is not profit directed in the Old World. Lest one think that anti-intellectualism has completely triumphed in the US, however, UC Irvine seems to be a real haven, a small utopia in Orange County. At least this was my thinking from the sparkling neighborhood pool as Leo dove in and out of my fat arms, entering the crisp blue water.
