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Cindy and I perfected our plan to go bicycling with an American Youth Hostel group all over New England for six weeks. Never mind that neither of us had any real talent for riding bikes or interest in canoeing or hiking which this trip also offered. It would be six weeks without our parents, with each other, six weeks of freedom albeit requiring that we ride a bicycle loaded with forty pounds of gear, upwards of eighty miles a day, through the mountains of New Hampshire. Cindy told her parents my parents had agreed to let me go and I told my parents her parents had given her permission, we both lied about the amount of adult supervision, we both confessed to a secret passion for long distance bicycle riding and both of us asked for ten speed Peugeots for our respective birthdays.

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I was newly divorced, sober, unemployed and grieving. New York City should have felt hard, cold and dangerous but somehow, it took me in. Like my ancestors fleeing the famine in Ireland and the millions escaping the pogroms, the genocide, the impossibility of their lives, I found refuge and community. Yes, it was hard at first, one bad job after another, one terrible apartment, isolation, and envy of others’ wealth and success, but gradually the life there became my life. In my horribly paid publishing job, all those church basements where I listened to the stories of addicts like me, the relationships that I had no business pursuing, I found a way to live. One morning, walking across Central Park as the mist faded from Sheep Meadow, I encountered a gigantic obelisk (Cleopatra’s Needle), deserted except for a homeless man who gestured to me to come closer.

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First, when your little boy decides to give you a new hairdo while weaving binder clips, white out, jars, pencils, and possibly a small stapler into the back of your head, let him. This may give you another ten minutes or so to work on your book. Recognize as soon as the call comes from the West Coast radio show, your son will forget the “no talking game” and demand something complex from the refrigerator. You will describe your artistic beliefs while mixing parmesan cheese into orzo. Then he will tell you he needs to sit on your lap and whisper things in your ear, even though this sort of thing never happens anymore. Practice sounding authorial while your child mutters, “I love my momma” in your ear repeatedly.

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