alone in xanadu

I am homesick this week. This is the time of year when school is out, and I usually flee back to the West, back home, back to family, just in time for the yellow wildflowers to bloom on the mountainside, just in time for backyard barbecues, just in time to drive around town in my mother's convertible, just in time to stay up all night laughing, eating too much junk food and watching worthless television.

But here I am, still in the city. And to make matters worse, everyone else in my family is home, barbecuing and convertibling and eating too much cake without me. It's times like this I most keenly feel how far I've strayed from home, how I chose somehow to live in a city that has no kin or bloodtie for me. I feel maybe a bit like Joan Didion did when she wrote this perfect essay about being a young woman of the West who found herself living in New York City:

From Goodbye to All That

You see I was in a curious position in New York: it never occurred to me that I was living a real life there. In my imagination I was always there for just another few months, just until Christmas or Easter or the first warm day in May. For that reason I was most comfortable with the company of Southerners. They seemed to be in New York as I was, on some indefinitely extended leave from wherever they belonged, disciplined to consider the future, temporary exiles who always knew when the flights left for New Orleans or Memphis or Richmond or, in my case, California. Someone who lives with a plane schedule in the drawer lives on a slightly different calendar. Christmas, for example, was a difficult season. Other people could take it in stride, going to Stowe or going abroad or going for the day to their mothers’ places in Connecticut; those of us who believed that we lived somewhere else would spend it making and canceling airline reservations, waiting for weatherbound flights as if for the last plane out of Lisbon in 1940, and finally comforting one another, those of us who were left, with oranges and mementos and smoked-oyster stuffings of childhood, gathering close, colonials in a far country.

Which is precisely what we were. I am not sure that it is possible for anyone brought up in the East to appreciate entirely what New York, the idea of New York, means to those of us who came out of the West and the South. To an Eastern child, particularly a child who has always has an uncle on Wall Street and who has spent several hundred Saturdays first at F.A.O. Schwarz and being fitted for shoes at Best’s and then waiting under the Biltmore clock and dancing to Lester Lanin, New York is just a city, albeit the city, a plausible place for people to live, But to those of us who came from places where no one had heard of Lester Lanin and Grand Central Station was a Saturday radio program, where Wall Street and Fifth Avenue and Madison Avenue were not places at all but abstractions (“Money,” and “High Fashion,” and “The Hucksters”), New York was no mere city. It was instead an infinitely romantic notion, the mysterious nexus of all love and money and power, the shining and perishable dream itself. To think of “living” there was to reduce the miraculous to the mundane; one does not “live” at Xanadu.

The first time I read this essay, this last part struck me as particularly true. I don't know that my friends who grew up here can ever quite have the same moment, on the way home from shopping for socks or getting a haircut, when they look up and catch a glimpse of Times Square or the Chrysler Building, and think, My goodness! I live here. I live right here in the Center of It All. I am trying to enjoy these charms of the city to cheer myself.