Keith Adams's Blog

Ben and I in Pittsburgh, 2017
Well, it's been an awfully long time since I posted. So this is more of an update. I'm still in Manhattan, and given Ben's commitment to his professorship, I'm likely to be here for more than ten years into the future.

We've weathered the pandemic rather well. We're both boosted, as are our friends, so we've still been able to have social engagements with them. Ben and I have gotten on well, despite the long periods when Ben didn't visit his lab, and we were both stuck at home with each other during the depths of the pandemic in New York.

The biggest news is that I've been unemployed for more than a year, laid off from a software company I'd been working for for 21 years, due to a restructuring of management. It turns out that the achievements of my entire career have been for naught, since my skills don't seem to account for much in today's economy. 

This weekend, I was in Palm Springs to visit some friends, and I had a meeting with a dear friend, Steve,  from LA, who had some ideas about how to modify my job search. This resulted from my statement that for all my adult life, I've craved interaction with intellectual, creative people. Steve suggested that I look for a job at a university, since that might fulfil my yearning. He's working with me to elucidate some skills that are transferrable. This means, I'll have to come up with a new resume, focusing on these skills, and develop suitable cover letters. Of course, I'll be paid a fraction of my previous salary.

Other news: we have a new dog (for almost two years now), Mahler, a gorgeous Bernese mountain poodle.

In this photo of Mahler, you can just see our 15-year-old, D'artagnan in the background.

Mahler is quite smart and trainable. Our favorite trick is to get him to jump up at us with his forepaws and then do a high-five.
I don't have too much else to report. Being unemployed for so long kind of robs you of things to talk about. So I'll call it a day. If I have readers left, thanks! Keith

Last Saturday, I woke up determinedly on the wrong side of the bed, and nothing seemed likely to right that wrong as the day progressed. We had a 1.00 p.m. hair appointment in Midtown, and we set off rather late unsure whether to take the subway or a cab. In the end, we did both, starting off with a cab only to run into logjams associated with the UN being in town. So we got off at 42nd St. to take the subway. It was quite warm, and I hate sweating, but we had to rush. And let me tell you that the question of livability springs quickly to mind when you're rushing through a hot and crowded subway station where there's a brass band playing. I mean, a brass band amidst all the resident clamor?

I won't document the rest of the day except to say I didn't like my haircut, and things did not go uphill from there.

I felt bad that my mood had so affected us, so when I woke up on the next morning, our 12th anniversary of our commitment ceremony, I felt I owed it to Ben to make things work. Yet, in the end, I didn't have to try. We decided to celebrate our anniversary at brunch, but, not sure where to go, we rode down Ninth Ave on our Citibikes, looking for chance to improve our weekend. We passed the Maritime Hotel, and noticed the huge restaurant on the 2nd floor, called La Sirena. It had outdoor spaces and a Mediterranean feeling to it, not to mention a Michelin Star. For some reason, I'd been thinking of bellini's because we'd consumed them on another festive occasion, when we'd celebrated Ben's birthday in St Mark's Square in Venice in 2004 on our cruise. And by complete chance, on an afternoon's bike ramble, we'd happened upon a restaurant that not only served bellini's, but where the food was absurdly delicious.

Celebrating our anniversary with bellini's at brunchI'm noticing that one thing about living in New York is that you can always expect the unexpected, and I think it's often the unplanned discoveries that mean the most. Today was another case in point. It could have started badly because no. 1 we'd both slept badly, and no. 2 we knew it was going to be a warm day for late September. But we dawdled over coffee and pastries from Think Cafe in the ground floor of our apartment building, while reading the New York Times, and set off on another ramble of an afternoon on various modes of transportation. We had the idea that we might try go to the iconic Empire Diner, a few blocks down Tenth Ave, which has become something of a destination now that it's been restored. My worry was that it might be too much of a destination, and we'd have to wait, something that neither of us is very good at. So we settled for a place we hadn't visited, The Trestle, a couple of blocks short of Empire. The food was tolerable, and we didn't have to wait.

We decided to make our way to Argosy Books in Midtown-East on 59th Street, which is apparently New York's oldest bookstore. But we noticed that one of the streets between Tenth and Ninth had a flea market along the whole block. Despite the heat, the tall buildings and the huge trees kept it mostly in shade, and you could find everything there from 1970's records to ceramics to bizarro metal furniture. It being Chelsea, gay men were out in numbers, as you'd expect. I bought Ben a couple of 1950's silver-gelatine photo prints of the Seine in Winter, since they brought both of us happy memories.

Silver gelatine prints of the Seine from the 50's bought at a flea market.We new we were going to have to sooner or later interrupt the idyll by doing groceries. We usually go to a really good Brooklyn Fare on 37th and Ninth, but there happened to be a rather more down-market Gristedes at the end of the block after the flea-market, so we got it over with there, and arranged to have the groceries delivered (one of the joys of New York City living.) One of the things I most enjoy about Ben is that he's so easy to be with, and sometimes even grocery shopping isn't a chore, when I'm with him.

We still had to get to Argosy Books, so we picked up a couple of Citibike's nearby, and biked to Broadway and 23rd, where we could pickup the 6 line going uptown to the East Side. Biking really is the way to discover neighborhoods, particularly those we might never otherwise come across. Ben had promised me I'd like Argosy, and that turned out to be an understatement. Over the past six or so years, I've been gradually replacing all my old paperback classics with used hard backs, mostly early editions. It's a surprisingly affordable hobby, where you can get even early editions of authors such as Edith Wharton for twenty bucks. And we didn't have to spend long in the store, before I'd found two handfuls of good catches, including a couple of Henry James, an E.M. Forster, and other delights.

My cache of books from ArgosyFrom there we took a cab home feeling we'd had a fun, unplanned afternoon. Is New York livable? I'm leaning that way. But ask me again in mid-Winter.

Ben and I in Pittsburgh recently for his fiftieth birthday
It's been over two years since I wrote on this blog. I'm playing with the idea of writing again. But certain things mitigate against that. For a start, it seems my page is only visible to people who are signed into Google. For another, my static side-pages don't come up. I'll try and find solutions to these things.

In the meantime, here is quick catch-up. I'd been living in the Research Triangle in North Carolina for three years, while Ben had moved to New York to work at Mt. Sinai. The idea was that I'd benefit from the interaction of being on my company's campus, and Ben and I would see each other regularly. In practice, we missed each other a whole lot. You can't overstate the importance of the sort of daily, easy relationship Ben and I have. Just the simple morning routine of reading the New York Times together, for instance, in our long and leisurely breakfasts.

In the fall of last year, I had a bit of a crisis, and I realized that living apart wasn't working, despite my distaste at the idea of working in New York. So in May of this year, we found a two-bedroom apartment together in Chelsea, in the Hudson Rail Yards development, and we moved in together again, and I started working at my company's office on 7th Avenue.

I'd like to think that it's early days, and that there's still a lot of potential growth in our arrangement. But I'm finding myself working at home a lot, and we're both finding it next to impossible to make new friends. It goes without saying that it's something we have to work on.

I'm realizing that writing isn't coming any easier than it was during the period where my blogging petered to an end a few tears ago. Blogging used to be so easy for me. Sigh. Hopefully it will get better. And easier.

The 50-year-old version (note "version", not "virgin")Recently, I’ve begun taking the dog, D’artagnan, out for a wee ramble on a largeish patch of grass straddling an abandoned railway track near my apartment. He’s a nervous creature, most of the time. But if he’s certified that there are no people walking past, and no loud noises in the neighborhood, he actually relaxes enough to let me chase him all over the grass, and around and around the bushes, giving us both some exercise. It’s fun for me too: I’m still something of a big boy at heart and I take an indecent pleasure in playing with D’artagnan. Sometimes when we play tug-rope, it’s a toss-up who gets bored first.

What makes all of this truly remarkable is that I’ve been living in Durham for a year now, and it’s only in the last few weeks that I’ve been taking him out for pleasure. If that doesn’t show how much of a funk I must have been in, I’m not sure what would. Here’s a dog who’s perfectly serviceable for the basic pleasure of a little harmless fun on the grass, and I’ve shunned it for a year because I’ve been too disheartened.

D’artagnan hasn’t taken particularly well to apartment living. He grew up and lived most of his life in a house in the Hollywood Hills, where, most of the time, we’d just let him out in the backyard to do his business (and look for squirrels to chase.) Even if we did take him out on the street, it was such a quiet neighborhood that you’d rarely see anyone else. Now, though, I live on Main Street (literally) in a city downtown, so there’s a fair amount of noise on the street, even in sleepy Durham. And the thing is that D’artaganan really needs to concentrate to do his business, which is hard for him when there are loud, drunk Duke students coming home from the Irish Pub, or American women screaming at each other as they seem to do here. But his problems are really naught compared to the months he spends with Ben in New York City. First, Ben couldn’t be in a worse location: he lives on West 42nd St, very near to the exit from the tunnel, and close to the Port Authority bus terminal. And there are so many people on the street, many of them loud, not to mention the incessant honking of car horns.

At first, if he's in New York, when he starts making the indications he makes that he needs to relieve himself, he’s not too bad. He wags his tail in anticipation, and looks excited. Then it begins to dawn upon him all over again that it means going down fifty flights in an elevator, and going out onto that dreaded, hellish street-scape where there aren’t even any decent patches of dirt. He starts to shake violently, and cry. We have to hold him in our arms in the elevator in the hope that he won’t poop out of fear. Then, once out on the street, it’s like running a minefield as he tries to avoid one noisy person, or shrieking truck after another until he can be coaxed to void his bowels (in the planters belonging to Ben’s building, usually, but please don’t tell anybody.) It got so bad, that Ben found that the dog was peeing in his (Ben’s) bed to avoid the whole 42nd Street experience.

Here in Durham, as I’ve mentioned, it’s much quieter, and he rarely shakes, and sometimes even enjoys running in the grass with me. Last night, he was a little bit too timid to run around, so I just sat with him on the grass, next to the street. In the middle distance, I saw the shirtless flesh of what looked like a gorgeous young blond man running towards us, and I secretly took him in as he passed: he was truly a magnificent creature, close-up, and a real breath of fresh air. So I suppose dog-walking has other benefits.

The young man made eye contact with me, and I remembered how awkward I used to be about being confronted with situations like this, even when I had the kind of body for which I could feel pride if shirtless. I really never had the gall to just look natural, and smile. Now that I’m fifty, though, I wonder if I shouldn’t adopt the practice I was on the receiving end of a few years ago, when Ben and I were in an outdoor shopping center in the Valley. We were just about to enter CVS, when this older black woman came out and immediately, as she saw me stepping towards her, grinned and said “My, you’re FINE! And I can say that because I’m old!” It gave Ben and I both such a kick that we still sometimes remind each other about it. So maybe I’m old enough that I can do that now: compliment fine-looking men on the street in a natural way, with a frank smile, and get away with it because I’m too old for it to be interpreted as a flirtatious act, and, hopefully, too young to be thought of as that dreaded stereo type: a dirty old man.

(It hardly seems possible this was the view from my apartment window exactly two months ago)Spring has long since sprung here in North Carolina. And whether it's the lusty burst through of new life in the grass and trees, or the alignment of the planets, the same might cautiously be said about my take on life. I feel it's possible - not definite - that I could be reentering life after a six-year absence in a cowl of depression (due to bipolar disorder.) So, although it's extremely unlikely anybody is reading this (since it's actually been entirely oflline for a few months), I felt the urge to blog.

But where to start? Jeez, so much under the bridge in the last year. I think I'll let that come out in dribs and drabs (assuming I am truly to start blogging regularly again) and restrict myself today to things I found amusing today.

Long story short, today was my first day back at work after recent liposuction surgery. Yes, after living in Hollywood for ten years, I waited until I moved to homely North Carolina to have plastic surgery. Things they don't tell you about liposuction: for several weeks afterwards, you'll actually be bigger and heavier than when you started. This is because - quite understandably - the body doesn't entirely like having its fat cells sucked out by a straw and therefore protests by replacing the lost cells with ample fluid.

You also have to wear a compression pad around your torso for the first few weeks, which, if you wear it under your clothes makes you look yet fatter. In fact, since the surgery, on the 17th, I've felt distinctly like a jacket potato. Not only did I have an aversion to reappearing in the office even fatter than before, I didn't want my colleagues to even know that my recent surgery absence had been on the cosmetic side. Solution: wear the compression vest outside my shirt, and let everybody assume (as they have done) that I had back surgery. This has the enjoyable side-effect of gaining me some "ouch" sympathy. And, besides, in NC, nobody would dare to judge me on fashion terms.

Apparently, I'd misunderstood what the plastic surgeon had said to me before the operation about looking like an eggplant. He'd said it in the context of bruising and swelling, so I'd naturally assumed that he meant that my torso would be bruised in the color of an eggplant. It wasn't until a couple of days after the surgery that I noticed that my penis felt unusually thick in my hand (don't ask), and I would have been horrified, if I weren't English, when I pulled my entire genital apparatus out of my underwear to discover not only the immense swelling and discoloration of my foreskin, but also the great enlargement of my scrotum (which looked, as you might now expect, like an eggplant.) Fortunately, I had Ben (who's an MD) staying with me, who  reassured me it was perfectly normal.

Ben can (occasionally) be very funny. I'd texted him very early this morning when I got up and found that my testicles had returned to their normal size ("the size of tennis-balls, not that I'm boasting...", I texted him.) He thanked me for waking him up at six-thirty a.m. with that  information.

The amusing bit came later. Ben had emailed me a link to a new book that sounded like we'd both like to read, about the origins of life, and I wrote back, joking "I wonder if it makes any difference if the carbon atoms I grew up with as a fetus came from the star Betelgeuse or the star Sirius." Quick as a flash, he wrote back that judging by the size of my tennis balls, it must have been Betelgeuse. (Now I write that, I'm not so sure it's funny.)

I suppose this pulls me towards a more serious side of things: how did I get fat? After all, I've always prided myself on being in good shape, and had never conceived the idea that I could ever be fat. It started back two years ago, when I went through a horrible few months trying what seemed at the time a last-grasp effort to get out of depression, by undergoing a course of Electro-Convulsive Therapy (ECT). Since it meant I had to come off all of my psychiatric medication, and then have my  brain electrocuted under general anesthetic several times a week, not unnaturally, I didn't really get to exercise for a couple of months.

To cut a long and boring story short, the ECT failed, and my depression kept going, and I never really got back into the habit of working out.

A year later, and the next step in an attempt at recovery was even more radical: Ben and I sold our house in Hollywood, CA, and relocated across country, Ben to New York City, and me to Durham, North Carolina. But living apart has been tough, and I got into the terrible habit of having a large drink of vodka before going to bed every night. Even worse, I'd double up on it one or more times overnight whenever I woke up, because the thought of being conscious in the middle of the night was scary. I was never an alcoholic, but I was definitely subjecting myself to a course of medical self-treatment.

Strange to say, and perhaps horrible to admit, but I think it did actually work. I'm not sure I'd have made it through the last year without some resort like that to break away, for however short a period, from depression.

The huge (literally) downside was that apparently there's no easier way to gain belly fat than to drink at night. I really couldn't believe how much of a beer gut I got in just a few months. I knew it was happening, and I hated it, but I was so apathetic and unhappy I couldn't see any way to break out of the pattern. And soon I was finding more and more of my wardrobe (which had always been on the tight-fitting side of things) would no longer fit. And I hated the way I looked, and it was now - in an overall sense - making my depression worse.

So one day, about a month ago, with the knowledge that my liposuction surgery was coming up soon, I just poured all of my vodka away. I didn't know if I'd be able to keep it up. For a while, I would feel very empty when it came time to go to bed, knowing I didn't have a ready escape valve. But as time goes on, it begins to feel more and more unlikely that I'll go to one of the state liquor stores to buy a bottle of vodka. Never have I been happier that alcohol isn't sold in supermarkets here!

Now, although I'm still feeling very bloated from the surgery, I feel as if I'm genuinely looking forward to starting to exercise again. The weather here, since Spring sprung, has been mostly heavenly, and I look enviously at the many people I see jogging in the street outside my window. I hope that will be me in a couple of weeks.

I can't really expect there to be any readers out there after so many months without posting, so this one's for me.

It's 4.23 a.m. on a foggy Monday morning in Durham, North Carolina, my new home. I"m sitting at my desk in the window of my loft-apartment, in a converted tobacco warehouse, overlooking Main St where the streetlights and neon signs glow in the soft light of the early morning fog.

I moved to North Carolina in May after an 8-day drive, with Ben, across the country from Hollywood, and, by pure luck, ended up finding what has proven to be the best apartment of my life in the heart of this rising, old, industrial city. Ben had moved to New York City in January, to take up his new endowed chair in a big medical research institution in Manhattan, whereas I'd stayed behind to try to sell our house in the Hollywood Hills. So, by now, we've been living apart for over seven months, reluctantly, but of necessity.

This is my first time living alone in a decade, and it is taking some getting used to. For a man who feels like he's spent most of his adult life trying to understand his own user-manual, I now feel I'm in such a new and strange situation - living alone in a new state while I'm on the verge of turning fifty - that I'm lost in a new chapter of that-user manual; and it's a chapter which hasn't yet been written.

I'm starting to feel the pull of my sleeping medication drawing me back upstairs to my loft bedroom, where D'artagnan, our little miniature dachshund awaits me with some anxiety. He's not used to this new way of life either, particularly since he's now a part-time New York dog (I'll be taking him with me on my next trip to visit Ben in Manhattan in a couple of weeks, and leaving him there for a few weeks with Ben.) D'artagnan may be missing a chapter in his user-manual too: but it's a very short chapter in a very short book.

I wasn't sure I'd ever write here again; I'm not even sure I'll publish this. Last amongst the uncertainties, will anybody even read it?

In Palm Springs for the wedding of our closest friends, Bill and Stephane, in early February
My creative side seems long gone and dormant. The last few years, amidst a five-year depression, I've just struggled to find sufficient reason to stay alive, let alone engage in the luxury of creative activity. (I console myself with passive intellectual and artistic activity, my latest endeavor being to read the famous Edel five-volume biography of Henry James.) And yet things have been far from static. Never knowing from one month to the next whether I have anything to live for, I've gone along an unstoppable axis of change just having to trust that it's not meaningless activity. And here I'm now on the verge of selling our house in Hollywood and moving to Raleigh NC, while Ben is already living in Manhattan. Last weekend, we gave our beloved ancient St. Bernard, Indira, to our long-time dog walker. Everything is changing, yet so far, the report from the front-line is that I'm still struggling to hold on to who I am.

It's 5.29 a.m. on Sunday morning. and I'm in Raleigh, for the middle weekend of a two week trip. Unlike my previous trip here in January, I've felt flat and only partially complete. My two closest friends here are both out-of-town, so I'm lonely. I'm also in the midst of one of the most important work projects of my career. There has been a lot of politics, which is not a good thing for me, since I find playing games to be abhorrent. Accordingly, I've been the butt-end of the Machiavelli's around me, and have suffered some humiliating defeats. I suffer then in the sure knowledge that I'm doing the best work of my career. I said that my creative edge was in dormancy: in fact, it's in the realm of software design alone that it has some agency: I wake up every few hours and go to my laptop to jot down ideas that will save the project.

So let's see, oh yeah, Ben in New York. He moved there on Jan 1st, at the end of our joint stay there from Boxing day to the beginning of the new year. I went home to a house empty of all but the two dogs, and, in short order, I was back to the bachelor days of yore, reminiscent of the ten years of singlehood I spent in San Francisco before meeting Ben. Ben, meanwhile, has taken on a new lease of life in his forced move to New York. I'd finally insisted that we find a plan to get us out of toxic Los Angeles, and fortune had come to us in the form of a fantastic job-offer for Ben at one of the most famous teaching hospitals in the world. It's not a step he would have taken on his own onus, but it's paying off memorably. Unlike things were at UCLA, he's working in a collegial atmosphere, with a bunch of bright, young scientists, and he's loving the stimulation of the city.

For a long while, our plan was that I'd move to join him in New York once our big dog had passed away (it's long past time!), and we'd sold our house in Hollywood. Yet, on my repeated trips to North Carolina, where the company I work for is head-quartered, I couldn't ignore how happy I felt when I was there. And when I found the chance of living in a brand new apartment complex in my favorite part of Raleigh, Cameron Village, I brooked no delay in putting my name down and came to the agreement with Ben that we'd try to make the idea of living apart workable with frequent trips in both directions between Raleigh and Manhattan.

This trip has seen tremendous steps forward in our effort to sell our house in LA. We were dissatisfied with the efforts of our first realtor, when we'd put our house in the market in late Summer. So we found new guys through a friend, and they've been so proactive that I'll find myself going home to a house on Friday entirely repainted on the outside, and freshly staged inside. We're resigned, now, to taking a small loss on the sale. It's time to move one.

My apartment in Raleigh is due to be finished by May 1st, so that's my target move-in date. I have more friends in Raleigh than in LA, and, with the stimulation of working in an office again with much more daily interaction, I should be guardedly optimistic at the potential for a partial recovery from depression. The only thing suppressing that optimism is, of course, the ongoing depression which I can't shake. But at least I'm still alive, somehow.

I know it must be very difficult to understand the perspective of a man who seemingly has everything going for him and yet has been mired in a curdling, organic depression for the last tenth of his (almost) fifty-year old life.

Over those five years of declining hope and lost potential, my ability to to write passionately about anything but the 500 lb elephant squeezing out all air and life, has died out. And, although I still don't feel as if I've adequately described what it's like to feel this way for so long, I've mostly given up on making my life more comprehensible to others - even those closest to me - and thus I've largely given up on writing too.

Yet it's far from being the truth that I have nothing to write about. Increasingly, as my attempts to find enough reasons to stay alive have failed, I've detached myself from the real world and found refuge in books and listening to classical music. And - most probably - this untiring quest to satisfy my intellectual curiosity has given me at least one thing to live for.

All of which is merely a long preamble in saying that maybe I should write the about things I'm reading and listening to, despite the almost complete feeling that I'm lacking the inspiration and energy to compellingly capture the excitement and joy I can still experience in reading and in listening to classical music. Even now, after just four paragraphs, I feel the drive to write dwindling, as I reach the end of prevarication, and face the need to actually say something about something.

But here goes anyway. What can mid-to-late stone-age butchering techniques tell us about why we alone, of all apes, developed a conscience? What indeed.

Nomad Hotel, 28th and Broadway, New York City, 2.04 a.m. Wed Sep 25th, 2013
I awoke just now from a rare triumphal dream. I was returning from a glorious war as a bemedaled hero. Something of my state of mind lingered over into my waking mood when I found Ben awake, reading, beside me. Wordlessly, I squirmed against him, wrapped him in my long arms, and squeezed him hard. Ben reached for his light, put his book down, and surrendered to the prolonged hug. But it was impossible for me to know what he truly felt, and, eventually, I let him go and lay alone, staring into the darkness, thinking about our brief interlude in New York.


On Monday, we both had a preview of our future work lives here. Ben went up to his new campus to begin sorting out the final details of his contract, and meet up with those colleagues from his UCLA lab that are choosing to accompany him to Manhattan. I took the subway to Midtown, and worked in the window office I've been assigned, on the 47th floor of a skyscraper on 7th Ave. I scarcely spoke to a soul all day long. It wasn't exactly bustling. Nothing much had changed since my former sojourn in this office, which began in June of 2003. Indeed, there was the same interminable wait at the Starbucks that left off the lobby, and even the same office manager (which at least meant there was one familiar face.)

There was the same loneliness in the face of the soulless, Midtown anonymity. I spent most of the day working in my office, looking out occasionally across the tops of neighboring skyscrapers, feeling an increasing emptiness as the day continued. I'd made a provisional plan to take the subway uptown around five to see Ben's new lab, and, most probably, go out for dinner with his new colleagues. But my depression meant that I felt so robbed of humanity that I knew I couldn't face it.

I remembered one day here in 2004, not long after I'd fallen in love with Ben. I'd already moved back to San Francisco, but the project still continued, so I'd spend weeks at a time here in New York, staying at the Marriott Marquis. One day, I remember, I missed him so intensely after he'd been here for the weekend, that I wrote him a poem, and emailed it to him. I couldn't help but cry bitter-wonderful tears of passion, and hid myself in the darkest recess of my cubicle. Now, I felt as dry as a husk. I took the N train back down to our hotel, and did what I always do now: choose not to think, and push reality away through reading and watching something on Netflix, trying to avoid the circular descent into depressive hell that would be my destination if I let myself actually feel the depressive funk that beckoned. When Ben eventually got home from his work dinner, I felt like an alien, and I wondered how long I'd be able to keep up these defense mechanisms.

We'd agreed together not to work on our remaining two days here. It was another gorgeous day promising the beginnings of fall, and, after coffee, breakfast sandwiches, and the New York Times at our local Starbucks, we walked downtown through the Flat Iron district, to the venerable Strand Bookstore, at 12th and Broadway. It had been probably two decades since I'd last been to the Strand, and I fell in love with both it and the neighborhood all over again. Paradise must have been close to this, albeit perhaps less cramped. We bought six books, between us: my finds included early, hardback editions of Henry James' The Princess Casamassima , and an old Folio edition of Sister Carrie , by Theodor Dreiser. (I acknowledge that it makes less sense than ever for us to be buying old hard-backs when we're moving across country in a matter of months.)

After coming out of the store, we sat outside, across the street, at an independent cafe, watching the street-life. Such a wonderful mix of students, academics, and intellectuals in the book trade. I realized we'd found a viable neighborhood to research for choosing where to live when we move here beginning December. And I felt, for a rare moment or two, a little passion at the idea of this change of scene. I could see myself working at home, now and then, for a change from the drab scene in Midtown, popping down to the cafe to feel a sense of place and identity.

In the light of doing that classic New York activity - oh, what is it called - when you put one foot after the other to move along outside - oh, yes, "walking", I thought it a good idea to record this weekend for posterity. Ben and I are in the fabled city, and, last night, Ben signed his contract with his new employer, committing us to move here towards the end of December. It's done: no backing out now.

(Not my photo, for once: but very representative of the beauty of the evening, last night.)
It was, perhaps a Woody-Allen scene, or, at least, our first truly adult dinner together, on a gorgeous early fall evening, where New York was filled with soft breezes and a golden light. The chairman of Ben's new apartment, Peter, had invited us over to his condo to meet his wife (Mattie), and his right-hand-man, Adolpho (and his wife, Anna) for cocktails, and a subsequent dinner in a posh restaurant on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Peter is a rather important person, a fellow of the American Academy of Scientists (sort of like the Royal Academy - in England - without Isaac Newton.)

When I fell in love with Ben, oh, more than eight years ago now, I imagined life as an academic wife, sherry parties et al. Those images never transpired, largely because Ben was so isolated at UCLA, where he was more or less the sole virologist in a team of microbiologists more interested in microbes. Oh, he'd invite his lab over for Christmas parties, and the like; but they were all kids, and I had little to say to them. To give them justice, they had little to say to me either. But last night felt like I finally got what I'd been looking for: none of us were American, to begin with. Ben, of course, is from Singapore, and I'm English (and also, technically, American since I possess said passport); Peter and his wife are Austrian, and Adolpho and Anna are Spanish (and delightfully so.) So the conversation was very Woody Allen, and I imagined getting to know these people in an enriching way. Whether that will happen is an unknown. But already, it's an improvement over the complete separation I feel with Ben's department in LA.