This may sound a bit odd, but whenever I think of my home in upstate New York, I think of how much I admire the French.
Not just because they wouldn't go to war with Iraq, or their healthy attitude toward sex, or white burgundy, or Johnny Hallyday or Jeanne Moreau, or puy lentils, but because of how they think about missing.
You see, we make missing all about ourselves: I miss you. They – yes, perhaps rather dramatically and with a little soupçon of passive aggression – say: "Tu me manques" (you, to me, are missing). So the missing is not done by us, but by the person or thing that we miss.
I really like that.
Even though I write this on one of the hottest, sweatiest, beastliest of nights when no ceiling fan or clanky air conditioner can bring succour, I still can't imagine anywhere on Earth I'd rather live than New York City. I am one of those people who, when I moved here, suddenly saw everything in my life making sense: the overwhelming welcome, the relief of no longer being an outsider, that amazing feeling that the energy on the streets wasn't just something I was entering into but more something long dormant that was actually gurgling up from deep within me, so powerfully I wanted to perpetually hiccup.
But summer, of course, is the time when New Yorkers traditionally flee the heat and head out to the beaches, many to that collection of villages on Long Island known as the Hamptons. I've been a few times, but it's not for me. The first time was for a party and it was full of all the people I tried to avoid at parties in New York. There were traffic jams all the way there, all the way back and at any time I ventured out of the little picket house I was staying in, with its redundant widow's walk – used only nowadays, I imagined, by skinny, blonde trophy wives peering through the smog for their husband's helicopter returning from a late meeting in Manhattan.
But I suppose the newness of something, whether a person or a city, is always romantic. Not that I have ever doubted my passion for Manhattan, but sometimes things happen that jolt us into a new way of thinking.
Like so many others, for me that was Sept. 11, 2001.
Now don't get me wrong. My love affair with New York has only increased since that horrible day. The way the city bounced back, the way it rallied and blossomed and lived (Auntie Mame would be so proud) only increased my desire to be a citizen of this weird little island floating off the coast of America, and even, more weirdly, proud to have been there when the awfulness happened.
But the change for me came a few days later, the Saturday after the Tuesday, when the bridges and tunnels were all open again, and a friend invited me to drive with him to his place upstate. I jumped at the chance. Suddenly, not being allowed to leave Manhattan had made me want to scream to get out of it. (I am an Aquarian after all).
We set off, knocked sideways and dazed, amazed at the ever increasing number of signs the further we got out of the city proclaiming revenge and death to those who had dared to shake America from its slumber. Maybe because we'd been there when it happened, maybe because we were still in shock, we hadn't worked out our feelings yet. But anyway, these public declarations of violence outside churches and fire stations and schools just didn't tally with what was going on inside our heads and hearts. We just wanted some peace.
And we got it.
First of all it was the silence. I hadn't realized how insanely noisy New York had been. Post 9/11 there were endless bomb scares and the streets ranged from being utterly empty to being full of people screaming and running in every direction. The Empire State building is about to be blown up! There's a chemical attack on the subway! Don't drink the water! Get a gas mask before stocks run out! To be away from it all – in this quiet, balmy, beautiful, leafy wilderness – was shocking, and forced me to deal with everything I'd been merely experiencing for the previous five days. A tidal wave of feeling rose up and drenched me. I wept and grieved. I looked around me and for the first time understood why people sometimes needed to get out of my beloved city.
And guess what? The land next to my friend's was for sale. And guess who bought it? Yep, just as quickly as my love affair with New York had begun, the ease with which I slipped into being a town and country man did too.
A couple of years later, I had a housewarming party for the new cabins I'd built on my land. I stood on the spanking new deck looking out across the Catskills. It was a beautiful warm evening. I could hear laughter and splashing coming from the spanking new pool. Someone was grilling on the spanking new barbeque. As I turned to raise my glass in a toast to my new home, I felt the glow you only feel when you're truly happy.
It was a magical evening, made only more so when I looked into the eyes of a friend and something changed in both of us forever. He is now my husband.
Tonight, he's out of town and I'm sweating alone in the city and I wish we were both in the coolness of the mountains. I miss him and I miss our country haven. Both he and it are missing to me.