Radiator Heat and Other Musings

Tonight I decided to do whatever I wanted, and so I did.

That seems like such a simple idea, but it's one I rarely follow. When was the last time you spent a night wandering around based on instinct, instead of under the limits of a prior plan? For me, this is such a rare concept that it's essentially extinct.

I left work at five, though I should have worked late. I recently got a promotion at work, which is awesome of course. It's kicking my ass though, which is less than great. I should most definitely have worked late tonight, been a good little paper-pusher, but I decided I didn't want to, so I didn't.

I went to the gym instead, because I wanted to feel better and that's what the gym does for me. When I got there, I intended to run for a little while, my usual one mile warm-up on the treadmill before my hour of strength training. Because that is what I do on Tuesdays. But once I hit the mile mark, I realized I wanted to keep running, so I did. I ran until my heart was exploding and my side was cramping and I was drenched in sweat, relishing the fact that my body is healthy enough to produce this kind of movement and motion and energy.

I remembered being 21, on my first outing a few days after my first spinal surgery, so weak and so tired that I could barely make it across the Kohl's parking lot with my mom. I cried in exhaustion when I made it back to the comfort of her car. Ten years and yet another unpleasant back surgery later, I ran three miles just because I wanted to, because I feel more alive when my heart is about to crack open from exertion than I do at any other time.

I left the gym intending to walk around before my choir rehearsal, but then I passed my favorite local diner and boomeranged inside instead. I didn't have a book or a magazine to occupy me, and when I sat down I ordered the same thing I'd had there for lunch the day before. And so I ate a huge chicken gyro for no reason, comfortable in a booth in the quiet. Because I wanted to. It started to rain, and so I stared out the window at the dark shining streets and the brightly bouncing umbrellas, listening to old school No Doubt and Whitney Houston and Myriah Carey on the old reliable diner radio. It was steamy and calming and when I left, I was happy and warm.

I headed again for choir rehearsal, held in an old church about a ten minute walk across the village. As I walked down the wet streets, umbrella-less as per my usual style, I passed a favorite jewelry store and paused. I knew that going in would make me even more late for choir than I already was. I really, really wanted to go in anyway, so I went ahead and decided to drop out of choir for the season. Because I have been feeling overwhelmed and overworked for weeks, and I'm tired. Because singing is supposed to be a joy, and not another reason for exhaustion. Because I can and I should.

And so, I looked at jewelry instead. Beautiful, hand-crafted, nature-inspired, artistic jewelry. I thought about my mom, how she wanted to buy me a necklace for my birthday last year to celebrate my recent weight loss. She told me to pick one out that I loved, one that would help me remember, but I never did it. I thought about her while I looked at the necklaces. Then I thought about a friend I haven't seen in awhile, one who would love this small, dusty, lovely store to pieces, and fingered a pair of blue beaded earrings on her behalf. I bought nothing.

I kept walking aimlessly in the rain as my hair poofed around me in a high drama. I stopped at a puppy store and rested my forehead against the glass that separated them from me. I hate puppy stores, but my heart bursts with love for those tiny, clumsy beasts romping through the hay in their small storefront window home. So I just stood there and watched them for a little while, even though it was raining on me and I hate puppy stores.

Next I went to a small independent bookstore and spent a half hour dazed with words and rain and solitude. I saw a book I knew a new friend would enjoy, so I bought it. I found a book my husband would love, so I bought that too. I didn't buy anything for myself. But for myself, I stood for a long time in the poetry section. The steam heat was rising up through the radiator, and the only sounds were that comforting warm rush and the murmuring of the shopkeepers to each other from behind the counter.

I remembered being 26, living in a crumbling 5th floor walk-up in Soho. My apartment was so small that in order to get to the toilet, you had to squeeze in sideways past the sink while holding your breath. My window looked out onto Mulberry Street, from where I could hear church bells rolling from time to time. An independent bookstore was directly across from my building's front door, and so from that very first moment I knew that I was home. From that apartment I could walk to work on quiet city streets every morning, grabbing an overpriced coffee from Dean and Deluca's like a real New Yorker, like a regular, crossing the wide avenues with care while I listened to music and watched the steam from the underground drift into the morning light.

My mother came to visit one afternoon and told me that my great-grandmother had lived there, in that exact neighborhood on the border of Little Italy and Soho, when she first immigrated over from Italy in 1918. Maybe even on the same block, she said with a squint from my doorstep, looking down the narrow street as she tried to remember.

My great-grandmother went by Great Nanny to us little ones. She has no teeth left by the time I met her, and made great smacking noises when she kissed my little girl cheeks, and it hurt a little, and her hands felt like claws on my back as I tried to wriggle out of her arms. She always had a stash of Milky Ways in her sock drawer, and used to hit our beagle Frisky with a wooden spoon, shrieking at him in Italian when he got in her way. She refused to call my cousin Mindy by name, referring to her dismissively as "baby girl" instead, because she wasn't named after a Catholic saint and therefore didn't really exist. She raised my mother, along with her own ten birth children, in the bowels of old Brooklyn. One of her sons was special, they said, a teenage hearthrob-type with the singing voice of a matinee idol, of an angel, who coulda been someone. But he had some real problems, they also said, and he drowned one bright, drunk summer day at the beach in Coney Island, while she was at home making dinner like it was any other night.

Her name was Anna. She got on an old boat one summer day in Italy when she was just 18, just a baby, all alone, and sailed all the way to New York. And maybe she lived just like me when she was young, for a year or two, on a beautiful street in a beautiful city in a crumbling old apartment where you had to hold your breath and squeeze to reach the toilet.

My apartment had steam heat that came up through radiators. That first cold November night I went to bed in my room that was so small that the bed was wedged against the wall, and the closet was hung with a sheet instead of a door, because the door would've slammed into the bed, and the heat came up while I was sleeping. The sound of the rising radiator heat, that popping, bubbling rush of air so new to me, slid into my dreams. My mind painted miniature humans rising one by one from the bars of the radiator, floating upwards clutching the strings of bright balloons, laughing and calling to each other gaily as they drifted skyward, drinking from tiny flutes of champagne. I woke up with a laugh bubbling out of me.

I stood in the bookstore tonight, thinking of tiny people sipping tiny flutes of champagne, of what it felt like to be 26 and to wake up laughing, safe in a dollhouse-sized room high above a big city. I touched book after book of poetry in a shop that has no business still existing in this world of e-books and high New York rents, and I felt the kind of happiness that is also sadness, because it is so finite and fleeting that even when you try to grip it with all your might it persists, stubbornly, in leaking away from you.

Tonight I ran for miles. I ate a meal by myself with nothing to read as protection from my own thoughts. I walked in the rain. I touched beautiful jewelry and thought of people I love. I dropped out of something that should make me happy, with the promise to return when happiness is what it means again. I stood in a bookstore and thought of more people I love, including my younger, laughing self.

When you're small, you give up sometimes when you don't feel well or when life starts to feel too big and too hard. You crawl into bed moaning for your mother, for some soup, a glass of water. Someone holds your hand, strokes your hot forehead, reads you a favorite story as you drift off to sleep.

How often do we take the same level of care and love towards ourselves? Tonight I did only things that I wanted to do, things that made me feel cared for. Gentle, soft things. Small things that felt correct and calming and good.

It was a nice night. Maybe I'll decide to do it again soon.