Hi!
Let me tell you a story.
It’s a story about a Romanian tavernkeeper and his wife. It’s the 1960’s, but you wouldn’t know it from looking around. You might guess 1860’s, but that was the state of this village. While other countries were launching satellites into orbit and making designs on getting to the moon, the people of this village still depended on horse-carts, and preserving their meat by keeping it alive until just before dinnertime. The tavernkeeper and his wife were Jews, and both lucky to be alive following the events of the previous decade. Most of their friends and family couldn’t say the same. And they looked around, at the state their country was in and the direction it seemed to be heading, and they said “Nope.” Packed up their two kids and got out, making their way to New York, America.
It’s also a story about a Czech tailor, and his wife and two daughters, coming to the very same conclusion in his country. Soviet rule wasn’t very much fun, even in a resort town like Carlsbad, and they, too, decided to be a part of it in old New York. It was possible to get permission to vacation in Italy, then once you were there you just needed to apply for asylum at the American embassy, wait months and months and months for approval, then hop a jet to freedom.
Then it becomes a story about two immigrants, finding each other in the city of immigrants. A Romanian boy with an engineering degree and a Czech girl working in design, in Brooklyn in the 1970’s. They meet cute, ice skating at Rockefeller Center. They date. They meet each other’s parents. That goes… well enough. They get married. They have three sons. They leave city life for the comfort of the suburbs, good schools and a swimming pool in the backyard.
Then it becomes my story.
I’m a big old nerd. I lose myself in fantasy and science fiction, in Tolkien and in Star Trek. In British comedy, Monty Python and Mr. Bean and Douglas Adams and Terry Gilliam. In the exciting world in ‘90s indie film, Kevin Smith and Quentin Tarantino and the Coen Brothers. I discover Vonnegut and Voltaire. I read Catch-22 twice.
I go to film school. New York University’s film school, one of the best in the country so they say, most prestigious on the East Coast for certain. I’m a good enough student. I learn a little about everything, about lighting and editing and sound design and directing actors and cameras. I make a handful of shorts, about a guy so horny his head literally explodes, about a vintage Mr. T action figure that comes to life and kicks ass, about a Frankenstein monster trying to get a job and reconnect with his ex from when he was alive, about a man who finds tiny elves living in the walls of his apartment who reproduce by injecting their young into his eyeball. I smoke too much weed and don’t get laid enough.
I grow up. I stay in New York, and I build a career in television and video post-production. I start out as an AV technician, then an Assistant Editor, then an Editor. I smoke less weed. I date more. I live with a girlfriend long enough that we’re essentially married in all but the legal sense, which makes our eventual divorce much less paperwork-intensive, if no less messy. I start to run. I like running. I start running marathons. I make a film about a guy who inadvertently becomes a terrorist to impress a girl he likes. It plays at festivals. It wins awards. I keep editing reality TV.
I meet my wife. I know she’s my wife pretty much the day I meet her, though we go through the motions of playing it cool. She’s a theater producer from Louisville, Kentucky, who’d been living in New York almost as long as I had. Our first date is to see a play in a bar/theatre on Rivington Street, a comedy about an alien invasion and the end of the world. We move in together and adopt a cat. We meet each other’s families, hers in Louisville, mine in Florida by this point. A year later, we are officially married by a judge, in front of all our friends, in Louisville.
I write a novel. I write short stories. The rat race starts to lose its luster. The City is changing — the City is always changing — but it’s starting to feel like it’s leaving us behind. Every election, lip service is paid to affordable housing, and every year the rents go up. Our home has become a playground for the very rich and the very young. We are no longer the latter, and can only dream of becoming the former. We run faster and faster on the hamster wheel. The thought of ever owning a home, like our parents and grandparents did, becomes a sick joke. The thought of having a child, and raising it on the hamster wheel with no family to help us, becomes a nightmare.
So we move on.
We come to Louisville, a pretty little city on a river! We drink bourbon and go to outdoor concerts. Our meager-by-NY-standards savings allow us to buy a very nice house, all of our own. We find new work, different work. We re-learn how to drive a car. We have our daughter.
And the story continues.