And because I can’t find a fucking slice of pizza down here.
July 18th, 2007 | by Scott Jennings |I’m getting the question “why are you moving back to New York?” more than I expected, as if I need to justify wanting to live in the greatest city in the world. I have a list of reasons that I go through with these nosy assholes, but this is the reason I’ll share only with you, entire Internet.
My mom spent about a year in college studying English, but had to drop out for financial reasons. (It was a lot harder for a woman to put herself through school back in the early 60s, there wasn’t a whole lot of support, the whole “M-R-S degree” attitude and all.) After she left college, she moved to New York, and lived in Chelsea on 22nd Street at Eighth Avenue, just a block from where the first Upright Citizens Brigade Theater would sprout up thirty-five or forty years later. (We loved that synchronicity.) She adored New York, and I imagine no one had the temerity to ask her to justify it, either. It’s fucking New York.
Her own mom passed away when she was twelve, and she had to grow up quickly to help take care of three brothers who were six, seven, and eight years younger. I don’t know how the whole story goes, but I found a letter in a yearbook of hers that said one of her brothers was expelled from a boarding school, and I imagine that she was called home to help her father again. She lived with her father for the rest of his life, moving with him to Florida in the mid 70s, until he died of cancer in the early 80s. My mom never made it back to New York.
I wasn’t called home from New York to take care of my mom at the end of her life because she didn’t want to do that to me. I offered several times, and she stubbornly refused. (Reread summer 2002 through summer 2003 if you need the story.) But I did come home because it was completely obvious that I was supposed to (even if it took me a long time to see that), and that’s what happened, and that’s what was supposed to happen.
I’ve had a very strange journey from September 2002 until now, and that me wouldn’t recognize this me, what with all the growing, et cetera. But to answer your question, I’m moving back to New York because my mom couldn’t, and she would want me to.
