busting a move — Summer of Rove

In the last couple months I’ve had the unfortunate distinction of witnessing not just one pervert exposing himself in a NYC playground, but two different perverts exposing themselves in two different NYC playgrounds. (You should see the videos stored in my iCloud. Disgusting!) I’ve felt hot blasts of adrenaline on the subway when something looked or felt wrong — and waited, heart pounding, to run and change cars at the next station. The other day I walked by a guy, needle in hand, calling out to passersby for a napkin or tissue as blood spurted from his arm in my local train station tunnel.

And yet. This city, even if it feels lawless and is pretty much literally covered in dog shit right now, has been good to me. I grew up here. My two children have known no other hometown. Living through the pandemic here meant the darkest of days, but also the proudest. The nightly clapping from our balcony, the random acts of kindness, the feeling of community that grew, improbably, from the shadows of forced solitude. I’ll never forget the resilience and fear in the eyes of fellow shoppers when we’d line up to buy groceries, or the smiles and high fives (“Welcome to the herd!” one volunteer cheered) at my vaccination site, which doubled as a school backup program that took care of my children every day their school was remote. (There were many, many such days.) New York in a crisis is an indescribably magical place. It’s struggling to find its footing right now, but there is nowhere else I’d rather have been during the defining public health catastrophe of my lifetime.

Oh, have I mentioned? We’re moving. Leaving not just NYC, but the U.S. My talented badass of a husband was hired to help establish and run a new acting conservatory in the U.K. So we’re packing our bags again (with my handy organizational cubes, of course) and heading to Europe, where we spent the happiest summer of my life in 2019 on the trip that birthed this blog in the first place. We’ll be living in Bristol, England, a city much smaller (pop: 467,000) than New York (pop: 8.3 million) in the country’s south west. I’ve never been, but here’s what I know: It’s an hour and a half from London by train, it’s vibrant & artsy (and the birthplace of Banksy), and home to a gazillion amazing-looking cafes, bakeries, street carts, restaurants, pubs, a cider boat and an international hot air balloon festival.

,,, plus a famous suspension bridge and those hot air balloons. (These photos: not mine but used with permission.)

They say moving is one of adult life’s Top 5 stressors. Let’s make it Top 3. Add to the mix an international relocation, in the time of Covid, with two young kids — and picture the inside of my brain imploding, one cell at a time. The last few months have been a blur. There have been all those visa appointments (fun fact: my fingerprints apparently are so faint that a postal service employee whose job it is to take fingerprints nearly gave up after spending 40 minutes on my right hand). The countless hours researching things like SIM cards and primary schools and mail forwarding to an international address (don’t even bother trying). And the move itself: the winnowing of our possessions to those which can fit in a shipping container; the mind-numbing quarantine and testing requirements in England even if you’re fully vaccinated; the unsavory relocation company that I will take down if it’s the last thing I do. At this moment, almost all of our stuff is sitting in a New Jersey port waiting for the right cargo ship to come along. Yay, adventure!

Luckily my 6-year-old (being fingerprinted at his biometric appointment, required for a U.K. visa) has a clean record.

I’m a creature of habit who is about to leave everything familiar and cherished — best friends, Trader Joe’s, the spelling of aluminum (google it!). Even the park perverts and police who arrest them are known quantities to me at this point. This is probably why I’ve spent the last few months alternating between:
a) deep denial
b) an intense dive into my local Buy Nothing Group, a fascinating social experiment where items of all sorts are requested and gifted and the only rule is that nothing may be sold
c) many hours in our eternal happy place (minus the illegal exposure arrests), the playground
d) a Big Apple bucket list for the kids that included the Statue of Liberty, Ellis Island, Coney Island, Peking duck dinner, and sidewalk lemonade stands and toy sales like the ones my sister and I used to hold in Riverside Park:

Lemonade: original and chinola, a favorite flavor in the Heights — Lemonade: original and *chinola*, a favorite flavor in the Heights

Carrying a torch for Lady Liberty with our favorite bucket list buddies

Coney Island + cotton candy + besties = an even better day

Last day of 4th and Kindergarten! What a year. (Shhhh, we haven’t mentioned the school uniforms in their near future.)

The big city is exhausting sometimes. The smaller city? We’ll let you know.

Of the 19,793 images on my phone (oof that was hard to type), so many show my two favorite people experiencing the city the way I did, as only a child can. Here are a few of our highlights:

Bye, New York. I may not like you all the time. But I do love you.