EFPTOZ

Ever since we moved, I’ve had certain tasks I need to do in order to feel like I’ve really moved. Like it’s not enough to have heaved everything across the ocean – there are musts on my to-do list that loom…and loom, and grow in importance until they seem so huge, they’re impossible.

One has been getting a New York state driver’s license. The whole time overseas, I never felt the need to replace my Ohio license. Apparently there are a few states that have worked things out with the French government to make their licenses easily transferable to a French one: Arkansas, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Illinois, Kansas, Kentucky, Michigan, New Hampshire, Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Texas, and Virginia (I think France just took a poll of the people least likely to come to France and made those the allowable ones), so I could have dumped Ohio for a more continental-sounding permis de conduire but that wouldn’t have been so handy for evading speeding fines. The fines are more and more frequent due to the number of discreet speed cameras they’ve been installing.

No, I stayed Ohio-proud as a cost-cutting measure in Europe, but back here in the US, I was eager to trade Ohio for New York. I wanted to turn model citizen and be who I say I am, as well as not have to withstand the looks of pity or hear tales of woe about the time someone had to live in Toledo for three years. And I worried about things like the NY state trooper who pulled us over on the highway for the van being “too loud” (the problem has since been fixed, honest Officer!) and how he could have cited me for the out of state license when I told him we’d been living in New York for two months.

Anyone who’s lived in New York City has likely been scarred and traumatized by a trip to the Department of Motor Vehicles, where the line of applicants stretches around the block, and the sadism of the clerks is legendary.

But mostly I was worried about the eye test. Maybe it’s the stress but my eyesight has gotten worse lately. I kept thinking I’d better get a new eyeglass prescription before I went in to exchange licenses. What if they decided I’m too vision-impaired to drive, even with glasses, and said “we’ll hold on to this” with my current license? I remembered the rigorous eye test at the Ohio Dept. of Motor Vehicles, where you look in this dark box and lights flash left and right…if the girl at the counter hadn’t prompted me a little bit, I honestly don’t know if I’d have passed – and that was a while back.

But to get some new glasses I’ve got make some money and I’ve got to drive to make some money so…

I got some sleep and cleaned my glasses and went first thing last Monday. The main street of our town is charming and old-fashioned, with an old movie theatre marquee and cute shop fronts. That particular morning, I saw a policeman leading a prisoner in an orange jumpsuit and leg irons from the jail down to the courthouse which was a little jarring, but I guess it kept things from looking too quaint.

There was a total of one person in front of me in the DMV. He was wearing shorts and a t-shirt, and telling the clerk how he wished he had his birth certificate but it was with his ex-wife and she didn’t allow him in the house anymore.

While I was filling out my form another guy came in, somewhere in his seventies, with a lumberjack shirt and boots, very thick glasses. They call everyone by their first names in this DMV, which is kind of sweet: “Now, Richard – it says here you have a hearing aid?”

“What’s that?” Richard the old lumberjack said. The clerk showed him where he’d ticked the box on the form. “Oh, no, guess I got that wrong,” he said, squinting. “My hearing’s fine!” he shouted. “It’s my eyesight that’s not so good.”

“But what’s that in your ear?” the clerk asked, pleasantly.

“Oh, that’s just some cotton I keep in there,” Richard said.

“Okay, well, let’s get you in front of the eye chart here,” said the clerk. They pivoted Richard around and he recited the letters, left to right. I was sitting a good six feet behind him and I could read them too, so I knew I was going to be alright.

Not In Cleveland

It was all set to happen, the other week. We were playing a benefit in Rochester for a friend, Tom Kohn, whose legendary record store the Bop Shop had been forced out by greedy landlords. He’d managed to find a new spot and a bunch of musicians had gotten together to raise money for him to move tens of thousands of records.

Sitting in the audience watching the Chandler Travis Three-O, I got very choked up. They’d left the stage and were playing and singing while moving around the audience. It’s the kind of thing that can seem forced, but it felt so intimate and wacky at the same time. When they played Things To You, that sweet NRBQ song, it almost did me in. It was a mixture of sad and happy, just like the song. Sad about Tom Ardolino, the NRBQ drummer who’d passed away the week before. Happy to be “home”, and simultaneously audience and participant.

They played a Travis/Greenberger composition next, called “This Is Home” – you know that feeling you can get when it seems like a band is telepathically channeling your life into song? He got to a line about “I’ve got boxes of stuff somewhere else” – and then I remembered: Cleveland.

Cleveland. The reason I put “home” in quote marks. Because if I’m honest, part of me still lives there.

“That’s How I Got To Cleveland” is the potential title for a country song parody, or memoir-turned-work of fiction. No matter how it happened, six or seven years later I still have an Ohio driver’s license. A nice guy named Bill still gets the occasional piece of mail for me at the UPS store on Euclid. My cellphone still mystifies people when it comes up in Caller ID – “who the hell’s calling from Ohio?” And there still sits in a storage place in Cleveland Heights a 5 X 8 space with my stuff in it.

Every time I go to make a piece of toast, I remember I’ve got a toaster. Bending down to take a charred piece of bread out of the broiler – “in Cleveland”, I sigh.

“That shirt’s looking a little wrinkled,” I say to Eric. “Let me get the iron-”

“Can’t – it’s in Cleveland,” we say in unison. A certain book, or something from the archives, that space heater or bit of Fiestaware – all in Cleveland.

In France, it was too far away to deal with. There was something comforting about having my little stake back in the states. And there were other toasters and irons. But those things don’t work here in the US. And there’s all that useful stuff sitting only a day’s drive away.

So I figured Rochester was even closer – four hours? I’d booked a ticket on Greyhound, reserved a small truck, had even arranged for a moving guy to help me empty the space and be done with it. But it snowed, and I was running low on money. And I didn’t want to be unloading a truck on my birthday.

In the time I was away, things changed. I catch up at the gym, watching TV on the treadmill. Hoarders shows, and Hot In Cleveland – aging gals who used to be somebody, adjusting their location/expectations to make the most of where they’re at in life. Geography – if you don’t like where you’re at, just change it. Is there a part of me that can’t say goodbye?

I was truly miserable when I lived there – I think I went there to be miserable. But it was the last place my daughter and I lived together. It was where I was living when Eric and I got together. It was cold, lonely, snowy – except when it was disgustingly hot and humid.

But there was a beauty to it, a purity and lack of pretension. Like Pittsburgh, where I grew up, but without the charm.

Storage places bank on this kind of inertia.

My friend Norma  was visiting this past weekend – she said there’s a Women In Rock show going til the end of the month at the Rock Hall of Fame in Cleveland. We’ve made a tentative plan to meet up there. Maybe I just need to trick myself into thinking I’m not moving again. Just stopping by to pay my respects to a small but important part of my life.

And leave with a truck full of stuff.

Some Other Place Already

I moved my blog from Blogger to WordPress two days ago. It’s been a little complicated and there’s still a few things I need to figure out (like how to redirect followers from the old blog over to the this one) but it seemed like everything was going okay. Then around midnight – I don’t know what I did wrong, but all these black bars started appearing over everything.

Then Wikipedia stopped working.

“Oh my God, what have I done wrong?” I wondered. “I’ve broken the Internet.”

But today everything was pretty much back to normal.

Shaky

Okay, I took the plunge and migrated my Blogger blog to WordPress. But I’ve got a number of things to figure out here.  Please bear with me! Phew.

Help

I didn’t mean to open this design can of worms! Went over to WordPress, started working on a blog there, then realized I’d have to have the concentration to learn a new dashboard etc. Which I sadly don’t right now. Then started looking at the (limited) blogger templates and next thing I knew I’d lost my old one. So…under construction. But here’s a photo from yesterday in Catskill.