Green grass grows everywhere
I think a lot about the kind of place where I would like us to live someday. London does that to you.
Last night, over dinner with Adriana and Perry and Perry’s Slovakian housekeeper, I mentioned that I think I’d like to live in Texas someday. Cue shock and incredulity. I forgot to mention that Portland also looks good to me. (Of course, when I was growing up in a place that’s a lot more like Texas and Portland, I wanted nothing more than to live in London or New York City. I am well aware of the healthy dose of whimsy contained in these dreams.) My friend Nancy Rommelmann, who moved to Portland from LA last summer, has written a piece that only encourages these “Oh look at how green that grass is!” feelings in me:
[L]ast night I drove into the Willamette Valley just after sunset, to a wine dinner at Penner-Ash Wine Cellars. Being from Brooklyn, I cannot tell a pine from a spruce but can say, the hills were covered with the sort of trees you buy at Christmas, but bigger. The light was magical, low and glowing, and as I turned onto the winery’s road, I felt as though I were passing into a dream; it went up and up, but you couldn’t see where you were going, a road that was so glorious and spooky that I considered that I might actually be dead.
The winery was lit up and full of people, and after much wine tasting, I made my way into the dining room, where the tables were set for 60, but where there was as yet only one person, sitting before the fire, an 87-year-old farmer who, that morning, had picked the corn we would be eating that evening; we talked about winning Lotto as the others filed in. The meal, which was for the media, included the vinters and the chefs, but also, the people who grew and raised the food. I wound up sitting between one of the owners of the winery and a woman who for several decades has been promoting the region’s wines. These are people at the top of their game, very successful, the winery is a marvel, and I’m sure pumped with many millions of dollars. And yet the ease with which we chatted, we might as well have been in our pajamas drinking cocoa; there was zero heirarchy, both were gracious and interested and funny and full of questions and relaxed. This last is the operative word. They were not mellow, or laid-back, but relaxed. And when one of the servers dropped and broke a glass at our feet, the host held the dustpan.
People I know in Britain don’t seem to think that Americans are very genuine in their cheeriness. Surely some of them are not. There is, however, a difference between cheeriness and niceness and bona fide kindness, and I have always found huge amounts of the latter in the States. The exceptions are plentiful, of course, but I long for the sort of interactions that Nancy describes, which were typical of the place where I was raised.
I’m going home soon, for a week’s visit, my second in the last nine months, third in the last two and a half years, and first with Antoine in tow. I can’t wait to show him this different world, one which I struggle to describe - its wonderfulness (pumpkins and potatoes from the local farm, cheap as chips; cows wandering around the rolling hills that make up my father’s back garden; the night, black as pitch, outside the house, chirping crickets not a joke but a reality, because there simply is no one else around) and its strangeness (teenagers arriving for the prom on a John Deere tractor; freshly killed deer hanging from trees in peoples’ front yards; bumping into at least six people I know, everywhere I go, all of whom have absorbed countless rumours about me and my family and multiple theories of why anyone would want to stay in London when they’ve got all of this waiting here for them).
But even there, we have people like the ones Nancy describes in LA:
The average customer at Whole Foods in Santa Monica, btw, considers herself the apotheosis of liberal values; a woman who drives a Lincoln Navigator and takes private Pilates classes until her 42-year-old body takes on prepubescent proportions; who buys her eight-year-old son (who is never alone) a cellphone “just in case,” and her teenage daughter a new one whenever she loses hers; who does not cook and does not clean and does not work but is nonetheless very, very stressed at all times, because nobody understands the pressures she’s under. Why, for instance, doesn’t the Mexican gardener dead-head the roses without her having to ask? Doesn’t he know to do this? Isn’t he a gardener, for god’s sake? What is wrong with these people? And here, Juanita, take the baby, I have to lie down for a minute, or get a pedicure…There is the woman whose family, as another friend put it, “is basically printing money,” but who weeps twice a week in her therapist’s office; her life is great, everything is great, but she feels so lost and so so scared. And then you watch her tell her daughter, who is crying because her best friend is moving away, “Oh, enough; lunch is ready and we don’t keep people waiting,” and you see the disingenuity with which she treats others, and you know her hold on the world is very, very tenuous, and the only way to maintain one’s place on the ladder is to step on other people’s fingers with the precise vigor that comes from believing your life depends on them doing less well than you, which it of course does.
All I want is to live in a dream world. Is that so much to ask?