Busytown by Jolisa Gracewood

My incredibly grown-up baby brother just went and bought a slice of heaven -- ex-state house, creek at the bottom of the garden, view of the water, nice mixed neighbourhood, walking distance to schools -- and I'm suffused with a strange mix of envy and nostalgia. Not just because he gets to do the M-word first (as Billy Bragg might have put it but didn't, "rent is just a moment of giving/ but mortgage is when we admit our parents were right"), and not just because the house reminds me of Nana's place, but because we've just committed to a move ourselves -- and it's not back to New Zealand. Not yet. Our hearts may be there, but our careers are here, for the foreseeable.

Such a luxury, if you think about it, choosing where to live. Not everyone gets to. But I didn't get where I am today without someone -- several someones, in fact -- saying something like "ooh that was a long sail, but this bay looks nice, good fishing, huge trees, let's stay!" or "ooh look dear, it says here in the paper 'friendly natives and cheap land'! Let's go, I can't stand this pea soup fog and grinding poverty any longer." Moving between countries, hemispheres, is my ancestry and, so far, my life. Adapting, too; I have a pretty functional set of cultural shock absorbers these days, honed on the similarities that surprised me in Japan and the differences that have blindsided me in the U.S.

So it's been interesting over the last couple of weeks, figuring out where we'll live next. If I had my druthers I'd stay in the city for a while. I always expected to love it here, but I'm surprised by the degree to which it feels like home. But we live a charmed life in subsidized housing, and the job that pays for the housing is of finite duration. The mood of the city is changing, too, as the post September 11 slump continues to make itself felt in everyone's pockets: subway fares are up to $2 (and in the process the venerable subway tokens have been consigned to history and an afterlife as key-ring fobs and earrings), public library hours are being cut back further, and last week there were five bulletins posted in our lobby detailing the forcible swiping of wallets in the neighbourhood, occasionally assisted by guns and knives. Extra coppers now patrol the streets around Columbia University, making them safer for fee-paying undergrads and, presumably, less friendly for anyone who fits the category of "black male, average height" as detailed on the posters. As always, a lowering tide sinks some boats faster than others.

Anyway, the physicist in the family has been mulling over a couple of exciting job offers, and it was surprising to both of us how important place was in our ruminations. Not just climate, accessibility, affordability, but how it actually feels to be somewhere. The lodestone, the baseline, the ancestral vibe is always Aotearoa, of course -- but it's important to be specific. On a drive from Hamilton to Wellington a year or so ago, looking in the window of a real estate agent while on a bathroom stop somewhere in the middle, we were stunned to realize we could have bought a house, free and clear, for what was in our not especially plump savings account. It was in Taumarunui, not that there's anything wrong with that, and it was the cheapest one in the window (Shania Twain needn't fear a competitive bid from us lot). In my dreams the snug hills of Wellington, where I spent my early childhood, and the warm chaos of Auckland, where I survived high school, both appeal, but the cities as I knew them are to some degree gone -- because they've changed, and so have I. As someone -- Julia Kristeva, I think -- wrote, an exile is an exile in time as well as space. You can go back, but you can't go back, if you see what I mean.

But I like to think that there's a portable sense of place that keeps us grounded while we continue our tour of duty over here. My domestic vision is equal parts "pretend we live in Auckland and slap some tapa on the wall" (pretty much self-explanatory), William Morris, and Laura Ingalls Wilder. The latter is pretty much how I was raised -- Little House on the Papatoetoe, sorta thing, albeit a modified 70s version that included bikes, vast amounts of bad TV, and the occasional family holiday at a nudist beach. I love that whole "Pa built a chair, and this is how he built the chair" pioneer self-reliance – all they needed was trees out back and a good sharp axe, not forgetting Ma's sewing basket (and oh yeah, an evil president willing to overrule the Supreme Court and relocate the Indians the heck out of the way).

And nineteenth century Arts'n'Crafts hero William Morris is the aesthetic leaven in my heavy hippie bread, with his legendary dictum "Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful" (although it turns out that this fantasy comes at a price, too: in Morris's utopian novel News from Nowhere, it transpires that his appealingly cosy artisanal 21st C London was only achieved after a bloody civil war in which everyone who wasn't completely into the beautiful/useful paradigm was smited rather heavily). I still use the Morris rule when garage saling and thrift shopping: hmmm, that's a funky magazine rack, but am I gonna use the thing? A ten dollar couch is a bargain, true, but does that colour do me any favours when I lounge on it?

So, you can do the antipodean grassroots elegance thing pretty much anywhere, but how does home beautiful fit into neighbourhood, city, country? I've been obsessing lately about the relationship between personal space and public space, especially since I got hold of an eccentric little book called A Pattern Language, by Christopher Alexander. The size of a very fat little paperback, it's a nutty, brilliant, compellingly strange utopian manifesto for how people should live in order to be really happy (you can browse a not quite as charming online version here). The project came out of Oregon in the 1970s, so it resonates perfectly with my own hippie-fascist tendencies. It doesn't so much prescribe as suggest very strongly what the world should look like, all the way down from the macro level (exactly what size countries and cities and neighbourhoods should be), to the micro, like why it's crucial for children to have cubbyholes around the place and a wilderness at the bottom of the garden, why you need a great big welcoming farmhouse kitchen, and what to do with the shady side of the house.

Some of the suggestions are, by conventional standards, kooky but appealing -- sleeping nooks in a common room rather than private bedrooms (can we say wharenui?); a 'children's bike path' through the town that takes them past the educational back windows of edifyingly busy businesses so they can learn where things come from (Busytown to the life). Others are brilliantly obvious: preserving green spaces and bodies of water so the town or city feels alive, making sure houses have a window or a balcony that looks out on the street so that you can feel yourself to be part of the town, and constructing public spaces that draw people in rather than scare them off. It all seems to be based on an analysis of what makes charming little Euro villages so charming, but what surprised me was how well a megalopolis like New York measures up to this template for humane living: it's a wonderfully social town, eminently walkable, and better supplied with parks and playgrounds than most other places I've been. You can live life on a human scale, walk out your front door and get places using just your own two legs, with pleasant chit-chat guaranteed along the way. Like I said, very hard to leave.

Luckily, both of the places we had to choose between were fine, liveable small towns, both of them vouched for by friends and relations who'd moved there and thrived. In the end we plumped for New Haven, a beautiful, troubled, interesting old industrial town about an hour and a half north of New York City. The decision was made mostly for job reasons, but one of the appealing factors was how familiar it feels: after mumble-mumble years in the Northeast it seems I'm a New Englander as much as a New Zealander. The houses hereabouts look like houses, to me, and the wee corner shops and little parks appeal to this urbanite more than the largely suburban, footpathless and thus car-driven culture of North Carolina. Both places are conceptually centered on a university, but New Haven more tangibly so: there's a village green in the centre of downtown, next to the Oxbridge-meets-Disneyland campus of Yale University. [Oddly enough, a Google search for images of "new haven green" also threw up this ad for Pakatoa Island, which appears to be for sale again. Hang on a minute while I empty the change jar and see if...nah, not even in $NZ].

Back to New Haven: the town and gown divide is starker... there are steadily gentrifying areas in which the university sponsors investment, and less fortunate neighbourhoods that offer a mute indictment of the castle-like bulk and colossal wealth of the university. But, this being the Northeast where forthrightness often trumps politeness, all those politics are out in the open, which can only be a good thing. Sure, the winters are colder up here, but the seasons are rewardingly dramatic -– spring erupts in an orgy of magnolia, dogwood, and cherry blossom; and if you've ever wondered why Americans call autumn "fall," you've never walked home through knee-deep drifts of dead leaves, admiring the fractal geometry of bare black branches against a glowing sunset.

Besides, when I'm desperate for an urban fix -- like, say, Friday's errand, which took me through the sheer visual spectacle and noisy chaos of midtown on a weekday in search of the perfect angular architect-style glasses to replace my woeful ten year old pair (recently bent beyond recognition by nascent spectacle fetishist Busytot) -- I can just hop on a train! New Haven will be a fun place to live for the next little while, I tell myself... meanwhile making a note to write and ask Aunt Betty whether one can grow flax or feijoas or kowhai or a cabbage tree in Horticultural Hardiness Zone 6.

Busytot's Dad here. Many, many years ago I must have watched an episode of Mork and Mindy which, thanks to some quirk of memory, has permanently lodged itself in my head. So far as I can remember, the show always ended with Mork calling home to Ork with his latest report on the earthlings – except in this episode, Mindy took over the job for a week after a sequence of arguments about the division of labour in their household. There have been no significant arguments this week in Busytown about housework, but since Jolisa is currently sitting on the sofa with a laptop on her knees and a thesis chapter's worth of notes piled next to her, I will be filing this week's report instead.

In order to speed the arrival of the incipient chapter, I have been spending as much time as possible with Busytot and his friends for the last couple of weeks, while his mother hits the keyboard. Here in the heart of the capitalist West, we have cut ourselves loose from the frankly frightening world of Manhattan daycare (witness the million dollar donation that allegedly secured places for a pair of twins in a particularly august pre-school) and, along with some other local parents, have set up a babysitting co-operative. In return for wrangling Busytot and a couple of his playmates for the morning, we get a couple of mornings of childcare in exchange. The little fellow is usually sufficiently tuckered out upon his return to settle down for a heavy afternoon nap, thus considerably extending the horizon of writing time.

To be honest, looking after three toddlers for the morning is hardly an onerous chore (although it must be admitted, I might see things differently if I had to do it every morning). Just today, I got to see a little girl produce a note from an ocarina for the first time and then stop to vigorously applaud her own performance, I watched three small people enthusiastically "thump their chests like a gorilla" (forget about The Very Hungry Caterpillar -– Eric Carle's masterwork is the crowd-participation epic From Head to Toe), and gazed in wonderment at the amount of melon that can fit into a two-year old frame (I was hoping for dessert off that melon: no such luck). I may have refereed the occasional rocking-horse custody dispute, taken a call from a potential employer with loud wails clearly audible in the background, and changed more nappies than I normally encounter in a morning in the physics mines, but I wouldn’t trade it for anything.

Busytot runs with a slightly older crowd, and an illuminating fringe benefit of our guerilla childcare scheme is that we get a sneak preview of what to expect in the coming months. Our lad will hit the 18 month mark this Friday (very auspicious, that our little half-New Zealander, two of whose great-grandfathers were at Gallipoli, will forever have his half birthday on Anzac Day), whereas most of his friends have already confronted the cake with two candles on it. In any group, someone must be the youngest or the last to hit particular milestones, and this time it is Busytot's turn. And the big event in the lives of many of his slightly older friends is the arrival of siblings.

Busytot has never shown any anxiety about seeing his parents with other children, but when he first saw each of us gingerly dandling a newborn (and gingerly it was – after becoming accustomed to hefting close to 15 kilos of sturdy toddler, holding a recently born baby is a shocking reminder of how much change can happen in year), he screamed himself purple with jealousy, and then sat in a parental lap snuffling and hiccupping for ages until he had fully recovered from our parental infidelity and regained his equanimity. More recently, though, he is getting to be as clucky as his parents - his own "baby" (a slightly alarming doll with eyes that blink shut as its head is tipped back) is a frequently requested bedtime companion, and he even asked if he could hold his Best and Closest Friend's newly arrived little sister.

The little sister was born safely and quickly last Monday, at home, as planned. Jolisa was there to help out and to keep an eye on the Best and Closest Friend, who was remarkably composed for a two year old. He stroked his mother's back between contractions, saying "It's OK Mummy. Don't cwy" -- which was the cue for everyone else in attendance to cry at the utter sweetness and sincerity of it. As Jolisa said on her return, seeing a baby come so beautifully into the world somewhat restored the karmic balance of the week -- it was a productive and positive and powerful and undeniably real event, after all that book-burning and misery and staged footage elsewhere in the world. Oddly enough, suddenly half the people we know are expecting (and one of them just found out it's twins!). In the words of one of film's most famous chaos theorists, "Life will find a way"... The world rolls on, lopsidedly but determinedly, and I guess we're lucky to be living in a currently safe part of it.

I hesitate to displace Russell's excellent gathering of essential war-news from the top of the listings in favour of utter frivolity, but, well, I'm going to. (For a moment, anyway; just watch Russell re-post within hours and move me on down!). So, Peter Jackson is going to remake the 1933 classic King Kong. Rock on, Wellywood! According to early reports, New York City will be played -- in a triumph of do-it-yourselfism -- by an empty field outside of Wellington. Damn, why didn't I think of that? The savings on rent, alone...

I hope this set, unlike Hobbiton, won't be summarily dismantled at the close of filming. Today's New York Times says that Americans are seeking out less dangerous spots to travel to, New Zealand being one of them (while Brazil and South Africa are edging out Australia as desirable destinations). Seems to me that a happy little 1930s ersatz Gotham situated at a convenient commuting distance from downtown Wellington is a resort concept just waiting to happen. You could catch a retired checkered cab out there from the airport, check into the reconstituted Plaza, and stroll down a truncated Broadway, ducking into a faux speakeasy for an illicit cocktail (curiously, Prohibition ended in the very same year that King Kong was released).

Speaking of speakeasies, we took Busytot out to a downtown bar'n'restaurant the other night (the Cowgirl Hall of Fame – great concept, fabulous company, absolutely crap food) and it wasn't until we were leaving that we realized something was different. It was smoke-free! We didn't smell like shit! I think I speak for millions of New Yorkers when I say "Thank you, Mayor Bloomberg, for ramming through what may well be a colossal assault on smokers' alleged rights, but is a long overdue and magnificent favour for the rest of us." I mean, talk about yer weapons of (insidious, ongoing) mass destruction. In a nice touch, the city is offering free nicotine patches to any New Yorkers who want to take this opportunity to give up the evil weed.

Back to King Kong. I wonder if Peter Jackson and his co-writers have taken due notice of the various critiques of the allegedly bogus race politics of the Lord of the Rings, both book and movie versions? After all, Jackson, Fran Walsh, and Phillippa Boyens are tackling what has been characterized as the story of yet another oppressed, exploited and unreasonably feared American of African origin being taken down by The Man when all he wants is to climb to the top of the business world and get a nice girlfriend. Except that, get this: in the original film, Kong's homeland, Skull Island, is actually located in – gasp -– the South Pacific! It's not a race-relations parable at all -- it's a brain drain story! The misunderstood ape is just angry about having to pay interest on his student loans back home while waiting tables illegally in the East Village, squatting in a squalid basement apartment, and surviving on bananas and day-old bread. I know plenty of people who'll pay to see that film.

The international situation is (in the immortal words of Tom Robbins) desperate, as usual. The news is ghastly and the pictures are worse; the protests continue -- but almost half-heartedly, it seems; and Salam Pax has fallen silent... just lying low, I hope. Like most of you, I'm just reading and thinking a lot. Much good it does me, or anyone else. Still, here's a useful overview of the incredibly slippery rhetorical slope that got us where we currently are. This thoughtful blog-piece asks some very good questions about what it means to demand "Peace" with no strings attached. And, thinking globally and acting locally, a couple of weeks ago this local mum stood up and gave her best on behalf of the Easter Bunny, protesting the revoltingly tacky war-themed Easter baskets on sale at K-Mart. Chocolate eggs and GI Joe, just the thing for the season. Amy was arrested for her troubles (albeit reluctantly -- it seems that city cops have better things to do than handcuff women in fluffy slippers). I'm sorry I missed the notice about this protest – I'd have been there with ears on.

You do what you can, where you can, and sometimes you do something completely pointless yet satisfying, just to take your mind off things. Today that consisted of taking Busytot to the park for a good old play. It was briskly cold, with a hint of the foot-deep snow we're meant to be getting tomorrow, but two of his little friends were there and he made a third, a very sweet boy who barrelled up out of nowhere and gave him a hug. Our little lad went down the spiral slide for the first time (on his tummy, feet first, about twice as quickly as he expected to), was kissed by two friendly dogs, and tentatively fed a passing squirrel -- I know, I know, they're rats in fur coats, but they are very winning.

Later, during naptime, I set to mucking out my neglected recipe folder. I winnowed the complicated, duplicated, or just plain disgusting (rhubarb, mushrooms and asparagus, anyone?) recipes I've accumulated over the years, and sorted the fast, frugal, and fun ones into useful categories. It's a plain old ringbinder, but I at some point I gussied up the cover with luridly unappetising photos snipped from a vintage pressure-cooker cookbook. Just to give you an idea, "Meat Dishes" is the caption to one particularly ghastly picture of what might possibly be a lonely slab of beef (it looks like some kind of bovine by-product, anyway), flanked by pallid slices of cucumber and a tablespoon of peas nestled in half an apricot (I think), the whole thing displayed flirtatiously on an eye-crossing op-art gingham tablecloth.

What I'd forgotten until looking at it again today was that the centrepiece of my collage of '50s food photos is an actual recipe salvaged from the book. Entitled, quite simply, Squirrel, it calls for:

1 squirrel
salt and pepper
1/4 cup fat
1 cup water
2 tbsp flour

It's fast all right (20 mins in the pressure-cooker; you can write me for detailed instructions if you're mad, er, keen) and frugal. But fun? Ay, I hope I never have to use it.

Out of a sense of impotent rage, and because none of the coverage makes sense to me, I've been mostly boycotting the "all war all the time" fest on TV and in the papers. Now even the distractions aren't distracting any more. I had to switch off the usually reliably diverting American Idol last night when the bright-eyed finalists, some with tears streaming down their faces, sang a gratuitous chorus of pro-America songs. It was just so wrong wrong wrong, but then that's the Fox network for you. I think we can take it as a sign that the war is, as reports have begun to suggest, not exactly going to plan. But the reality-TV coverage goes on, and on, and on. It's like some ghastly return of the repressed from the trauma of September 11, when people found themselves stupidly saying "It's just like [insert movie title here]." But that wasn't a movie, and this isn't either. As Jay Leno put it the other night, more in sorrow than in comedy, "In Baghdad, they don’t even need TV. They just look out the window. It’s like CNN 3-D."

So what's a skeptical, frustrated, anti-fascist peacenik to do? Last Saturday's march down Broadway was a good one, as these things go. It was a warm spring day, the crowd was mellow, and the mood was peaceful but intense (thanks to the black helicopters overhead and helmeted cops at every corner). We caught up with the march about halfway through at 34th St and watched for a while, just soaking up the vibe. After waiting for the Socialist Workers to file past with their recycled signs (Living Wages, Abortion on Demand – well yes, of course, you idiots, but in case you hadn't noticed there's a war on!), we slipped in behind the Teachers' Union and joined the throng. I'd planned to get a couple of helium balloons to tie to the stroller and write something pithy on, but we'd run out of time. No balloons, no badges, no signs, but it felt good to simply walk alongside a hundred thousand other New Yorkers, standing up and being counted -- at least until the youngest members of our party called a halt at about 23rd St, having sighted a playground and a place they could run around without getting trampled on by people singing "Give Peace a Chance."

It was a very eclectic crowd -– as one call and response chant put it, "Tell me what democracy looks like/ This is what democracy looks like!" -- with all ages and styles represented. I especially liked the groovily bedecked clutch of what I took to be NYU undergrad grrls. I haven't seen anyone that excellently dressed since the last time I was in Auckland, and it gave me happy flashbacks to my own heady baby feminist days, when the sartorial was political too. A couple of them were happily topless for some reason. Militantly breastfed Busytot heartily approved of that particular gesture – he's always harassing me to get my tits out for peace, and it was certainly a nice day for it.

Although the overall mood fell somewhere between sombre rite and tentative spring promenade, some of the signs were wickedly funny. One well-seasoned chap had written his anti-war message on the back of a precious souvenir poster for a long-gone Jerry Garcia gig, which made things confusing if you were walking behind him. The posters were as much anti-Bush as anti-war: the new classic, "Empty warhead found in White House" jostled with "Have another pretzel." My favourite featured a photo of Dubya gesturing behind a podium, photoshopped to look like he was playing with plastic soldiers, and saying "It'll be like blam blam blam! Kabooosh! Wheeeee! Aaargh, you got me!"

Later in the afternoon, walking back to the train station with bags of veges from the Chelsea Markets, we re-encountered the crowd dispersing from the tail end of the march -- and I realized the real importance of the signs and badges. It's not so much (or not only) for the cameras. It's so that other people will know you went to the march. We just looked like a petit bourgeois family coming home from a frivolous shopping trip, instead of the New York faction of New Zealand Academics And Their American-Born Toddlers Against the War. It's face-paint for the little one next time, and maybe we'll dig out our old Students' Association t-shirts emblazoned with the slogan "The System Loves You and Wants to Be Your Friend" above a picture of the Red Squad.

You know I'm just cracking hearty because I'm scared, right? It's getting harder to be all acerbic and Evelyn Waugh about the whole thing, even though there is so much absurdity to poke fun at -- on this side of the front lines, at least (you really don't need me to tell you how horrific things are on the other side; you can read Salam Pax for that, as long as he keeps posting, or this unutterably ghastly report from the Independent, but not if you've just eaten). Witness the shrill, stupid little ad placed in yesterday's New York Times by a tabloid website, demanding a boycott of all things French and French-owned. According to the ad, this includes Wild Turkey bourbon, Technicolor, and -- good lord -- Jerry Springer, alongside the usual suspects like blameless toddler fave Yoplait and out-of-my-budget-anyway Bollinger. But one item on the list hurled me straight back into a gratuitous mid-eighties francophobic fury for a split-second: Zodiac inflatable boats. Sacre bleu! I'd forgotten those cowardly cheese-eating scuba monkeys! Where's my "You can't sink a rainbow" T-shirt when I need it?

I know most of the readers of this site are checking in from New Zealand. Times like these you realize just what a privilege it is to hold a passport that much of the rest of the world would, metaphorically at least, kill to get their hands on. One Salon columnist, feeling all nervous about being an American in these troubled times, found himself wondering if now would be a good time to buy that one way ticket to New Zealand. (He's not the first, and certainly won't be the last, to seek sanctuary down under: allegedly one of the kids who shot up Columbine High School wrote in his diary something about how they planned to escape "to new zeland [sic] or somewhere far away where americans can't find us." NB I wish I could find an accurate reference for that quote; I read it in Harpers Weekly, and vividly remember the misspelling). Still, it's too late, really, for that sort of complacency: after my last little comment about being the mother of a draftable boy, I was alarmed to see a New Zealand-born soldier on the list of those who have been captured. And this last weekend, my brother visited Bali to remember a friend killed in the bomb blast at Kuta Beach. It's a small world, after all. Dammit, I always thought that was meant to be a good thing.

So George W. Bush addressed the nation tonight, to announce the beginning of what one letter writer to the New York Times this week called his "shoot first and ask questions later" plan. It was an uncharacteristically solemn performance by the President; I'm guessing he'd had his smirk muscles Botoxed for the occasion. Bush only addressed the one nation, of course - 'cos everyone else can just kiss his grits - and emphasized his personal desire to bring freedom to the Iraqi people without sacrificing too many Americans or "innocent" Iraqis. (See this timely column by Thomas Friedman on how, if the worst happens, as it has, the US might make lemonade out of the lemons that Bush and Rumsfield and co. are handing out -- i.e. how they might make a Marshall Plan out of a sow's ear and a devastated Baghdad).

Meanwhile, Saddam Hussein continues to play his part in the absurd wrestle-mania performance of it all, by twirling his moustaches and allegedly rocketing a couple of Kurdish villages. Nice one. He's a nasty bastard, of course, no disputing that. But in his speech tonight, Bush continued to perniciously conflate Saddam Hussein and 9/11, saying that it was important to fight this war Over There With Soldiers before we have to fight it "on the streets of our cities, with firefighters, police, and doctors." And you wonder why something like half of all Americans believe that Saddam was responsible for the September 11 attacks. Have a lookie at the transcript of this press conference - look down the page for a question from a guy named Adam, read Bush's answer to his question, and wonder what else is being creatively reframed to justify this so-called war (thanks to Matt in Munich for that link).

War brings out the worst in mealy-mouthedness. Whoever's writing Bush's speeches has a strange way with words, from the nasty vagueness of "target of opportunity," to the sadistic relish of "at a time of my choosing." I actually heard a military spokesman say on TV tonight that targets had been "serviced" this morning in Baghdad. The word has both a nicely efficient white-aproned waitery ring to it, and a slightly more sinister whiff of animal husbandry. Which reminds me, this excellent (and scary) piece in the New Yorker on the journalists invited to accompany elite Marine units to the front may be the first time the words "We're fucked" have ever appeared in that magazine.

Speaking of Marines, last night we flew back into New York from North Carolina, and the airports were crawling with young military men en route to various destinations. They all looked alarmingly young, and not all were as brawny as you might think, although a couple had necks as thick as my waist and arms resembling (as Clive James once memorably wrote about Arnold Schwarzenegger) a condom full of walnuts. It's suddenly highly relevant to me that I'm the mother of a draftable boy, albeit he's got another sixteen years up his sleeve before the recruiters come calling. There are soldiers in my family – not my generation, but certainly the two before me, so it's hard for me to feel unequivocally anti-military, per se. They're just doing a job, and in this country in particular, many of them have few other career options or chances of affording university. It's a very class-based occupation (see Michael Moore's comment on how many of the 535 members of Congress have children in active service: exactly one). A poster I noticed all over the place in Chapel Hill said it nicely: "Support our Soldiers: Bring Them Home." Now we get to wait and see exactly how long that will take.

North Carolina, by the way, looks like it might be a very nice place to live, although the population boom down there over the last decade or so means that most people seem to live in strangely uniform gated communities -- scattered in and among forests some distance from the town itself -- that resemble the set of The Truman Show, or possibly The Prisoner (sans giant bouncing balls). Optimistically, I'm still hoping for a charming wee cottage within walking distance of downtown Chapel Hill and the UNC campus, which is dignified and picturesque, especially with the magnolias in flower. While checking out the town, we caught up with good friends from New York and New Zealand who now live down that way and are flourishing. And hey, The Datsuns were playing the local alternative music venue the night after we left, on their way back through from a highly successful visit to the South by Southwest festival in Austin, Texas. All good signs.

Odd thing, though -- you'd think I'd be heaving a sigh of relief at the chance to live in a wee town that's not a designated possible target of weapons of mass destruction. After all, this week New York is once again under the grip of tighter security measures. Helicopters overhead, armed National Guardsmen on the streets, bomb-sniffing dogs in the subway (I have to admit, I first heard that as "bum-sniffing dogs," and wondered what was so special about them). But flying in last night over the vast glittering tapestry of greater New York - for a full twenty minutes I was looking out for Manhattan, but it was just miles and miles and miles of New Jersey, the mere outlying circle of this great city - I felt like I was coming home. And tonight, walking the toddler up and down 112th St to get his wiggles out before bedtime (and to get away from the bad news on TV), we bumped into friends from over the road and some kids from our building, and stood there chatting for a while and admiring the moon. Funny how a megalopolis can feel more like a village than a small college town.