Busytown by Jolisa Gracewood

Where was I? I’ve been trying to follow the so-called “race debate” back home. Distance lends a certain perspective, as well as an alternative frame for all the angst and aggro. For one thing, there’s nothing like being a world away from the landscape of childhood – and dreaming of it every other night -- to reveal a deep and, yes, spiritual relationship to the land, even if you don’t think of a given mountain as your actual ancestor.

And for another, I’m finding it impossibly hard and embarrassing to listen to the litany about how it’s all “take, take, take” on the part of the tangata whenua. From where I sit, pakeha New Zealanders have pocketed a great deal, in every sense of that phrase. It takes some time away to realize exactly how much we owe.

I’m not (just) talking about compensation for land grabs and compensatory policy for all those crucial areas where the effects of dispossession and racism are still deeply and disproportionately felt by people who are Maori – health, wealth, employment, education, social and familial cohesion, ambition, expectation, life expectancy.

(I mean, bloody hell, life expectancy! Tenure on the planet! That’s the equity bottom line, as far as I’m concerned, and it would require callousness greater than I’m capable of to argue that evening up the odds of being around to see your grandchildren graduate from university is some kind of special treatment. Whatever it takes, I’m for it.)

But I’m also thinking about all the intangible benefits white New Zealanders get from living in a country with a vigorous, enthusiastic, staunch, distinctive and uncompromising culture flourishing alongside – and inside – our, let’s face it, largely off-the-peg anglo society.

No, no, sit down, I’m not saying that pakeha have no culture of their own. On the contrary, the culture that we have is inextricable from a relationship – positive or negative – to Maoritanga. It’s in that word, pakeha. As far as I know, it’s unusual for a settler population to denote itself with a term from the indigenous language (haole, Hawai’ian for pakeha, would be another). It’s a small detail, but a crucial one, just as the earliest use of the word “New Zealander” referred exclusively to the original inhabitants of the island.

It’s not that “we” refer to ourselves with “their” word, or called “them” by what is now “our” term. That’s where biculturalism tips into binary thinking, forcing the categories apart and making them each other’s opposite. Rather, what interests me is that the different terms necessarily assume – and create – a shared world. You can’t be a pakeha unless there are Maori; you can’t be Maori, as the term currently works, without the presence of pakeha. (You can also be both at the same time, of course, but people will often insist on making you choose one or the other).

So much cultural borrowing and lending, back and forth, over so many years. And still, so many pompously stupid letters to the editor about how Maori should forthwith desist from using modern technology, blah blah blah, with not a thought to how many benefits -- cultural, economic, social, international -- pakeha derive from our centuries of access to a distinctly local cultural well of imagery, idea, ceremony, knowledge, history, drama, language, humour, family. We’re so quick to brandish our bi-multi-cultural Brand New Zealand abroad, but so damn slow to show some respect at home. What gives?

Ten years ago. Sitting outside a trattoria in Florence, just down the street from the childhood home of Dante’s wife. It was August, the season when Italians flee for the coast and tourists hit town, so most of us were from somewhere else. Vino de tavola, prosciutto e melone, fifteenth century buildings, lovely warm evening. All of a sudden, a large and boisterous group of youths rounded the corner, stumbled drunkenly into formation, and performed a haka.

Not just a haka, of course, the haka; Te Rauparaha’s famous victory number, which commemorates the time his wife hid him in a kumara pit and (gasp) stood over the top of his head. She was strategically violating tapu, or invoking noa, as a cunning way to put his pursuers off the scent; for what proud chief would lower himself thus? (I guess that’s what they mean by “snatched from the jaws of death.”) By some twisty route, this haka has become not just the standard rugby warm-up, but the trick that drunken New Zealanders perform when feeling a bit show-offy or homesick.

I doubt that all of the Tiki Tour kids on that warm night in Florence had a sense of the meaning of the words or the history of the thing. There were a couple of seasoned performers in the front row, where I’m pretty sure I caught a glimpse of some authentic pukana. But the rest of the rabble was simply going through the motions until they made it safely to the jumpy bit at the end. Still, it impressed the hell out of the elderly English couple at the next table. “Blimey. Was that really the All Blacks?” they asked each other.

Shya, right. But for me it was a reminder that you can take the pakeha out of Aotearoa, but you can’t take the Aotearoa out of the pakeha (even when you wish you could, to save you from embarrassment in a ristorante). In fact, it’s precisely when you take the pakeha out of Aotearoa that they come over most misty about absolutely anything vaguely tangata whenua and discover their deep attachment, and emotional debt, to the idea of indigeneity.

I once sat around a dinner table in Providence with half a dozen other expats, all of us Pakeha (with a big P), and all but one of us wearing a chunk of pounamu or carved bone around our necks. The other one explained how, at her farewell do the night before heading off for the northern hemisphere, her parents announced they’d gotten her “something special to keep you warm while you’re away” – and then gave her a set of thermal undies instead of the longed-for wearable token of home.

She told it for laughs, but her disappointment was palpable, and the sense of entitlement and rightfulness was strong. Not content with just assimilating land and power, we swipe symbols too. Now that’s bicultural. But how will people know you’re a New Zealander -– how will you know you’re one -- if you don’t have a socking great bone-carving round your neck, or a nifty kete on your back? You get the feeling the state should supply them along with your passport, which, incidentally, does come with a handily bilingual front page and a natty kowhaiwhai pattern, useful for flashing about in those moments when you want to really underline that you’re not just another honky from who knows where, but a special one from special old New Zealand.

It’s a double-edged thing, this being white. Writing in the Herald, the always smart and thoughtful Tapu Misa talks about what in the US would be called white privilege, the freedom of the majority to imagine themselves neutral. Or, more specifically, to not imagine themselves anything at all, to live free of limited expectations. The only people who can say "But surely, we’re all just New Zealanders" are those who’ve never been seen as anything but. Who’ve never been asked "S’pose you got in on one of those iwi scholarships, then?" or "So, how long have you been here?” or "Gosh, your English is good!"

But once you’re out in the big wide world, that very unremarkableness can be disorienting, can feel strangely disabling. The Kiwi accent will usually only get you as far as "So, are you from South Africa or Australia?" which isn’t really very far at all. So how do you establish your cultural bona fides without flaunting a bit of Maoritanga?

One thing you can do is make sure to mention New Zealand every other sentence, which worked quite well for a lot of people at the Oscars this year. I spent the whole week afterwards accepting proxy congratulations from nice Americans. "You must be so proud! What a great night for your country! Well done you!"

Which was odd, because about half way through the broadcast, I was getting a bit bored with the whole sheepish, unbrushed, unwashed, golly gosh, cheers thanks, wow, little old New Zealand deal. [Note to Russell: maybe this is "the inevitable jaded, get-over-it commentary" you feared was coming?]. It just didn’t translate all that well. So, like Shane Jones, I yearned for Keisha to win her category so that there’d at least be a bit of te reo, a waiata, a moment of ceremony (and, to be honest, a bit of colour; the final camera pan over the assembled winners revealed it to be the whitest Oscars in a long while). What was lacking was -- and I realize this sounds ridiculous in the context of what amounts to a glitzy and superficial wankfest -- mana.

Now, I know that even if you’ve got a brilliant speech memorized, it’s one thing to practice it in front of the bathroom mirror beforehand (in between bouts of nervous vomiting) and another to deliver it with perfect sang froid when hauled up onto the stage, dazed and bemused, gripping the golden dildo for dear life and suddenly unable to hear yourself think over the blood pounding in your ears.

And I know there was a 90 second speaking limit (of which Annie Lennox swiped 85, thus forcing Fran Walsh to elbow her way back to the microphone to dedicate her award to Cameron Duncan), and a five second delay, which all helped to constrain any voluptuous outpourings of gratitude and astonishment. But I wanted someone, anyone, to take the microphone, take a deep breath, and say a little something about WHY this was such a big deal. Something like:

"Kia ora koutou katoa. Greetings to you all. I’m thrilled to accept this award, on behalf of my team, in recognition for the work we put into the film. We’re very proud to be standing here. But this is about more than the trilogy. New Zealand is a small country, and you know we’ve always been a good backdrop, happy to stand in for anything from 19th century Japan to 1950s Massachusetts. By insisting that these films be made not just on location but in the location, our brave director has changed the cultural landscape..." etc.

It looks a bit dicky written down, and it probably would have sounded dicky as well. That’s the problem with throbbing nationalist rhetoric; just as we giggle every time an American president invokes God or makes a claim about being the world’s greatest democracy, Americans go “huh?” every time we use a phrase like “our creative economy,” which sounds a little too much like “creative accounting.” I guess one man’s jingoism is another’s incomprehensible jargon. It just doesn’t necessarily translate.

Describing the opening of the "Paradise Now?" exhibition in NYC last month, John Daly-Peoples makes a similar point.
For the record, the show is an important one and has been well received, but Daly-Peoples offers a refreshing alternative to the puffery and self-congratulation that tend to accompany such events. More than once, at New Zealand presentations abroad, I’ve winced at the sheer dorkiness on display, the peculiar combination of cringing self-effacement and blurting boastfulness, and it sounds like there was a bit of the usual going on here too.

What most caught my eye here, though, was the description of how the powhiri played – or rather, didn’t play -- to an audience unfamiliar with its protocols. Not only did people not get it, they didn’t necessarily get that there was anything to get:

The American audience didn't know what was going on. Straining to see what was happening, one local concluded that "it must be a call to prayers," while another remarked, "I think the guy with the stick has gone into a trance," and another remarked of the women, "They must be some sort of vestal virgins."

Had I been there, I’d have been hard put not to turn to one of the overly chatty spectators and say “Yo, have some respect!” And this, in turn, made me ponder how reverent, and defensive, even the most disgruntled pakeha talkback caller would likely be in the face of such willful ignorance, whether or not they themselves understood the words or gave a toss about the powhiri or the exhibition or the New York art world or whatever.

It’s like the way you can bitch and moan about your annoying family all you like, but the minute someone else weighs in, you spring to the defence of your beloved tribe.

I bet the lads who interrupted my dinner in Florence en route to thirty European capitals in thirty days would have had something very stroppy to say to anyone who’d belittled or interrupted their half-arsed, hamfisted, heartfelt haka in the piazza. Somewhere under the bravado and the bone-carvings is a fellow-feeling, a mix of pride and gratitude and identification, that is not easily analysed or dismissed. It’s not exactly a conscious apology for two hundred years of colonial dicking around and disingenuous "who me?" dithering over the appropriate response -- but in its own way, maybe it’s a start.

The Berlin Wall of marriage started crumbling on the weekend of Valentine’s Day in San Francisco, and three weeks later happy couples are still pouring through it, queuing up to be pronounced “partners for life.” Now the small town of New Paltz, NY has followed suit. This is not much I-do about nothing, it’s a velvet revolution, a dignified and joyful antithesis to Britney Spears’ drunken kiss-and-run travesty. And it’s lovely.

Feel moved to join in, but unable to hop on a plane? You can send flowers if you like – just a click away. Or just look upon the dozens of photos of happy couples and read their stories and try not to shed a mother-of-the-bride tear or two.

Here’s how Joan Walsh described it in Salon:

You can't imagine what it's like from a distance. Straight or gay, visitors get teary when they walk inside City Hall, where the meaning of what [Mayor Gavin] Newsom did is huge and palpable. It's always struck me as vaguely homophobic, the insistence on how "normal" these couples are, but that really is what hits you in person. Sure, there are drag queens in the line waiting for marriage licenses, and plenty of old-fashioned flannel-shirted lesbians. But there are also 50-something men in bad suits and women in Prada; there are women in wheelchairs and interracial couples; and there are children everywhere, kids doing homework sitting on the floor as they wait for their parents' turn to get married. These are families already, and once you see them you know: There's really no going back.

Meanwhile, George W. Bush plans to amend the Constitution – the document that undertakes, among other things, “to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity” – with a Pythonesque rider: “Rule Number One? No Poofters.”

Even though there’s little chance it will get through before the election, and there are suggestions that Bush is merely paying lip-service to his most radically Biblical supporters, this is a huge deal. You don’t tinker with the Constitution lightly. Constitutional amendments generally limit the power of government – term limits for presidents, the right to due process, freedom from unlawful search and seizure, that sort of thing. Or, they extend freedom to the people – speech and religion for starters, and then try Amendment 13, the abolition of slavery, or 19, women’s suffrage, not to mention the good old second amendment freedom to carry guns, lots of guns. Limiting personal freedom in the Constitution is not generally a winner: Prohibition, added to the Constitution in 1919, was sheepishly repealed 24 years later.

The last time a marriage-related Constitutional amendment was attempted was in 1912, by a fellow with the ripely Dickensian name of Seaborn Roddenberry. Interracial marriage was his target, and although his language was ghastly and inflammatory, Roddenberry was simply reflecting common opinion. As Nicholas Kristof pointed out in the NY Times, history has (mostly) made a mockery of Roddenberry's fears:

In the last half-century, there has been a stunning change in racial attitudes. All but nine states banned interracial marriages at one time, and in 1958, a poll found that 96 percent of whites disapproved of marriages between blacks and whites. Yet in 1997, 77 percent approved.

Thankfully, despite being in line with the spirit of its time, Roddenberry’s amendment - which would have criminalized one of the greatest things about this country, and, incidentally, a number of Busytot’s playmates – didn’t get through. And Bush’s one probably won’t make it into law either, which is also good news for the play-group.

Lurking behind the opposition to life-partners of the same sex legally solemnizing their relationships is a huge anxiety about what counts as a family. For a moment there, even the war against terror seemed to wilt in the shadow of this massive new alleged threat to what Bush weirdly calls “the oldest human institution” (what, as opposed to the oldest profession?).

Well, yes. So old an instutition is it, that even in the short history of this country it has had many different forms - from the limited and ad hoc versions available to slaves, to the sapphically respectable de facto Boston marriages of the nineteenth century, to the Clintons' apparent "don't ask, don't tell" arrangement, to a government-prescribed band-aid for poverty, to the 50/50 gamble that it generally constitutes for Americans today.

Anyone who believes that it has always and everywhere been the full Biblical monty should check this handy list. And anyone who insists that marriage be reserved wholly for procreation and vice-versa should start performing citizens’ arrests on their happily married childless neighbours, or perhaps go tell it to the late Strom Thurmond's long-denied out-of-wedlock daughter, or the various descendants of "founding father" Thomas Jefferson. Ya know?

The move to elevate homophobia to the status of national writ is shaping up to be a big election issue, but it’s producing strange bedfellows and some very twisty-turny politics. Let’s not forget that it was that paragon of marital virtue Bill Clinton who signed into law the offensively named Defense of Marriage Act. Still, Bush’s constitutional follow-up has Log Cabin Republicans and long-time right voters like Andrew Sullivan hopping mad (although oddly enough, Dick Cheney’s lesbian activist daughter, Mary, is missing in action - perhaps she’s joined the National Guard?).

On the other side, Democratic nominee-presumptive John Kerry famously voted against the Defense of Marriage Act, and happens to be senator for the state whose Supreme Court last month saw no good reason to deny marriage to same sex couples, and ruled out the notion of separate civil unions using the language of racial desegregation: "the history of our nation has demonstrated that separate is seldom, if ever, equal." (Mind you, Kerry also said he was not necessarily opposed to a marriage amendment to the Massachusetts state constitution -- trying to have it both ways, perhaps?). Rest assured that, regardless, the Bush re-election machine is working hastily to tag Kerry as hopelessly gay-friendly (in their book, a bad thing).

And there’s nowhere near unanimity in what you might call the liberal electorate at large, either. There’s a solid and longstanding body of critique about why gay people would want to buy into what activist Michael Warner calls the “selective legitimacy” of marriage, which sanctifies those inside the tent and stigmatizes those on the outside. On a somewhat similar note, as a letter-writer to the NY Times pointed out, the wishy-washy compromise solution of allowing states to create a separate but not quite equal category of civil union will provide a very useful alternative for all the straight couples who don’t buy the whole horse and carriage deal, thus arguably "weakening" the institution of marriage further. And Lisa Duggan, in The Nation, argues perceptively that gay marriage may indeed be the first step on a slippery slope -- towards detaching all adult legal and social privileges from marital status altogether, which is in some senses an ideal proposition.

And meanwhile, the weddings go on. Two women who have lived together happily for fifty years were the first through the gates, and this week Rosie O’Donnell married the other mother of her four kids. Although there is powerful symbolism here, it’s not just about the piece of paper: it’s the 1049 individual legal benefits and protections that go with it. Benefits that are utterly taken for granted by those who’ve never been denied them. Like being able to visit your partner in the hospital, no questions asked. Like not having to fork out an extra couple of hundred dollars a month for health insurance because you don’t count as a spouse. Like being recognized as your child’s parent, or your deceased partner’s heir. Like being able to immigrate as a family.

It’s that last one that I was after when my partner and I entered into a marriage of (in)convenience about eight years ago. We’d always intended to be informally shacked up, forever, in that relaxed, companionable, write your own contract, New Zealandy quasi-Scandinavian kind of way. There we were, sitting cross-legged on the moral high ground, insisting we wouldn’t wed until the institution was open to anyone who wanted the legal protection of marriage, and even then, maybe not.

But things look different when you’re contemplating the dismal prospect of living on different continents for the foreseeable future, with the occasional conjugal visit at the discretion of the border police. We fought the law, and the law won. We flashed our heterosexual privilege cards and gained the right to continue our intentions towards each other in person, not intermittently or telephonically.

If you’re a straight couple, it’s shockingly easy to get married in this country. You really don’t need much, just a couple of days, a couple of friends, and some cash. And the requisite penis and vagina, one of each. Strangely, nobody asked for evidence of this unspoken qualification -- I guess they trusted our witnesses -- and I’m still waiting for the instructions on what we were meant to do with them once we were fully licensed. It certainly didn’t say on the wedding certificate (issued by the New York State Department of Health) that we had to go forth and multiply. Although once we did, I have to say our tax returns started looking a lot healthier.

So, yes, shockingly easy. We located City Hall, presented ourselves at the counter handily labeled “Licenses: Marriage, Dogs, Guns, Etc,” showed some photo ID, and the clerk filled in the form (interestingly, one keystroke fills in the same residential address for both participants, which struck me as a very modern feature). The license costs you around twenty-five bucks, and there’s a twenty-four hour waiting period, just so you can cool off a bit. Then all you have to do is round up a celebrant – we picked the first one on the list – and a pair of witnesses.

The witnesses can be anybody as long as they’re adults and can sign their name on the form. It doesn’t even matter if they’re godless foreigners. So we asked our bestest friends, another New Zealand couple who’d been living in sin about as long as we had, if they’d vouch for us. They did us proud. They scrubbed up nicely, stood up to be counted, only joshed us a little bit about caving in to respectability, and then produced an impromptu wedding cake in the form of a one-egg chocolate sponge from the Edmonds book, with cream and strawberries. That’s friendship.

Actually, it was our wedding witnesses who were the first to get themselves knocked up. Now they’re one child ahead of us, and we still owe many of our good child-rearing techniques and a fair amount of baby gear to them. They got jobs and moved to Canada, and although we miss them terribly it’s probably just as well that they’re living in a country where their two-parent, two-child family is recognized as a family. Each of them is the biological mum of one daughter and has (under current New Zealand law, which is being revised but bloody slowly) only guardianship papers for the other, which poses certain problems for immigration. Although in Canada, as Michelle put it, “nobody blinked an eye -- on this side of the border we're legally a family.”

Exactly. "These are families already," in Joan Walsh's words. Michelle's partner Anne expands eloquently on that thought: “The real fear motivating the homophobic reaction to gay marriage is the constitution of families that don't fit into the heteronormative model. Problem for them is that we are already here -- and there have always been lots of families that, in various ways, have never fitted into that model.” (And concomitantly plenty, that by virtue of consisting of a man and a woman, have passed as entirely normal).

Here's the thing. Far from threatening our marriage, Anne and Michelle aided and abetted it, despite being currently barred from either taking up or refusing the rights of marriage for themselves and their children. Our lovely accidental bridesmaids threw us a party. And if they or anyone in their position ever wished some day to buy into the institution too, I would want nothing more than to meet them in San Francisco or Toronto or New Paltz -- or Auckland -- and do the same for them, right down to the one-egg Edmonds chocolate cake. Busytot can help his little cuzzies carry the flowers and eat the cake.

Look, I know I'm preaching to the choir here, but if anyone here knows any good reason why these two people should not (if they want to) be wed, then dammit, I haven’t heard it yet.

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A totally unrelated bonus link for those of you who read all the way to the end: if for whatever reason you're planning on seeing The Passion of the Christ, you'll be needing this incredibly handy guide to useful Aramaic phrases (from the Guardian).

The first thing you do when you leave the city is buy a car. It took us a couple of weeks to find the right one -- and to persuade Busytot that, alas, not all Volkswagens are Beetles -- but we’ve now officially joined the age of the combustion engine and the station-wagon driving classes at a single stroke.

The salesman was a sweetie, and hilariously young: he allowed as to how he was nearly born in the back seat of a 1981 sports car and had, as a consequence, been a car nut ever since. Demonstrating the grunty eight-speaker stereo (cassette player included!), he tuned us in to a classic hits station playing big bad matey-eighties hits by Huey Lewis, Bon Jovi and their smooth-chested guitar-crotched confreres. "Oh man, I love this old stuff!" he enthused, as Busytot's dad suffered a series of terrifying 1ZH flashbacks in the back seat.

Great as it is to be able to zip around to the mega-ultra-superstores, to buy things in bulk (and bulky things), it is surprising how much you can do here locally and on foot. Especially in the neighbourhood we’ve fetched up in, which is full of little family-run corner shops. Run by Italian families, Greek families, Portuguese families, Korean families, Indian families, they feature everything from biscotti to kim chee and authentic NYC bagels.

Busytot is adjusting pretty quickly to the slower pace of small-town life. The stroller is in hiding while I attempt to get him more used to, as the poet Rex Fairburn put it, "walking on my feet." He walks on his feet all right, at the approximate speed of an elderly snail, so I’m getting to know the neighbourhood in what you might call excruciating detail. It took us 45 minutes to get to Lulu's café the other day – a destination about 50 yards from the front door – but en route, we met a cat, three old ladies and two friendly students.

We also completed some painstaking and important experiments into the magical melting powers of mud puddles when the air temperature hovers slightly above freezing. Conclusions: snow melts, as does ice; mittens and socks, on the other hand, don’t. It's not rocket science, but our tests were thorough, repeatable, and the results were definitive. (Precisely for those reasons, we're not expecting a call from the Bush administration any time soon. They seem to prefer their science docile and creative, if not creationist.)

How far away can the spring thaw be? A huge snowfall the week we arrived turned quickly into sheets of ice, and then briefly the other day into mud, but more subzero weather is on the way again. The other weekend, we made a quick foray to the nearest playground, which is in the lovely East Rock Park. The jungle gym itself was largely thawed out, but the ground below was a mix of hard-packed snow and ice puddles. All over the park were huge shallow sheets of groaning, creaking pack-ice, and off in the distance boys played ice-hockey on what was either a deliberate or impromptu rink in a particularly large hollow.

It was two weeks since Busytot last saw a slide, which is about a year in toddler time. So he went bonkers on the play equipment while his father and I quietly froze to death, cracking Scott of the Antarctic jokes that stopped being funny at about the point I ceased to have any feeling in my fingers, which was, in fact, about halfway into the first joke. If we’d had a huskie on hand, I would have eaten it raw, if only to warm up my mouth for a brief second.

We finally dragged the boy, kicking and of course screaming, away from the playground, only to add injury to insult when his Dad slipped on the ice while holding him, and both of them landed bottom first with a loud crunch. Ah, the fresh air, the freedom, the healthiness of small town life!

On the other hand, there is something regally satisfying about stomping up the stairs onto your front porch, and coming into a warm house, pausing only to decide which of several rooms you might sit down in to drink your warming cup of cocoa. All that space.

And all that cold weather outside, all those iced-over playgrounds. The temporary solution to the conundrum: a ten dollar space hopper, and full rein to leap off any surface in the house onto the impossibly plush carpet installed by the landlady to cushion the falls of the previous resident, her very elderly mother. It’s like a trampoline underfoot, and hopefully it will cushion us through to the real spring thaw, whenever that finally comes.

I haven't been back to the city yet, but here's what I miss: the corners. The average Manhattan corner is a conjunction of lines and forces as potent as any that allegedly converge on, say, Stonehenge. I'm not referring to the unearthed electrical wires, which are another, much scarier, story in the news lately. Rather, I mean the geomancy of the grid.

The shape of a city turns a simple walk into not just an expedition, but a transformation. Slicing my way through the pedestrian traffic in Tokyo, I used to imagine that I was a fish, one of those mouthy, swishy, muscly koi you see in the ponds at temples and in parks. They swerve around each other, a tangle of orange and white and black, carefully maintaining their own personal space, and miraculously no fish ever bumps into another.

New York, with its sheer angularity, feels different. You become a chess-piece, an implacable rook proceeding uninterrupted down one of the broad north-south avenues, surfing the light-changes, getting where you need to go in a nice straight line. Or you're a knight, zig-zagging at the last minute into or out of a side-street. Or you can slide down Broadway through midtown, cutting across the other avenues at an angle as rakish as a bishop.

Whether you're walking north-south or west-east, each intersection is a square-dance, in which you do-si-do with as random an assortment of partners as you’ll find anywhere, then swing yourself along to the next (or pause for a moment to curtsey and bow: stories of new lovers or old friends who meet while waiting for the lights to change are a sweet New York cliché). An irregular intersection, like Straus Park at 107th St, feels like a jazz step, a syncopation that takes a block or two to reintegrate into the rhythm of your walk.

And each corner offers a multiple choice list of vistas in four directions: a, b, c, d, or, if you spin around quickly, all of the above. Emerging from a side street, you encounter the broad avenue to left and right, offering you views uptown and down, as well an instant lesson in perspective. Who needs Brunelleschi? There’s your vanishing point, right there. Or, glancing off the avenue into a cross-street, you find a shaded lane, a glimpse of the park or the river, or as we used to every day, the façade of the world’s biggest cathedral.

Even the side streets sometimes have side streets, like the elegant, cobbled Washington Mews, near Washington Square Park, or the curious Pomander Walk, behind Symphony Space between 94th and 95th Sts, a tiny street of half-timbered houses with window-boxes full of flowers. It’s like a stage set. Funnily enough, it was, in fact, inspired by a stage set.

On that note, I also miss the theatricality of city life, the way you leave the apartment and assume a role for the day, thus achieving anonymity and personality in a single stroke. What’s your real name? Who cares? You’re a roving pair of eyes looking for an in, or an out. It’s like a massive game of theatresports: someone will throw you a line or a situation, and you jump in, wait your turn, or sit it out and watch. There’s plenty of action on the boulevards, but it’s often the side streets that often provide the strangest moments.

For example:

One of Busytot’s favourite NYC books is the odd How Little Lori Visited Times Square, written by Amos Vogel and illustrated by that disturbing genius Maurice Sendak. It’s the story of a little boy who suddenly realizes he’s never been to Times Square, and his many, futile efforts to get there. The subway drops him off at South Ferry. The train takes him to his uncle’s place in Queens. The taxi driver kicks him out because he doesn’t have the fare. A horse and carriage only gets him as far as Central Park. Finally, he meets a friendly turtle who -- speaking veeeery slowly, with only two words to a page -- offers him a ride.

Not to give the ending away, but the book wraps up with a line that is both funny and creepy: “And that was four months ago, and nobody has seen them since...” (I confess I sometimes change it to “And they’re still not there yet,” which is marginally more reassuring to the parental soul).

Anyway, just before we left the city I realized that Busytot hadn’t actually been to Times Square for a long long time, certainly not recently enough to have a feel for what the mystery destination in the book might actually be. Although I can’t help thinking that my little breastfed toddler would have appreciated the topless ladies of the pre-Giuliani Times Square more than the cleaned up Toys R Us Disneyfied version, it seemed a sin to merely read about it without making a field trip, especially when it was just a single train ride away.

So we cleverly arranged to visit Times Square en route to meet his Dad at Grand Central Station (as seen in Maira Kalman's busy, fizzy Next Stop Grand Central), thus making for a double-header book-related pilgrimage. We came up out of the subway at 42nd St to the expected riot of brilliant lights, running news tickers, flickering neon and eddying whorls of thrilled and appalled tourists. "Voila!" I said. "Times Square!" And then we looked down a side street and saw a wailing, flashing convocation of fire engines. Hey, no contest.

We stood with the crowd for half an hour, as rescue vehicles came and went, and a portly, long-suffering cop herded the hovering rubberneckers (us) across the street like a flock of unruly sheep. Emergency workers hauled a buzzsaw up a ladder and cut a hole in wooden sheeting. Someone, it transpired, had fallen from a nearby building and was stuck behind the scaffolding. Unaware of the human drama, Busytot was mightily impressed with the equipment, although I explained to him that it was all in the service of rescuing a person. Rumour buzzed up and down the street, New Yorkers called each other on cellphones, and sidewalk superintendents of one stripe or another kept up a running commentary on the action.

Then a red double-decker tour bus rounded the corner (the same line that loops up past the Cathedral a dozen or more times a day). Like a synchronized swimming team, the camera-wielding tourists turned, as one, from the glitzy gleam of Times Square proper to the unreadable spectacle on 42nd St, elbowing each other out of the way, pointing and commenting and recording it all for posterity.

“Wouldja lookit that,” came a snicker from someone at my elbow. “Tourists.” Like we weren’t? But of course we weren’t. We were just citizens doing our duty, daily extras in the film of a day in the life of New York, spear carriers in the vast metropolitan opera, happy to turn up, turn a corner, and stand on our marks.

Now, whenever we read the Little Lori book, Busytot notes to himself, “Guys cut a hole in the wall. Rescue a person. That what Time Square.” After our gruesomely fun-filled outing, he has his own native memory of a legendary spot. Not quite “Remember when they had topless gals and peep shows for a quarter and you could get a sandwich and a coffee after at the automat?” -- but close enough.

Moving house is a lot like childbirth, and I say that as someone who enjoyed the latter about as much as it’s possible to. They're both painful and grueling processes, no matter how much you reassure yourself that thousands of others have survived, many of them without the aid of drugs. There is no way out but through. And after all the anticipation and waiting, and the messy, animal grunting and puffing, suddenly you are delivered to the delirious chaos of your new life, and it feels like you never were anywhere else.

Of course, there are also ways in which moving is not at all like labour. This time it sure as hell wasn’t me doing the pushing. It took a great deal longer than nine hours, and the clean-up is taking even longer. And the movers who midwifed our transition from NYC to New Haven were a dubious crew, exuding none of the calm professionalism of the sage women who attended Busytot’s arrival. In fact, their first words inspired the opposite of confidence: “[Expletive] [deity],” their wiry moustachioed leader said, “we won’t get this done in a day.”

And they didn’t. Bugger. Thank goodness for our friends two buildings down, and their spare beds. Who knew we had so much stuff? The crew wasn’t helped by the narrowness of our street, which necessitated moving the truck a dozen times or so. Temporarily homeless, Busytot and I roamed the streets, saying farewell to our favourite cathedral (St John the Divine), our favourite bakery (Silver Moon), our favourite thrift shop (Valley Restoration), and our favourite child-friendly restaurant (La Rosita, whose daytime staff are as surly and standoffish as the evening people are warm and welcoming).

We walked down Broadway and back up Amsterdam, drinking in the people, the noises, the faces, the clothes, the vehicles, the sudden swirls of pigeons taking flight, the neat zigzag of the fire escapes, the bodegas, the shoe repair places (so much shoe leather is expended in a city day; I had my favourite pair resoled four times while living here), the fish shop where live crabs scrabble about in a basket, the brightly lit two-chair barbershop with the handwritten sign on the door, “por favor, toquer el timbre,” although the place is so tiny there’s no need to ring the bell, as they’d have to be blind to miss you standing at the door.

On our way back to check out progress, we bumped into one of the building guys, Angel, whom Busytot regards as his personal entertainer. Angel does a nice line in birdcalls, which he says he and his brothers perfected when growing up in Puerto Rico, catching birds in the mountains. When we told him we were leaving the city, he quipped “Oh well then, I see you in New Heaven, since I am an Angel – you get it?” Then we made our sad farewell to David, the super-friendly fix-it guy who fixes everything in the building. He was the one who first taught Busytot how to make a snowball (or snaw-baahl, as it came out in his lovely Jamaican accent).

Everything was tinged with the romantic melancholy of imminent departure. I like it when the weather comes to the party -- I’m always looking for auspicious meteorological omens, external correlatives for the mood of the moment. The day before the movers arrived, as Busytot’s Dad and I walked home from a hastily snatched afternoon coffee-date on Columbus Ave, a dark front of snow clouds quickly slid up and over the blue sky like a lid over an eye. It began to snow, great fluffy sparkling wads of it, as we climbed up 110th St past the bare trees of Morningside Park and the placid gothic haunches of the Cathedral. And then it stopped - a special effect switched off once the scene had been captured - and the sky was blue again.

By Saturday afternoon, only a day later than promised, the apartment was empty. Time for one last walk-through. The sun was streaming in, as it had been when we first saw it. Then, we lay the fat little four month old baby on a blanket on the floor, to enjoy the sun while we measured the rooms and marveled at our spectacular luck in being granted such a big sunny space by the fickle gods of the Columbia housing office. Now, the same little lad strode through the place, musing aloud “It so empty! No carpet. That pretty strange... What guys do? They put stuff on moving truck. That what they do....”

Driving north out of the city, we zipped up past the frozen Hudson (“A tug boat!” came the jubilant cry from the boat-spotter in the back seat) and through the Bronx, past the towers of the housing projects, and the vast parking lot for school buses. The city disappeared behind us as the sun set, and soon we were among the red-brick chimneys, steeples, and gabled roofs of small New England towns. Exit signs indicated a more rural history: Saw Mill Rd, Gun Hill Rd.

And every twenty miles or so, a vast, spectacularly ugly mall, surrounded by half-empty parking lots, and featuring chain stores with unappealing names (who would buy a dress from a Dress Barn? A fashion conscious horse?). Also, the ubiquitous highway billboards, touting traffic accident lawyers, the Reliable Liquor Shoppe, and the oxymoronic “Super Duper Weenie,” which I took to be a kind of hot-dog, but who knows?

One city behind us, another in front of us. The mad, blank scramble of moving is book-ended in my mind by two conversations overheard in the space of a week, one archetypically big-city and the other quintessentially small-town:

The Morningside Heights branch of the New York Public Library. I’m returning the last pile of library books. A man comes in, hovers urgently, then asks the librarian, in a thick accent that is perhaps Lebanese or Egyptian, “Statue of Liberty?” He pronounces it with the same liquid consonants and extra syllables Busytot gives it, so it sounds like “Statue of Delivery.”

“You want books about the Statue of Liberty?” asks the librarian, a young woman with impeccable braids and over the top lipliner.

“No,” says the man, “Where is? Statue of Delivery? I come from New Jersey,” he gropes for words, “through... tunnel. I want to see Statue but I not find it.”

It’s a New York moment. The librarian and I exchange glances and a grin. Lady Liberty is six or seven miles to the south, on an island, reached only by ferry. He’s a long, long way from his goal. Did he imagine, as I once did, that the famous torchbearer stands perhaps on a handy plinth in the middle of Central Park, or maybe lords it over Times Square (which is of course not square) like Nelson on his column?

We explain that he can take the train, making sure to stay in one the first four cars so he can get off at South Ferry. It turns out he is driving, so we advise him to follow Broadway as far south as he can, but beyond that we’re stumped. As I set off to take care of a long list of chores, the librarian is sending him upstairs to get a map from the reference section.

Did he get to where he wanted to go? Who can say? It’s just another one of those mysterious and unfinished big city stories, a temporary vivid encounter with someone else and their passions. You soak it up, hurry off, turn a corner, and write the ending yourself later – if you even manage to remember it for more than a block, because there’s always something else to see around the next corner, and so much to do, and another city story or ten before bedtime.

A week later, in New Haven. We’re in the Orange St Market, the corner store a block from our new house, stocking up on cherry tomatoes, cottage cheese, salami and other toddler favourites. The phone rings, and the brusque guy behind the register picks it up. “Uh-huh? Who? Yeah, she’s still here. OK. OK, I’ll tell her.”

He puts his hand over the phone and hollers “Louise? Your momma says to buy some bananas.”

I turn, expecting to see a little girl with a shopping list, but then a delicate-looking lady in her sixties comes round the corner with a basket, on top of which is a fine bunch of bananas. “You tell her I’m one step ahead of her,” she smiles at the gruff checkout guy.

Small town, short story, happy ending.