A New York Window

My room is, was, so tiny...just big enough for a bed...just big enough for a desk, just big enough. But I have windows. I’m just learning the importance of windows.

I wondered how it was that I decided to come to a school that’s got 19 girls for every guy. How will I find Mr. Right in Ms. Rightville? Sometimes I see beautiful men…most are on the street, many have their arms around other beautiful people. And I walk by thinking how beautiful that is.

But I’ve seen this guy around my building here and there and I thought, wow, there is a beautiful man. A few weeks later, I saw him coming off the elevator as I went in—he was with a girl and they walked down the hall towards his mysterious apartment. As the elevator doors hesitated to close, I watched their backs walk away together and I sank against the elevator walls feeling defeated. She won, I thought, as the doors finally closed.

Then I saw him again, saying really nice things to the security guy at the front desk of our building, but I can’t remember his words. I was fumbling in my purse, trying to find my ID so I could scan in and attempting to listen to a friend nearby who was talking to me. But I was listening to the beautiful man who lived in my building conversing with the security guard. I started to stare as my hands dug in my purse. He saw me looking at him and my face said everything as our eyes met. I took them away as soon as it happened, knowing they said too much, threw them into the depths of my purse and hurriedly grabbed my ID card so I could rush to loneliness.

A week later I went downstairs to get my mail and he was standing in the path of the mailroom. I immediately tensed up but tried to keep my composure. He saw me and smiled. I gave him a grin, the best I could do under the intimidated pressure of being in the presence of a crush.

Back to my room…it’s so tiny but it has windows. I have two. One looks out onto a courtyard made of cement from 7 stories up. There are benches and chairs but really not that much is there. My other window faces other people’s windows. One is directly across from mine but the shades are almost always closed. A couple nights ago, while working on my computer, I paused from my studying and turned my head only to see a shirtless man standing in his room across the way. The window framed the bare chest and muscular back that paced the room. It was him! The beautiful boy I’d been seeing around and pining over all this time lived 20 feet away from me, our windows looked right into each other’s. I couldn’t believe the odds--in a 10 story apartment building with over 700 rooms and mostly girl tenants—my dream man lived directly across from me.

I watched him sit down at his computer in the humidity of the New York night. He ran his hands back and forth over his head thinking about what line to write next.

I couldn’t help myself from looking more. I grabbed a piece of paper, wanting so badly to reach out at that very moment, and wrote in large letters “H’ and “I”. I drew a smiley face and hung it up with a piece of tape against my window pain in the hopes he would look. I eventually went to sleep and the next morning I saw his blinds had closed, but his window was blank. The following day I checked off and on, for any signs of life, but only the blank, white sterile vinyl curtain looked back at me. Defeated, again.

I felt like an idiot and took down my unreciprocated “Hi! :)” sign. A few days later, I was in my kitchen and noticed something strange, a few windows down and across there was something on the glass. I ran to my room to get a better view and saw that he had written back! Taped onto his bedroom window was a sign that said, “Hi, sorry…” and on another window of his apartment following it was, “I’m late! :)”

I danced around my tiny room like a little girl on an endless ballroom floor.

I smiled all day.

Tonight I see his lights are on. I look up, without glasses and he is there standing, half hiding from the openness, peeking to see if I am looking, and I can’t see, but I see and he sees me… and I wave and he waves back and my heart is racing!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

New York Lived--Month One

New York is a sea of places and faces and concrete buildings and horns swirling around me. Whirling around, I wonder, where am I going? So I pick up the pace and jump on the train that people from the industrial revolution thought our generation might respect. Little did the progressive engineers and laborers know how their posterity would treat their modern marvel. Rats scurry from track to hole amidst discarded diapers and coca colas and unsustainability, dodging the incoming D.

No time to fix any of it because we’re moving…onto to the next stop where twenty different people help a blind man upstairs and out onto the street. Smells change just as quick as our steps and men with nothing to loose let every beautiful woman know she is. Fences are everywhere and the chain links rushing minutes closer and closer together until all you can squeeze is a blink.

But the old Puerto Rican man and his friends steal time to dance in the street on Saturday evening, reminding me to slow down—that the city, she breathes; And every tree that calls this place home has become my hero—and sometimes I inhale and notice—every bee and bird that hack the solid ground despite the buried earth that’s beneath; And every child who plays amongst the towering structures and curious strangers gives me reason to do the same. Their songs are the gentle melodies that flow like golden rivers of light that glow brighter than that square of time.

Love, Patiently

I went to creating my vision board…anyone who’s watched the secret knows.

And I cut out girls with hot jackets and sweet stockings cause’ I want clothes to look that good on me. I taped all the dream vacations I could imagine and the school I will one day own and my dog and the bike I will ride instead of a car and the legs I want onto the poster board. There were trips to Vietnam and the Grand Canyon, African Safaris and storms in the Caribbean; there were parts of me I never even knew I wanted that I plastered onto the paper to focus on and make real. But there was something missing from the magazines, and I searched through all those easy images that came in the mail and plastered the streets and the papers we hold. No lovers worth cutting out had been come upon. I had no love to place besides my ocean view and garden gazebo and spiritual bliss. There were no pictures of love in the magazines; spiritual bliss yes, funny to say, but love no. And it has left my vision board lacking in the one dream I would so like to relish in.

Queen of Hearts

Queen of hearts
sat alone on Valentines Day
surrounded by the vast gardens outside her royal palace
The roses are red
but have no odor
the opulent throne was her only comfort
as she looked out the majestic window
at the beautiful world she ordered
but was unable to share it with her other senses
The senses that told her not to be a queen

10,000 dens and servants made of silver
dust gold-lined bookshelves she barely peruses
luxurious vacant rooms lay colder beds
dressed in the finest linens
And each night she tucks herself beneath her royal blankets
and dreams of the day when she will be rich.

When I Dreamed I Was a Tree

I had this dream that I was a tree
who settled in the sand
and began to stretch my roots
deep between the shifting grains
round and wet and cool
and my tree-self looked out at the ocean
that would not let me stay
nor the elongating roots
could not keep me from floating away

Something I Learned from Carley Simon...

You are not worth a poem.

I feel like that girl who sang “You’re So Vain”

You know, Carley Simon

and that oldie about a guy

who obviously had a major ego problem

which most likely lead to the downfall of their relationship

which prompted the song that she claims isn’t about him

but we all know she’s singing about the vain guy

who’s listening and thinking, is she singing about me?

But he’s so vain

she answers his question, which she knew he would ask

me, me, me , me, me…

And she won’t even give him the satisfaction of knowing for sure

that the song had been written in his honor,

even if it was because he was such a dick

she won’t even give him that.

She rocks.

And I so want a pair of her kick ass sandals.

What's In a Name?

What’s in a name? I remember that being one of my favorite history assignments in school. Us 15 year-old-know-it-all’s were told to ask our parents or grandparents about our name. What did it mean, where did it come from, and how did it become ours.

I went on the crusade that night to find out. I asked my dad, giver of our family’s last name, Riddle. “Riddle was probably given to my great-great-grandfather by a slave holder,” he said. The thought was a new one to a tenth grader. Not only did slavery exist, but my family even has it in our name. Also, it was strange to me that “owners” of other human beings lent their names out to their “property”. I always wonder if the name before Riddle was anything close to Kinte. Taken from my relatives because it was in a language the keeper of my ancestors didn’t care to know…and all that is left is a Riddle.

My middle name came from the late, great actor, Alan Lad who played Shane in Shane. My dad loved the movie so much that the leading actor's name was transformed from Alan to Alana and shoved in the middle of his daughter. Great, I thought upon finding this out, just what every teenage girl wants to be named after, a cowboy. Probably a conservative too and from what I remember, he liked to shoot deer.

But what’s funny is that I am even searching for a meaning of myself through a name. Is there a part of Shane in me? Is there some gracious house-guest, nomadic traveler, bad-guy standin’-up-to, irresistibleness dripping from his pores kind of ways in Alana?

I realized there was much more to a name than I had known. My ego totally motivated me to do my homework that day I got the assignment in History class, but after my selfish quest, I became aware of the history that stood tall behind my name. I think I will have my students do the same.

Now, I realize how important it is to call people by their names. How important it is to remember people’s names. It’s not easy, but it is incredibly meaningful. Everyone wants to be known by name. That’s why graffiti artists put their names on walls, it’s why celebrities search for the lights, and it’s why the drinking gang went to Cheers.

Once, when in the Peace Corps, an over-zealous volunteer bragged to me how well he knew people. He emphasized the importance of saying hello to everyone he worked with, including the janitor and woman who stood only by the fax machine. Even more, how imperative it was to call them by name. It seemed like a valid insight, not that profound at the time he said it. Now I realize how true his words had been. You forget to say hello to the cleaning lady or those standing quietly on the sidelines from where you perform. But they are the very people who can ignite the winning chants from within of the Coliseum.

I knew an entire English class of 10^th grade students who committed mutiny because their teacher refused to address them by name; instead he insisted on referring to them as “you” when they were called upon. They put him through hell because of this disrespect and the poor guy ended up donating the class of disgruntled teens to me. It was the first time I had ever taught a class unsupervised, without assistance and without a plan. I admit, the kid’s Hungarian names were not easy to pronounce, let alone memorize. Still, if calling them by name was all they were asking for, I could at least do that.They gave me their loyalty for that simple gesture, as my beginner, mediocre lesson plans were not what won them over. All I had to do was know their names.

It’s all Sebastian had to do to save Fantasia in the Never Ending Story and it’s all it took to conquer Rumpelstiltskin.

Several years later, the practice of knowing a name continues. And it does take practice. There are so many names, so many ways to say them and so many faces. I fuck up all the time.

“So Allison, where did you get that purse from?”

“The name is Andrea. I specifically said I hate being called Allison.”

And quietly I’m thinking, I knew there was a reason Allison was stuck in my head.