I was born in New Jersey in 1947. That makes me 70. My father taught mathematics at Princeton University and its gracious campus, part Ivy League and part Southern society, was my backyard.
When I was twelve, my roots got tangled. My mother switched mathematician husbands and I moved with her to Santa Monica, California, while my two older brothers remained in Princeton.
Mathematicians, I should add, are my primal tribe. Four generations of mathematicians have made my family a legend at the annual meetings of the American Mathematical Society. I sat on Einstein’s lap when I was two, shared the dinner table with the ghosts of Fibonacci and Fermat, and drew out mathematicians who hadn’t succumbed to the Fish House punch at department cocktail parties at our house.
I began junior high in southern California a fish out of water. A month later, I had made two best friends and fallen in love—with the fragrant smell of pittosporum, Santa Monica’s wide beaches, the avocado and lemon trees out my bedroom window, the promise of eternal youth, making out on Mulholland Drive.
When I went east to college (Harvard was also a family tradition), I vowed to return to LA when I graduated. I didn’t. Instead, I helped start an alternative high school in an abandoned bowling alley in Providence, Rhode Island, a dying textile town, known as much for its ties to the Mafia as for Brown University.
For the next six years, I moved from the third floor of one three-decker to another in the city’s working-class neighborhoods. I deepened my voice for high school reform.
I married a graduate student in Italian Literature. After touring the Roman Hills on the back of a Vespa one summer, heady with wine and pasta, Tony and I fantasized about moving to Italy after we finished our degrees (his, a PhD; mine, an EdD). A year later we married, bought a tiny house on Providence’s East Side, found jobs, and started a family.
For the next 33 years, Rhode Island was our home. The city was enjoying a renaissance, the state’s bucolic coastline had been discovered, and culinary graduates from the Rhode Island School of Design were turning Providence into a foodies’ dream. While Tony spread his wings as a manufacturing executive and later a solar light entrepreneur, I took my campaign for progressive education nationwide.
Still, if you asked me where I was from, I would say that I was from California, but lived in Rhode Island, which hadn’t shaken its parochialism despite its high marks on Trip Advisor. When our boys, five years apart in age, headed off to college, they asked, in turn, “Why are you staying in Rhode Island? What keeps you there?”
After college, our older son, Carl, had headed to East Africa to work with local coffee farmers. For eight years we followed him with regular trips that included projects of our own. When he announced that he and his new Ethiopian wife, Kidist, were moving to New York City, we cheered. When their baby, Lucas, soon followed, and our younger son, Dan, accepted a postdoc in statistics at NYU, Tony and I had the answer to the question, “What kept us in Rhode Island?” In three frantic weeks, we readied our nine-room suburban house for sale, threw or gave away almost everything we owned, and rented a three room, fourth floor walkup in Brooklyn’s Park Slope.
Our friends thought we were crazy, though they admired our verve, and we were. Crazy about our grandchild and getting the chance to hang out with our boys and their significant others.
Crazy about everything that makes New York City unlike any other place in the world.
But there was also a lot of bad crazy. Topping Tony’s list of bad crazies was spending 45 minutes looking for parking within walking distance of our apartment, then trying to remember a few days later where you had parked, then making way for the weekly street sweepers who sentenced you to hunting for a spot again.
In our heads, Tony and I planned to give Brooklyn three years and then plot our next move, although we knew wrenching ourselves from Lucas and his parents would be heartbreaking. When Dan decided to leave his post doc at NYU and join the LA Dodgers as a sports analyst, Tony and I offered to drive his car across country to him and his Israeli wife Einor, a fresh Chinese art historian. That was in August 2017.
On a whim, Tony and I decided to fly from LA to the small southern Oregon town of Ashland (pop. 20,000, alt. 2,000), where my best friend from high school now lived. The day we arrived, smoke from a nearby forest fire engulfed Ashland and the temperature sizzled. But the town’s charm was unshakeable.
Nestled in the Rogue Valley, the mountains, forests, hiking trails, and vineyards surrounding Ashland invited vast belief. The population of retired hippies, theater goers at the almost year-round Oregon Shakespeare Festival, the artists and “through travelers” (a.k.a. backpackers) from the Pacific Coast Trail made the town one of a kind, though not racially diverse in the ways I had become accustomed to.
A week later, back in Brooklyn, I began searching Ashland real estate online. Within another few weeks, I had found a house that caught my eye and, quickly, my heart. With my friend Kathy as our on-the-ground scout, we made an offer sight unseen—an impulse Tony couldn’t quite believe—and three months later the house was ours.
At the end of March, we took everything we could fit in four suitcases along with our two cats, hugged our Brooklyn family tight, and boarded a plane for Oregon. Our new life, we swore, would be bicoastal. “You have to learn how to pronounce it,” our three-and-a-half-year-old grandson said. “It’s not Or-e-gone. It’s Ora-gun. Now say Brook-lyn.”
SUBSCRIBE
Add your name to the email “blast” announcing new posts. Please send your name and email address to: