STICKING AROUND AND SETTLING DOWN

Sticking around is an art form. It’s not hanging around, it’s sticking. Sticky.

Instead of a picture on a wall to walk past, sticking around goes with you. (I know you’re thinking of shoes and gum.)

When you start feeling like a piece of furniture, a decoration in your own life, do the sensible thing and take a look from a new angle.

Shift your point of view and nothing changes but you. And it’s enough. Easy, right?

My point of view shifted after I moved out of my parents’ house. Not the time I left for college and came back for the summer, but the time after.

At the end of my freshman summer I joined the Army instead of returning to college. I expected to live on an Army base.

Instead, I served my country in Philadelphia, South Philly. My housing options included living on the local Navy base and joining the Navy vs Marine fist fight, or getting my own place.

So I got to know more about a city I knew nothing about except the Liberty Bell, City Of Brotherly Love, stuff. I had three different apartments by the time it was over and felt like a grown up man.

Sticking Around Town Homers

How many places have you lived? What was it about the places that made you want to stay?

I didn’t stick in Ashland, Philadelphia, Eugene, Wilmington, or Brooklyn. Why? Because I liked North Bend better. I saw my hometown in the homers living where I lived and felt left out. It was all about me?

In Brooklyn, we worked together, took breaks together, played baseball and basketball on weekends together. More than once I felt like sticking around. Then this:

I was on seventh floor of One Battery Park Plaza, sitting in the cafeteria lunch room with floor to ceiling windows facing Hudson Bay. It was on the first row of buildings across from Battery Park. Look, the Statue of Liberty.

The homers I hung out with were chatting up the data entry models, the young women who did key punch dressed for the runway. Their real mission? Find a stockbroker husband.

My pals and I weren’t stock brokers. They had serious game though, and it showed. Everyone spoke Italian, so they were in the club.

One of the girls left the table and came over where I was busy drinking coffee and watching a Staten Island ferry dock. The paint had dried a long time ago, the grass was already grown.

I concentrated on the view.

If I was in the six o’clock position at the table, she took the three. We smiled. We’d smiled before from a distance. She smiled like Sophia Loren. Mine was more a frozen smile from being so close to the most beautiful woman in the world.

If you’ve ever been in a crowd and noticed a face unlike any other for just an instant, you know the feeling. Now she’s sitting right there like a song before its time.

You’re beautiful
You’re beautiful
You’re beautiful, it’s true
I saw your face in a crowded place
And I don’t know what to do
‘Cause I’ll never be with you

“You look lonely,” she said with a funny pout.

Lonely? I was twenty five years old and thousands of miles from anyone I knew. Maybe a little. But, these girls were untouchable. I’d been warned. They belonged to a network of beautiful women on Wall Street drawn to the power, the dream, the life.

And every man was drawn to them.

“Yes,” I said. “You saved me from falling out of the window. Thank you.”

We both looked out the window. She turned back and we looked into each others eyes, neither blinking.

“What do you see?” she asked.

I Saw The Future

Take another look at the top picture. The black box on the left is One Battery Park Plaza. The gray blocks in the foreground are slabs with the names of Navy dead.

Count seven floors up in the black box and that’s the window I was looking out of when I decided sticking around New York was too close for comfort.

In those few seconds I felt the power of something I’d never felt before. I felt like I’d do whatever she told me to do if I wanted her to keep looking at me the way she was looking.

I remember that look, and I remember wondering if it worked on stock brokers. It worked on me, but probably not the way it was supposed to.

I broke the trance, folded my napkin, jumped on a Greyhound bus pulling out of Port Authority on the Westside after my buddy Dennis dropped me off, and stepped out in Portland three days later.

I remembered that look decades later when it landed on my wife’s face. I showed her the stairway I built, an angled re-build of rotten wood transformed into something more than the sum of its parts.

We looked at the intricate joinery, tricky cuts, hardware, and jumped on it. It was solid, I was solid, and she glowed like she’d found her stock broker on the stairway to heaven.

That’s what keeps us sticking around. What’s your trick?