I am ready to pick up and go again. Like Juliette Binoche's character in Chocolat, the west wind beckons, and me and A should go to India right about next week.
Just kidding.
Or maybe not. What prompted the decision to look outside of our cozy apartment for comfort?
About this time every evening, our upstairs neighbor makes a lot of noise. Like, bed-shaking noise. I hope he doesn't hate me if he reads this. Yes, dear neighbor, I realize that your noise is in your bedroom, so I shouldn't hear it, since it is A, not me, who sleeps directly below you. But every night, I can hear you. I do not wish to know what you are really doing, because I make believe what makes the noises filter down to us. Yes, you are testing the boxspring like a crash test dummy with your helmet and elbow padding, in some odd paid experiment from the makers of Sealy Posturpedic, that must be conducted between 1:00 a.m. and 3:00 a.m.
We need an apartment with thicker walls and flooring. Should we move to a former factory in SoHo? To the Upper West Side, where buildings were really built like, well, buildings? TriBeCa? Meatpacking district? What? Yes, I will call up a realtor and ask the following:
[ring, ring]
Me: Erm, hello? Hi. Could you please tell me what part of Manhattan has the thickest flooring and walls? About 10 feet thick, please. With brick, wood, and metal buffering. I need, um, less bang for my buck. And this would be a forever home, please. Except when we take off for India for two seconds. Thank you.
Realtor: [dead signal]
India has been on my mind for a while. I am trying to figure out the angle for an article based on a single homeschooling mother who takes off with her photograph-taking son to the land of spices, sitar ragas, melting chocolate palaces, and certain societal and gender challenges that a single homeschooling mother would normally face in such exotic environs.
Or perhaps I should visit New Zealand when L at MySchola when her family moves there. We could have a homeschooling caravan. Or maybe we should go to France (I've already lived there and A wants to go). Or England (ditto). I recently received the Old Boarding School Society newsletter from the school I attended there, and I miss it. Yes, LaMai is an official OBSS Girl with voting rights among old snobs in England.
Wherever we go, I will have to make sure that the walls and flooring are as thick as my wanderlust. We will, after all, need a good night's sleep.
1 comment:
Seven years ago, at one of my first support group meetings, there was a woman who had just come back from India. Single homeschooling woman with a daughter (who was I think around 10 at the time). I didn't know her and I think she moved away some months later, so I never got to know her. But she certainly did it and sounded like she had a grand time. So there you go. Mind you, I think it's a noisy place :-) but certainly it's somewhere I'd like to go one day.
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