This has been a huge year for my two kids and me, and with the school year just ending the magnitude of the change is just now starting to sink in. My dad moved me to Manhattan when I was sixteen, the year after my mother died. I moved to Los Angeles in my mid-twenties but this fall, fifteen years later, and four years after my divorce, I decided to move with the kids back to the city. Native Californians, they've lived with me ever since my wife and I separated.
I'd been missing New York for several years before I actually moved us back. My friends who still lived there grouched that it was becoming too safe, too neat. Muggings were seen as quaint historical events, like wearing goggles and a long coat to drive a car. I was fascinated.
So when a teaching job came up back in New York I begged their mother to let me move the kids across country. It was a coveted opportunity for me and would hopefully broaden my children's conception of their world.
Ava, my third grader, I was most worried about because she would be starting over again in a new school. Chet would be going into kindergarten so they'd all be new. From California I picked one of the best public schools in the city. Ava was used to a very lovely, small private school. This was going to be a bit different.
Her very first day I made her wear a rhinestone-encrusted High School Musical t-shirt so the other girls wouldn't think that just because she was from California, she was from Mars. Still, nobody talked to her. The second day she was in tears, refusing to get out of bed. The third day, sobbing again, I dropped her off in the Big Yard but loitered by the tall chain-link fence. I couldn't let her see that her tears were dissolving my heart. I needed this move to work for all three of us.
For me, it was a dream. The City was fantastic now. When the subway worker stepped out of his bulletproof cage and asked if he could help us I first thought he was being cruelly sarcastic. Out on the oddly clean streets I saw more yoga mats than I did back in Santa Monica where yoga attendance is mandated by municipal code. I found myself reveling in the joy of almost constantly holding my kids' hands. In L.A., not so much. You can't hold their hands while driving.
Looking in through the fence I held my breath when I saw another little girl take Ava by her big backpack and steer her to see something across the street from the school. Then they both cackled and ran off together.
When I picked her and her little brother up at the end of the day I asked her what the other girl had shown her.
"Oh. A dead rat."
So New York hadn't changed as much as I thought. But I knew then, that we were going to be all right.