Dear Ali,
This is the first (and only) letter I’ll write to you from Stamford, Connecticut. By early August, Jared and I will be in Oregon with my parents. A few weeks after that, we’ll move into our “cozy” apartment in Palo Alto.
A reminder to readers: on Thursdays, Ali and I share our own writing with each other. (Mostly essays, occasionally fiction or poetry.) In these pieces, we’ll work through the ideas and conundrums that have been on our minds, just as we would if we were together in person.
Talk soon,
Kate
A smattering of skyscrapers, buses, and a trolley. Banks, hedge funds, accounting firms. Target, Michael’s, Best Buy, and Marshalls. The main roads are lined with strip malls containing jewelry stores, pastry shops, and nail salons. A few restaurants designed for the youth serve tacos and ramen and grapefruit mimosas. Stamford has a small downtown, partially complete. Cranes decked with flags extend into the sky. This city is not cool, or hip. Its motto is “The City That Works.” At best, it gets the job done.
The view from my roof
There’s the old mall smelling of Auntie Anne’s. Terrible streetlights. Potholes. Roadwork that starts at 5 am. Polluted air. On Halloween, the local McDonald’s fills with drunk UCONN students in catsuits, screaming for apple pies. Sprawl. In the winter, of course, it's freezing. Our apartment has cheap gluey laminate floors. It must have been quickly constructed. The roof deck is good for grilling, but also often covered in dog poop.
There are rows and rows of apartment buildings. Some of them are rundown public housing; some are garish new constructions. Many buildings, like ours, have shuttles. The shuttles take people to and from the train, which takes them to and from Manhattan. I used to have a terrible commute; the fluorescents in the train station triggered headaches.
When we moved to Stamford, I defined it against elsewhere. New York, for work. New Haven, for work. Pretty spots we could drive to like orchards and forests, wineries and farms. (Yes, Connecticut has wineries! No, the wine is not good.) Friends in Boston. Friends in Maine. Friends in Washington D.C. Friends gave their condolences. I was leaving the glistening center of the world for its dirty outer edges.
Not true, of course. Stamford is kind of nice. There’s olive bread at the farmer’s market. Otters at the nature center. A massive public library. The river park blooming with daffodils. There’s a tough old swan, two mating pairs of ducks. A library rummage sale. Saltbox houses. Salty air. Wheeling seagulls. Streaky sunsets. Hot apple cider in a little tiled shop. Magnolia trees casting their flowers. Rented kayaks. Yoga in the park. Movies in the park. Concerts in the park. White women love events in the park!
Magnolia trees in *the park*
Peak park energy
Downtown you’ll encounter “young professionals,” scream-laughing over cocktails and throwing up in the street, especially on St. Patrick’s Day weekend. But families also live in Stamford: Dominican and East Asian and Black families, a community of Orthodox Jews. There are people who live their lives quietly. An old man with his walker comes to a street corner, stands still, and watches the passersby. He does this every day, in a coat, and smokes; I saw him out our window each day this spring and summer. One of the men without housing at the train station only ever walks backwards. He never bumps into businessmen on their phones, businesswomen with their coffees, school children on trips, conductors in their uniforms, calling all aboard. He always looks over his shoulder, kindly.
Our washing machine has been broken for a month, and so we go to the laundromat. An elderly woman talks to my husband while they wait for their clothes to dry. Her husband recently passed away. “I’m sorry,” he says. “Well,” she remarks, “he wasn’t a good husband: but I didn’t want him to die!” Mothers mind babies, shake out powdered soap. Next to the laundromat is a so-so Thai place. We used to order from it coming home from the airport. Pick up in ten minutes? they’d ask. Without fail, it was ready on time, a steaming container of pineapple fried rice.
Down at Cove Beach, families listen to cumbia and cook hot dogs; sparse sand becomes rock and seaweed and crabs. We cut our feet. I swim out in the Sound to a line of buoys, then turn around and come home.
My feet at Cove Beach
On the freeway ramp, a line of day workers wait to be picked up for a job. The men have always held their own lunches. Now, they wear masks.
People bring their dogs to the vacant lot I can see out our window. They run them into tiredness with sticks and balls. In other times, commuters parked in the lot. In March, the lot was a testing station, filled with hazmat-suited nurses. Cars came. Nurses approached to take symptoms and swabs. A few weeks ago, we shot off fireworks there, sparks screaming in the night.
The Dairy Queen is an institution. You have to order from the window, on foot. It only serves treats, not burgers or fries, but all the treats you can imagine: sundaes and cones, blizzards and parfaits, some frightening item called the “cake shake.” On humid nights, pimpled teenagers serve customers: elderly couples, construction workers on breaks, nurses on breaks, necking couples, youth baseball teams. Even when we’re all wearing masks and spaced out, you can feel the anticipation. Ice cream. Standing in that line, which winds by the A&S pharmacy (on the sign, it looks like ASS), trying to decide which mix-in to get, we feel like we live somewhere, even if it’s not somewhere others would come.
An arty photo of the town treasure
At Christmas, someone dressed as Santa rappels down the tallest building in town. Yes, really. Next, there’s a lighting of a tiny town tree, barely able to hold up its bulbs. We snicker at it over cups of hot chocolate. But there, on the guitar, is José Feliciano, the singer of “Feliz Navidad”! Yes, that guy! It really is him! What?! He lives a few towns over. Most of the families that come to this event aren’t speaking English to each other. The people that come are people that live here, aren’t just passing some years for convenience.
What do we ask of the places we live? (When I say we, I mean us “young professionals,” the commuters, yes, the gentrifiers.) Perhaps that they affirm something about us, with their brunches and bookstores and cute Saturday markets—or else, their glamor and excitement and mythology. Perhaps these gifts and myths tell us we’re good: well-off and organic, thoughtful and sophisticated. We are where things happen because we deserve to be.
Well: I do think all places should have a market where people can buy fresh, affordable vegetables; a store to buy used books; plenty of green space with free exercise classes; public programming and tangible investment. That’s good not just for yuppies.
But sometimes a city is also big-box stores and convenient highways, neon signs in the night. It’s a place nobody dreams of moving as a child. It has homes in need of repair, public housing, things under construction. It has suburbs. And families. And road noise. And pigeons. It has struggling people. A strapped food bank just down the road from the high-rise Indeed headquarters. It has no glamor or mystique. It simply serves, and sometimes it fails to serve those who need it most.
What does such a city tell us about ourselves? This is no longer the correct question. Such a place asks you to get over yourself. Shop at Target. Take the freeway. Eat the pizza. Be convenient. Enjoy the yoga in the park, but don’t think that’s all there is. Give! Think of others. Maybe stay awhile. And at least be sad when you leave.
<3