Upstate Again

A short drive.

My wife and I have lived in cities, in suburbs, spent time in rural places, and have opinions (not always the same one) about which we prefer. Recently this has come up again with renewed force. We are making a move that puts us more in the center of a city but that might also mean that we want to try to spend less time in it. When we were younger, we had neither the luxury to consider this kind of balance nor the inclination. There’s a new calculation now and it’s partly guided by what we know we are not. We are not our kids, who are in a phase (hopefully) when environments start to seem exciting and unbounded. We are not our parents, who are in a phase where choices made are often more about others than about self. We are closer to the latter than the former, probably. Whatever. It’s none of your business, anyway, and only slightly relevant to this piece, which is based on a bit of conversation I overheard when my wife and I stopped in to eat at a place on our way back from a place that may or may not be part of our future self-concept.

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METONYMY BITES

Elaine combined the amateurism of her father, a catch-as-catch-can kind of guy, thief one month, courier the next, running numbers when numbers needed running, with the more streamlined and organized cashlust of her mother, who spent evenings bent over papers that she referred to as her “greenprints,” one a detailed plan for getting quick into a bank, another a summary of how she might seduce a billionaire, become his nth wife, and slowly via poison separate him from his fortune. Elaine’s mother had made good on none of these plans but it did not stop her from endless refresh and review sessions in which she underlined and circled, rubbing the backs of her thumbs across tired eyes. Elaine had her mother’s eyes. All of that, the thieving and the running, the circling and the muttering, was thirty years ago. Both her parents had sometimes seemed like their own inventions but now their bones were in the ground. Their funerals, even, were a distant memory. Elaine, thirty, geared up for some level of excitement — she was at least warm to trot — lived in the heart of a suburb whose mayor had pledged to protect it from the ravages of digital pollution. This meant intentionally poor public coverage and incentives for venturing out into green spaces. Elaine walked out onto the front porch of her house. The evening breeze insinuated itself into her hair. She recalled a man, not her husband, who had presented her with a secret code for a better signal, folded up inside a ring box. The joke had seemed to her profound and sad and she had undressed on the spot. A week later at a party she met a different sort of man, a small muscular sort with large glasses. He had encircled her with a description of a contraption he had devised: a candle slowly heated a penny, which melted a block of ice, which let go a string that gave way to a weight whose counterweight lifted the door of a cage, releasing a trapped bird. He called it a Freedom Machine, for that was its only function. The philosophy had seemed to her pedestrian and she had turned away to unpop her top button. Over time, the man had become the penny, melted her resolve. “Honey,” Elaine’s husband said, “come to bed.” [©2026 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas]