The last four months

“Once I had a dream

Once I had an epic vision

All that’s left are screams and dungeons,

Tales of hell on earth –

Violation.

And if all the lights and sparkles should die,
Maybe then the truth would shine.

I hear a desperate melody

And my eyes are filled with sorrow.”

- Dave Dobbyn, ‘Accustomed to the Light.'

I’m on my fifth cup of tea for the day. I am sitting at the Central Café next to Grand Central, wearing clothes I got for free, and fresh out of a business meeting with yet another New Zealander in New York.
This one’s here to stay. He lives in Westchester, and is an entrepreneur made good, married, with two wholly American children. He’s a kiwi success story. He doesn’t have to worry about his Visa expiring. Drinking a beer, he’s able to dismiss the Kavanaugh circus with the easiness of a man satisfied with his life.

The conversation veers to women’s sports. He gives his opinion on New Zealand golfer Lydia Ko. Since she fired her manager, the clothes she wears are too tight, he says. Oh, and also, no one wants to pay women’s basketball teams, because women just are simply not as interesting to watch in sport as men.

It’s only as we get up to leave that I see a hint of hesitation, as he stops short at pulling the door out for me. Men feel uncertain at this time, for the first time ever.

The feeling of watching our Prime Minister speaking on an American talkshow yesterday and the “first baby” being unleashed on an unwitting UN can be best described as surreal.

Oh, but he approves of Jacinda’s appearance on Colbert. He finds her magnanimous, diplomatic – warm-hearted. A good sport. Displaying a kiwi generosity of spirit, void of those ghastly opinions or conviction that blight so much American politics.

I consider that it is easy for a New Zealander to take this perspective – American politics being so separate from our own.  So uncivilised. Distasteful. Gaudy. So… well… those other people. The YouTube armchair commentators side with New Zealand on this one. “Do they really have to rub their civilized leader in our faces?” they say.

Jacinda throws a non-answer to Colbert’s question: why did they laugh at Trump at the UN? Winkingly, she says she doesn’t want to spark a diplomatic incident. These politics upset the balance of our egalitarian utopia. It doesn't affect us so leave it alone. MYOB please. Nasty business, all of it. Never mind the bile rising in my throat after Trump was elected, or when my own uncle called Hillary “crooked Clinton”.

The New Zealander I met with is an entrepreneur in early childhood education.

He’s paying to take me out to lunch and discuss a job he might have for me that I’m not really sure I want.

I should feel excited to be a New Zealander in New York right now. And I do. But I also feel apprehensive, and a stranger in an ever-stranger-growing land.

A New Zealand album that Dave Dobbyn first released when he became a Christian is playing on my phone.

“Tonight I am feeling for you”, Dave sings, “under the state of a strange land.” The song is called ‘Welcome Home.’ But home feels so distant on a drizzling autumn day like today.

“Once there was a way to get back homeward,
Once there was a way to get back home.”

Another song, by an American émigré ejected from his own country, Kurt Weill, says it’s a long way from May to December, and the days grow short when you reach September.

I guess America “never gave me its pillow,” and only sent me its invitation. Did I expect too much?

The Twilight of the Gods

Yesterday I was again in my coffee shop, drinking tea yet again.  There is an old lady who I have struck up a friendship with who can hardly walk.  I try and give her as much time as I can when I see her. She loves opera. Yesterday I read out a New York Times review of Samson and Delilah, which has just opened at the Metropolitan Opera. The conversation turned to Kavanaugh. She did not want to listen to Christine Blasey Ford because she found her voice ‘shrill’. She shared with me that she was raped in Paris by an American. For her, the testimony brought back memories she would rather forget.

Earlier, we had shared sexual assault stories which had been tabloid fodder for the past few months, littered with salacious details about opera demi-gods like James Levine and David Daniels. The phrases “took advantage” and “fallen from grace” were thrown around. “How the mighty are fallen,” my mother would say.

On days like today, where twilight falls so early – it’s difficult to remember why I took the road less travelled. Dobbyn promises God will “hold us up, way beyond our wildest dreams – if we lay down our darkness”.

“Hey you,

Running rings around the world.” He says. “It will run rings around us all. It conspires to steal our soul, just to watch us take a fall.”
An old song that used to be on a Telecom ad in New Zealand comes to my mind…I remember the ad had meerkats comically falling over as they desperately struggled to stay awake.

“But more and more I find, the dreams I leave behind are somehow too real to replace… last night, I didn’t get to sleep at all.”

Still feeling and thinking about all the stories I’ve read in my Facebook feed from women today and for the past few months, my elderly and infirm friend asks me to please tell her what is on at the Met these coming weeks. I am shocked when I see my friend from Australia’s name in large letters on the company website. She is playing the leading lady role in La Boheme.

Reading her name in lights takes me aback. I pull myself aside, peel away another layer of pride, coring myself from the inside out. I have had a revelation. I am free from the sin of caring. I’m no longer a slave to fear. Am I? A fizzing burning pain begins to dissolve throughout me.

I’m shocked at the depth of feeling.

“I’m a little verklempt,” I tell her, and excuse myself.

I spend the next hours looking up her appearances at the opera, appearance after appearance. Names that I saw in the horizon of my mind’s eye as a teenager. Dallas Opera. Royal Opera. ENO. Name after name, my jealous eyes scanning her schedule for meaning, for some reason, some answer that never comes.

My lovely Russian waiter Sacha rushes up with arms of consolation, loaded with plates and pots. “If it was me,” he says. “I would ask, ‘why her, why not me?'"

After "America's sweetheart" soprano Renee Fleming’s Wellington concert, I knew I still felt something but I thought the desire to sing every day would vanish, as I frustratedly attempted to funnel the sense of thwarted creativity into other arenas. I put up a pretty good show of hiding it I think. The encroaching sense of ‘now what’ when I didn’t want to get up at all. Conversations with American musicians just told me to drop more money into what felt like a black hole. I found myself in New York, unencumbered, without a plan.

All the passive aggression, the lip service, the people who nodded and took my business cards, the “let’s do lunch” and “we’ll let you knows” led to what I promised myself wouldn’t happen - not wanting to get out of bed until late into the day, as I found myself weary from my retail job, and too much caffeine mixed with the adrenaline of the city offering only sleepless nights. I know I am lucky to have work, believe me. I will never forget the Americans lined up down the street from dawn for a career fair. Inside, the only people recruiting were door to door insurance sales, the police, and the army. 

When I asked the man inside why more employers hadn’t turned up, I got cold comfort. 

How can a nation not look after its own people? That’s just the way things are, he tells me.

I pack gumption like Americans pack firearms. I pack so much gumption, because that’s what I think “they” want. I lay it on with a trowel. “Don’t act so desperate!” Americans tell me. “Slow down!! Positive thoughts! The sun’ll come out tomorrow!!! What are you smiling about?? SMILE, DAMNIT.” Eventually, I learn to switch on and off like I learn to ignore the spam phonecalls, the phoney job offers. Second guessing myself, lost in “am I too…?”, is now habit. Perhaps I’m the one who is tiny-minded, petty, judgmental. Did I live in a small town too long?

I take a retail job breaking down boxes and hauling trash onto the street to survive.  Compelled to share the details of their lives with you, Americans want to get to know you intimately the first time you meet them… “how old are you? What’s your sign?” I feign a US drawl to help customers understand me. Despite all of this, I don’t mind the work, and I honestly don’t mind the customers. Except for my friend and I - our shared recognition of the ‘Stepfords’, the ones who accusingly stare if you smile at their child with their eyes just vacant real estate. 
Pride comes before a fall. That’s another biblical misquote. It’s pride before destruction. Pride before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall.

I tried to reinvent myself, to start from the beginning, but wound up at the end.  These are the real moments of revelation. I know a change is coming, and the gap on the map will set me further and further free.

As Americans are so fond of saying: The best is yet to come.

So I row to your isle
All that distance reconciled
Should my arms, shoulders fail
Put my trust in wind and sail.

Songs that inspired this post: