Going Back, Part Ten: The Carriage House

So, quite a few months after our return visit to Syracuse, it’s time to wrap up this little recall session. I didn’t intend for it to drag out this long, but all of my projects do. That anyone reads them at all, I consider a bonus; for the most part, I’m doing this for me.

We had several years of mostly bliss in the apartment on Green Street that I wrote about last time. Those years of love, stability and sobriety enabled me to get through a challenging master’s program – and then I had to figure out what to do with it. The Maxwell School was excellent at finding placements and opportunities, so I had no doubt that I would find something in line with my interests . . . but at that age, starting a career from scratch, that left a wide range and it took a while to sort out. I quickly wrote off going to DC – a decision I never regretted. I looked around for local government opportunities, which I would have loved – the possibility of staying in Syracuse, or going to Rochester – but of course those were few and far between, and unlikely to land me in the environmental policy area I was most interested in. I went through a fairly arduous process for a state executive fellowship program and was lucky enough to be selected. But the agency that wanted me the most wasn’t the one I wanted the most, there was some sketchiness to the matching process, and funding was cut back, so I lost that opportunity.

But I was given a shot at a fellowship with the New York State Senate – essentially a 10-month position that could lead to something more. It paid, it was prestigious, and there was the chance I could get into the policy fields I was interested in. After a couple of interviews, I was in, and would report to Albany in mid-September, 1989.

We couldn’t both move to Albany for what was essentially a temporary job. It paid, but not enough for us to keep big, nice apartments in two cities. Unfortunately, I would have to take the cheapest thing I could find in Albany, and we would have to downsize in Syracuse. We were fortunate to have a good relationship with our landlord, who owned several others properties in the immediate neighborhood, so we were able to move into a small one-bedroom apartment in a converted carriage house just down the block. It was much smaller, but we would split up most of our belongings between the two cities, put some of it in storage, and make it work, and she was gracious enough to let us keep the canoe in the basement of the old place. So, sometime around June 1989, we moved into the Carriage House on Howard Street.

It was a nice apartment, but it was little. The small kitchen was hard to distinguish from the living room, separated only by the countertop/bar style seating area. There was one bedroom, a bathroom, and a sizeable closet underneath the stairs that led from an outside entrance to the separate apartment above us. I don’t remember how much less it cost in rent, but it was enough to make the difference. My graduate fellowship ran out in May, the new job didn’t start until September, and we had been running on fumes for two years anyway. Not uncomfortably, but without any real safety net. 

I had left my typesetting job the year before, and while I could pick up a few hours here and there at the old job, I didn’t want to go back there – I had a real fear of getting stuck, and it probably wasn’t an option anyway.

So to get through those weeks between the end of grad school and the start of the fellowship, I signed up with a local graphic arts temp agency. Just imagine that the graphic arts and printing industry were so vibrant at that time that it was possible to have a temp agency focused just on graphics arts workers. I have no memory of what it was called. I do remember going in for the initial interview, and getting that look from the female interviewer – the look that intimated I was a male, obviously not up to snuff, and wasting her time. (I couldn’t blame her – most typesetters were female then.) Then I took the typing test, and her entire attitude changed.

So through that agency, I was jobbed out to various places, a week or two here or there, throughout that summer. I remember spending two weeks way out in Port Byron, for some reason. I spent another couple of weeks working with some weird compositor for a demolition company somewhere near Canastota, but after a bit I suspected I was intellectual company for the owner, a youngish former high school teacher who had been forced back to the family business and seemed more than a bit lonely in the land of crowbars and literal wrecking crews.

We had a lovely couple of months in that apartment that summer, during which I was busy boxing things up and getting ready for another move. I had a lot of free time, so I learned to bake bread, and rather loved doing it. The albums of the summer were both Joe Jackson – his new “Blaze of Glory” CD, and his Live 1980-1986 set. I listened to them over and over and over. I rode my bike, I hiked and pretended to fish down at Clark Reservation. We did a lot of camping. I needed the time off, because, although I loved it, grad school had been a grind, and I had been working steadily and hard for years. Having a little bit of time when it was okay to just not work was pretty beautiful. I felt . . . peaceful. It wasn’t a familiar feeling, and it didn’t last.

Summer was glorious but it was over before I knew it, and I drove a moving truck with what I would need to get by to Albany, where I had rented an even tinier (and considerably crustier) fourth-floor walkup just steps from the Legislative Office Building where I would be working. The plan was this: I would work this (hopefully) amazing new job during the week, and we would trade off visiting weekends – some weekends I’d go to Syracuse, some weekends Lee would come to Albany. We had just bought a brand new Ford Ranger (with what for money, I’m not sure) because our Renault had become wildly undependable – but it made more sense to bring the expendable, undependable Renault to Albany, easier to park in Center Square and we didn’t much care if it got banged up a little (it didn’t). Generally, we would travel back and forth by train – again, one of the cars was highly unreliable, and the trains weren’t that expensive. (Acres of free parking in Rensselaer, kids – not pleasant, but free.)

So really, after the summer of ’89, the last place we lived in Syracuse was mostly the last place Lee lived, and I just visited. It was a snowy winter in the Salt City, and her postcards were filled with tales of defending the entrance to her parking space from plow pack. There were many postcards back and forth – our prime form of communication. We weren’t good on the phone together, and long distance was expensive. (I know that makes no sense now, but just believe it – we had to wait until after 11 pm, when the rates went to their lowest, to feel comfortable making a long distance call.)

It was a fairly lonely existence – though on my end, I still had high school friends who lived in the area; one of my best friends was just a few blocks away in Albany, and I became reacquainted with others, and met some new people. And once the legislative session was in swing in January, there was a lot going on, my work days were long, and there wasn’t a lot of time to be bored because there was so much to learn. On the other hand, my partner was left on her own in Syracuse, still working a challenging job and without much of a social circle to rely on. It wasn’t an easy time for either of us, and there were definitely some strains on the relationship at times, but we felt this was a necessary step to assure our future, and we weren’t wrong about that. Where that future would be was still uncertain, and I held out hope of getting back to Syracuse, but of course it didn’t work out that way.

So Lee lived on in the Carriage House through that winter and into the next spring. At the end of the fellowship, I was offered a chance to stay on with the committee I’d been placed with – my dream position, in fact – and I couldn’t find any opportunities back in Central New York. (That wasn’t even the only time we ever lived apart for most of a year in order to improve my career position. While it has mostly worked out both times, I couldn’t recommend it.) There was plenty of stress over this decision that was not helpful for our relationship, but eventually we worked it out, found an apartment in Albany, packed up the last of our stuff and said goodbye to Syracuse.

It wasn’t an easy goodbye – I considered Syracuse a major part of my identity. That I had landed there so young, so full of wonder and possibility and energy, and so quickly adopted the city as my home, as a place I truly enjoyed living in, exploring, knowing. On this return trip, 35 years later, I was still navigating on memory (not to say there weren’t some wrong turns!), and every street, every corner, every familiar building held a particular memory. I went around with my camera on a farewell tour, taking pictures of the places I considered significant or beautiful, the spaces that I had felt such a part of for so long. Twelve years, give or take, is a long time. A lot can happen. A lot did happen. And while the early-middle part of my life there had been decidedly mixed as I struggled with alcohol, what had begun with such promise was also ending with promise.

Maybe it’s appropriate that right now, I can’t find a single photograph of the Carriage House, though I know they exist – at least of the exterior. And when we went back in May, we drove past, and I thought of the lovely, sunny hours I spent on the stoop listening to Joe Jackson and waiting for my dough to rise or my bread to bake. But it was a transitional space, and never fully a home for the two of us, and my thoughts of it are entirely of how hard that transition was, how much work we both had to put in to make it all work.

For years and years, we woke up together in Syracuse. For a while, we mostly woke up in different cities. Then, we woke up together again, in Albany, near to where we had each started out.