The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
WHEN IT’S TIME TO LEAVE
Atlanta transplant struggles to say goodbye to the city.
“It’s all downhill from here,” my father said.
It was the summer of 1998, and I was sitting in my apartment, not far from the Piazza Santa Croce in Florence, calling my parents in New York to announce I would soon be returning to the States – something my dad had been urging me to do.
Had he really predicted that my life post-Florence would never measure up to this moment? I don’t remember how I replied. I only remember looking around my flat and feeling the push and pull of my two worlds as I watched my neighbor’s laundry flutter over our narrow, cobblestone street.
I’d wound up in Florence because I was an Italian major in college. Lured by the magic of a semester abroad in the Tuscan city of Siena, I was determined to go back and live in Italy. So I took off for the city of Dante right after graduation, living in Florence for several years
But then I met an American in Italy — a fellow New York stater — and we fell in love. So after a few weeks at home on Long Island with my parents, I flew to Atlanta to join him for his new Stateside work assignment. Nine years later, a reluctant transplant to the city struggles to say goodbye.
Where do you go when you leave the birthplace of the Italian renaissance? Unless it’s New York or Paris or heaven, you’re in a pickle. No place in Atlanta could match my final apartment in Florence, which had been at the top of a medieval tower with a nearly 360-degree view of the city.
It didn’t help that Mike and I initially lived in an area of Marietta so unlike Florence that it didn’t occur to me one day when I set off on foot to catch a bus that the nearest stop would be three miles. Nonetheless, wherever I’d have gone, I would have been in mourning for my Italian life. Driving around in the old maroon Monte Carlo Mike retrieved from storage, I would often weep quietly as he played Italian songs on the car stereo.
But I learned something about myself during that grieving period. To paraphrase the Italian novelist Antonio Tabucchi, we become fused with the places we inhabit. Somehow, often unbeknownst to us, we carry those places around with us. We don’t ever truly leave them because they don’t ever truly leave us.
His idea resonates especially now because this month, I’ll finish packing up a literary hoarder’s worth of books, articles and mementos from my house in Grant Park and I’ll move to Connecticut to be closer to family. And once that’s done, most likely I’ll never return to Atlanta to live.
Hello Atlanta
I first stepped off the plane in Atlanta in July 1998 and was immediately struck by the hot press of air. This was back when airline passengers often deplaned directly onto the tarmac. “What is that?” I wondered. I felt as if the flight attendant had thrown a blanket over my face. It was, of course, the Atlanta heat. The plane had touched down around 9 p.m. but little of the day’s swelter had dissipated.
Mike’s apartment off Columns Drive in Marietta had the requisite patio seemingly every apartment in Atlanta has. Nice — but it looked out over a parking lot. The apartment was in the suburbs — near his job but far from anything that would feel familiar. In Florence, our life had revolved around meeting up in piazzas and walking to cheap mom-and-pop restaurants that served the most incredible food I’d ever eaten.
In Atlanta we went everywhere by car. Indeed, we were hemmed in by cars at every turn. I developed a visceral dislike of popular restaurants because their strip-mall settings lacked ambience. Driving through the empty streets of downtown Atlanta left me frustrated by the wasted potential for a thriving city center. It was nothing like where I grew up, in the suburbs of New York City. I cringed as I thought about the famous New Yorker magazine poster of the world hanging in my parents’ bathroom, which showed the streets of Manhattan writ large in the foreground and the rest of the planet — California, China, et al — much smaller in the background. Perhaps I had made a mistake moving to Atlanta.
That early period in Atlanta would be marked by many false starts. I spent those early years complaining with other transplants about how there was nowhere to walk in Atlanta, nowhere to window shop. Where were the squares where people gathered? The Beltline wasn’t even a gleam in Ryan Gravel’s eye, back then.
To compensate, we decorated our cookie-cutter apartment with mementos from Italy, including a portrait an artist friend had painted of me back in Florence. The supernaturally large green eyes — my eyes — watched over me and our whitecarpeted suburban digs.
Eventually, we moved to Vinings where we could walk down the hill from our apartment complex to the town’s little shopping district. We enjoyed drinking on the second floor deck at the Old Vinings Inn, and we’d wave to the train conductor whenever we were eating at New York Pizza Exchange, whose outdoor patio abuts a very active railroad crossing.
Here’s what I eventually learned about Atlanta: You can stumble around until you find your spot. And that’s what I did.
A turning point came when I finagled my way into an editorial position at a trade publication for the security industry. At last I was on my way to becoming a journalist. But after three years, we left Atlanta, somewhat in dismay over the region’s failure to recognize the intown area as the necessary cultural and economic driver for everything else. We moved to Greenville, South Carolina, where I landed my first newspaper reporting gig.
From there we moved to Allentown, Pennsylvania, where I got a job as a business reporter at a daily newspaper. But after five years, we got the itch to move again. When a job opportunity came up for Mike in Atlanta, we went house scouting one March weekend in 2008.
As luck would have it, it was one of those periods in Atlanta when summer splashes out a little early. The weather was lush and tropical and so unlike Pennsylvania. I was giddy as we drove with the windows down through Cabbagetown and Grant Park. We ate calamari tacos at Six Feet Under and looked out on what would become one of my favorite places in Atlanta: Oakland Cemetery. Atlanta seemed so exciting that weekend, I felt as if I’d washed up in some happening island nation. Many of the intown neighborhoods had been revitalized. We found a little Victorian cottage with a front porch in Grant Park and called it home.
It took six months to wrap up my job and my life in Allentown before I could join Mike in Atlanta. When I finally did, I realized Allentown had put roots down inside of me, casting me in a permanent state of remorse over leaving, over what could have been. As if the city were a lover who had jilted me.
I came to the conclusion that with each move I make, I gain something and I lose something. It’s become the story of my life.
Second time around
With the second residency in Atlanta, I put down roots in a major way. That’s because this time around, I became a mother, giving birth to Leo. I was also reborn as an aspiring creative writer.
Atlanta is where I began a journaling marathon spanning multiple mammoth computer files and dozens of notebooks stashed in my car. Three a.m. would find me feverishly scribbling down my thoughts, which seemed to bubble up from a new source. Indeed, it was a new source: I began writing again 10 days before giving birth to Leo. It was an entirely different kind of writing from my news stories. A life was sprouting inside of me, and his little hand had hit the switch on Mommy’s creative impulses.
After Leo was born, I returned to work as a reporter at Georgia Public Broadcasting. I wrote wherever I could: in the car while snarled in traffic, in parking lots, even at my church on Easter Sunday.
Some days I couldn’t stop writing. On a breezy, sunny spring day during my first year of motherhood, I sat on our front porch filling pages and pages of my journal while Leo slept at my feet in his carrier — and I concluded, finally, that I knew what I’d been chasing. Not a place — but the writing life.
What did I write about in my journal? A bit of everything — short story ideas, journalism pitches, observations about motherhood and little Leo-isms. At one point, I kept a running log of the words he knew. On April 25, 2014, the inventory of his vocabulary was as follows: Mamma, Daddy, water, book, ball, bath, duck, hello, more, all done, byebye, no, oh no, truck, snow, blue, red, dog, cat, yellow, milk, rock, bike, up, down, cold, hot, bowl, flower, airplane, baby, fish, star, car and outdoors.
I often found myself thinking, “These are the days.” I was motivated by one small little person who had remade my whole world — and changed forever how I saw Atlanta. It was no longer “not as good as New York” or “where I went after I left Florence.” It became the city where Leo was born.
All of this to say, my move to Connecticut is bittersweet. I know as I go toward something new, I am leaving something else behind. The something else I’ve known for the past nine years.
And that something else — my life — continues to evolve. Perhaps because I am a parent, I haven’t been able to put a stopwork order on my Atlanta life.
Maybe that’s why I found myself crouching under a small bridge, not far from busy Ponce de Leon Avenue one day in April. Leo and I were trying to attract the attention of a pair of ducks floating on a creek that runs under the road near Fernbank.
I don’t even remember how we stumbled upon the creek — me and my partner-in-crime are always on the lookout for Atlanta adventures — but soon enough, we were throwing chunks of granola bars at ducks.
We were enchanted. I marveled at the hidden, half-suburban, half-wild spot, sandwiched between Ponce, the PATH and