Local | Loco

America, show me your crazy

LOCAL

*derives from Latin word locus, which means “a place”

When the world news entails wars our own country instigates for no apparent reason alongside a President’s personal vendetta against algae blooms, you might develop a thicker than usual shell of what-the-hell-am-I-supposed-to-do-about-it. You might decide to give up showering and never again leave your house and your processed vat of cheesy comfort noodles again. And you might certainly forgo celebrating the Fourth on the mouthful holiday of this semiquincentennial.

But, if I can thank this last difficult decade for anything, it’s the way (at least for a while) that it did the opposite. My rage over Trump’s first victory ejected me from my couch and into my community. The same way I suppose having kids once did, when I dabbled in learning to lead through their extracurriculars. The way I made mom-friends with the other somewhat searching mothers satelliting their kids on the playground; how I grew into organizing their Girl Scout troops from Daisy to Cadet; when we tried on every class, volunteered for every Earth Day trash pick up. And then the crisis recalibration of this President happened and we found comfort in discovering all the many like-minded who also wanted to gather and brainstorm and fight—and cry—in reaction to this Brave New World. We coordinated a Unity March to make our Hispanic immigrant neighbors feel welcome when he promised to deport them; we met in living rooms, church basements, and took the Women’s March bus to Washington.

Many people’s approach to this era of escalating authoritarianism and divisiveness is not to choose sides in the battle but to say the battle itself is the problem. All government is bad, any angle. I always try to counter this with: but look at me. I’m Suzy McGovt earnestly behind the scenes with zero ego attached, doing my quiet work to help the people when I can in my own small ways; there are plenty of people like me, at every level all the way up. And especially locally. You want to make a difference in the big wide (weird) world—maybe that’s not very possible. But you can easily make a difference right here. All you have to do is ask nicely, or be the one rare person who cares enough to show up at the City/Town/Village board meeting. They will listen if you make yourself heard. It doesn’t take any more than speaking up.

The older I get the more I learn that this is how we live best on this planet, in our own small spheres, doing our best to improve the immediate here and now. I made some hokey rhyming comment to someone on Substack the other day, but the sentiment is true:

Globally all we can do is wonder and worry but locally is how we live and love. I’ve got everything (from giving) right here.

When I lived in New York City, I realized one day after five years that I had finally reached the comfort steeping point. It took five years to get to the place where the big city felt like home, and for me that meant that no matter where or when I ventured out of my apartment, I would cross paths with someone I knew. That was an invigorating feeling, and it made the city of millions feel much smaller and warmer. (Also learning the subway system and knowing I could wander anywhere on the grid all day and never be lost—other nice milestones that certainly helped along the way.) Then I moved to the outer boroughs, Brooklyn to be exact, and I fast forwarded my timeline in a new neighborhood by opening a business. No longer would I slowly let a community accrue by happenstance over months or years; I would create it from scratch and Sawzall. The bar was more of an arts lounge that depended on nightly events to keep slogging away. Soon it seemed to attract every creative type within a five-mile radius. By that metric, I had succeeded.

Then I bailed, with a baby and a husband and even a Subaru, to start anew in Sleepy Hollow. This was no ordinary place but a little literary village steeped in stories next to its other village sidekick with more restaurants. Here I found the best way to enter fast was being a reporter and hitting the pavement. I walked everywhere with an infant, and then another one, strapped onto me and/or rolling ahead, making our mark via tossed baby bottles smashing on pavement. It felt like I met everyone, or at least anyone doing something newsworthy, which doesn’t take much in a place of 20,000 souls. I saw a lady walking across the street once with purple hair, and I thought, “I’m going to be ok here.” Turns out that lady is the puppeteer who now rents out one of my garage bays for puppet-part storage and of course you know her too because that’s the kind of sweet place we live.

The Headless Horseman pursues Ichabod Crane in an illustration by Edward Hull (1823-1906)

Fast forward to now. Kids nearly grown and flown, gulp. I am so proud of living here, my identity having merged with this place in the same way it once did with Brooklyn, another place I would never leave. This place has become my brand. Sleepy Hollow, inK. is the name of my freelance miscellaneous business, also my publishing imprint. Of course I had to publish a version of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and I run a biannual Sleepy Hollow Show & Tell. I embrace costuming for Halloween to the degree that my kids are embarrassed by my effort and think I’m crazy (see below).

Recently I experienced an aha moment that I’ve really arrived in my best possible life, at this ripe age of 52, edging on 53 next week, where every year—I’ll admit it—my guiding mantra is “best year ever.” I was invited by the long-standing (14 years) Superintendent of the famous Sleepy Hollow Cemetery where Legend author Washington Irving is buried, the founder of this fictional place we get to live in. Jim Logan invited me there to interview me for a book he’s writing, a compilation of the real ghosts of Sleepy Hollow beyond the obvious Headless Horseman. For a place that the internet claims to be “the most haunted” in the world, I’ve never been convinced since I haven’t seen any. But he wanted to talk to me because back in 2015 one of the ways I really dug into this community was recording a monthly series of oral histories, topic by topic, for two years. We (myself and the Warner Library director) started with interviewing the workers of the General Motors plant that sat on our Hudson river 100-acre waterfront for 100 years until it shuttered in 1996, leaving a void wherein North Tarrytown would become Sleepy Hollow at last. Halloween (tourism) would save us all. The second topic for the oral histories, since it was the month of October, would be the “real ghosts of Sleepy Hollow.” I recorded four stories you can hear here, along with the accompanying article I wrote for local news site The Hudson Independent.

In interviewing me about why and how I was affiliated with recording these stories Jim would reference in his nonfiction compilation, he also thought it was important to ask me more questions as a local personality in my own right. Who me? I was startled and flattered. No I haven’t encountered ghosts but boy have I made up a few. I recounted how I wrote a piece for the new local-lore-inclined new Tarry lit mag we have as of last October’s launch, of a version of this place where there was a great density of both living and dead. And how if you thought about it, if there really are ghosts, we should be much more crowded with them, since there are many more dead than living people in the history of humans on this dear queer ball of ours. And then I talked about how I just wrote another quirky story on the very cusp of the submission deadline for the second year of the annual Tarry. (At first I wasn’t going to try, but then I couldn’t resist the prompt. On the very day of the deadline no less, the ides of March, I wrote a whooping 10 pages that aren’t entirely bad.) More ghosts in this story, but really more concentration on/in/under the grounds of this very cemetery whose office I was sitting in now. In my new mythology of here, these teens dig up a body in 1979 and disturb the earth/Earth, so much so that their dirt manipulation shifts tectonic plates and causes earthquakes which lead to more earthquakes and may or may not eventually (100 years later) be responsible for the demise of the whole planet.

This is where my minor epiphany arrived, a rare special realization that I am in the flow of life, the exact sweet spot of this lazy river current that just has me on a raft with a refreshing drink with the day and the water the perfect temperature and the glint of sun in the golden hour making everything glow just gorgeous. (And how hard I worked to get here but don’t tell anyone). The thing is that story of the teen grave robbers was my romanticized version of a real story from 1979, from actual newspaper clippings I found online, the search prompted by my former colleague Michael giving me a little tease of the story when he told me he had been in the local courthouse on the day the boys were coming before the judge for their abhorrent crime. Jim of the cemetery wouldn’t tell me much more about it when I brought it up last time, only revealing that I wasn’t wrong but he couldn’t say more. He’s very protective of his dead and honors the dignity of his role. So much so that Halloween and its clot of tourists having their way with his cemetery can really get his goat. But this time, in the cemetery headquarters, when I had come to him to share stories and contribute to his book project, he was loosened enough to feel safe to share. He told me about these guys and their tale, and oh my, it’s a doozy. Whereas in my fiction they dug up a woman because they were fond of her and in a somewhat sympathetic way desired contact, in his story, in real life, they were drugged thugs who happened upon an open grave and thought it was a fun idea to drag out a newly buried body and pose it sitting up at a nearby tree. Horrific. This would not be in his book.

Then we talked about the ghosts who aren’t really ghosts though the people living here seem to really want them to be. Like that very real lady who used to wear towels on her walks home late at night from the Tarrytown Lakes (I supposed after her illegal swim?), often with a Q-tip lodged in her ear. Unlike the lady who wears white who is said to haunt Raven’s Rock (and is in the book), this lady of the towels (including one wrapped around her head, attest multiple people), was just one caricature among the odd humans who actually live here. Which brings me to:

LOCO

*Spanish for “insane,” though of uncertain origin, perhaps from Arabic lauqa, fem. of alwaq “fool, crazy person.”) Unrelated etymologically to “local”

There’s the where-ness of who I am, locally cultured, free range cheese of Sleepy Hollow. And there’s the who-ness. I am my own special breed of loco. The older I get the more comfortable I get in my own skin, in my own identity, in my special KMad kind of crazy. This is what the older crones told me I could look forward to someday circa mid-menopause: they told me the more I know my values, my priorities, my codes, my ticks and tricks, the better life would become. I haven’t mastered this existence in the slightest but I feel that having fully tapped into the aforementioned flow—which has a lot to do with this calmer confidence of knowing I am being my most authentic self most days—I am on the best possible path. I can’t think of a better feeling and I’m pretty sure even someone like Jeff Bezos, with all the unlimited money that enables him to buy a human sex doll for a wife, probably doesn’t feel that way often or maybe even ever. And maybe that’s why these richest of men, these gazillionaires whose money seems to double daily (Elon in the outermost ether now as unhappiest trillionaire), will never think their unlimited excessive fortunes are sufficient. Because still their tanks are empty. They still don’t know who they are or find any joy from the journey.

Joyce Carol Oates famously roasted Elon last fall on Twitter:

So curious that such a wealthy man never posts anything that indicates that he enjoys or is even aware of what virtually everyone appreciates—scenes from nature, pet dog or cat, praise for a movie, music, a book (but doubt that he reads); pride in a friend’s or relative’s accomplishment; condolences for someone who has died; pleasure in sports, acclaim for a favorite team; references to history. In fact he seems totally uneducated, uncultured. The poorest persons on Twitter may have access to more beauty & meaning in life than the ‘most wealthy person in the world.’

To which he replied, she’s mean. (Which is also a typical crone thing to be, so I’m sure she’s fine with that).

Of the 51 people I’ve dated since marriage—51, ack, the number is approaching my actual age and I would like for that to stop—I haven’t met many people who seemed fully cooked and charactered. The ones who come across as most confidant initially are usually the ones who actually soon reveal themselves to have the least access to their inner identities (call them narcissists or narcissistically inclined or sociopaths or what you will). The guy who ghosted (granted I was silly enough to let him do this twice) had a swagger about him, but I realized (in retrospect of course) that this need of his to be seen and admired and lusted after was only an empty attempt to disguise his lack, to fill a void, his insecurity, his not-enoughness, his bottomless hollow. Why is it so easy for someone like me—who is so much—to keep landing like a moth on so many false lights? I learn, dust off, do it again. Sure, there are nice boys in between, but some of them prove too eager to please me, too bendable to my will. The latest was a guy whose ambitions were gobbledygook—they literally made no sense and he couldn’t even articulate them clearly, let alone start making strides to make them happen. The closer we got to a real committed loving relationship, the more he would pull away between dates, regrouping, doing his own thing, gulping the air of less expectation in my absence. He broke it off right when I knew the L word was about to bubble up—from both of us—I could feel it coming, and he choked. He rattled off a million reasons in the break up convo I forced him to have instead of going silent and slinking off. We were incompatible, he wasn’t good at relationships, he liked his independence, we wanted different things, he wasn’t ready, he was going to let me down, he mislead me, he was using me. All true, and all a bunch of bullshit. I think the real reason was he was avoidant and scared of being found out for the empty fraudster that he was. It felt good to not mourn so much as pity him. Of course he would be back on the apps right away, there’d be another a better option, and he’d do the same hurting and again and continue ultimately alone.

The internet, the media, is meant to make you restless. The apps, the swipes. All the countries we’re supposed to visit and pose for selfies before their fountains. (Now all the tallest antennae towers you can climb with your lover!) All the beautiful people you could be, or maybe date. No one knows who they are, no one is supposed to. So I guess people might sense in me (the better older me) some anachronistic trait, an old-timey quality of secure selfhood. I am who I am. I’m scarred. I’m scared. I’m brave. I’m amazing (to myself). I’ve made a ton of mistakes that I am never ashamed of. I hold no space for regret but it’s healthy to examine history.

Alain de Bottom has a video where he talks about the essential question you should ask in early dating, “Tell me your crazy.” I love the question and his treatise, that you want to see the truth in people as soon as possible, not the performative mask they wear to pass in early dating.

What’s wounded you? What did you learn from it? What are the odd things that happened in your childhood that impact who are you today? What’s your inner child like? What are they saying? Show me your crazy.

If they are offended by your question, then you are not with a viable partner. You need someone who not only wants to share the answer, but loves the question. This is the beginning of an honest lifelong conversation. Which, after all my dating data mining and checklists, becomes the foremost goal: can I spend the rest of my life talking to this person?

I have a boyfriend now, a kind and consistent one, a local one, and just the right amount of loco. I haven’t asked him this crazy question yet, not in so many words, so busy we’ve been collaborating on all our schemes and scavenger hunts and I of course have a number of other questions that all somewhat swirl around this theme. Perhaps this would be the perfect convo for my upcoming birthday and this bittersweet American anniversary.

Our country as a whole would benefit from such introspection, investigating the seamier side of things, the skeletons in our collective closet. Dear America, what happened to you that hurt you? Don’t hide your wounds. Show me your inner child and I’ll show you mine.

This little magical beast in me is louder daily and more honest. I’m the Raspberry Birthday, as I used to yawp, since they always end up on my cake, ripening as I am. I can celebrate in knowing: I’m exactly who and where I’m meant to be—for now.

Patriot red velvet cake for the 4th of July, Andrew Smith from Seattle, WA, USA, CC BY-SA 2.0

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