Scaffolding

And what's underneath

I first came to New York at the end of August 2001 and I lived on Washington Square Park in a dorm room I did in fact know was probably nicer than anywhere else I would ever live on my own. My book-loving roommate and I had a view of the Empire State building and as soon as I walked out the door every morning to listen to a Counting Crows album on my discman on my way to my acting classes by Union Square, I would see the arch in Washington Square.

Except actually I wouldn’t see the arch at all because it was covered in scaffolding. In my memory, which is unreliable, the scaffolding covered the arch for the majority of my time in college. I can’t say for sure if this is true, but I do know I longed for the vision of the park to be the pretty one, the right one. I wanted desperately, achingly, for the arch to be scaffold-free.

The arch, in the essay I wrote about it twenty years ago, was a little like me. It was a work in progress, it was getting fixed, I suppose, it wasn’t quite who it wanted to be yet, it was waiting to be stronger, sturdier, prettier, better. It was exactly how I saw myself, in my college years.

At the end of the essay, the scaffolding came off, and I came into myself, and we were the same, the arch and I, finally the selves we wanted to be, living in lower Manhattan, strong and lovely and I don’t know, admired? The scaffolding meant something to me, our journeys felt meaningfully parallel, like we were growing up together.

I’m in my 40s now, and I’m maybe less prone to identifying with inanimate objects, but scaffolding still means something to me. My oldest daughter started kindergarten this year, and the school she began at had been notoriously covered in scaffolding for years. This is not unusual in New York, where the whole city is always in some kind of process, is always being worked on and refined, and the pace of those adjustments is slow, impacted by bureaucracy and pandemics and budgets and mayors and who knows what else. Still, it was depressing, the huge building entirely covered with metal, the windows seemingly blocked, the school unseeable, really, as if you were sending your five year old into a construction site every day.

And then, not too long ago, the scaffolding came down. It was quick— so quick that there was a day my daughter and I both got confused about where her school actually was, marching right by it and then snapping to attention when we realized oh, it’s here, we see it!

I can’t overstate how beautiful it suddenly was. In reality, the school is exactly what you think a large public elementary school in a neighborhood in Brooklyn might be. It’s brick. It’s enormous. It’s very… rectangular. But after years of seeing it covered in metal, it was something to behold. It was a home, it was a safe haven, it was a special place. I might have even cried, a little. I sent my husband a photo of it. We were all taking photos of it in the early morning wintery sun. It was a moment of community and pride and just joy. Which is lovely, because I am a fan of joy in the mundane, of joy in unexpected places, of joy in the early morning wintery sun.

And I’m an even bigger fan of the way something hard-won feels especially sweet. Scaffolding is like revision (at least it’s like revision more than the Washington Square Arch is like 22 year old me). It’s ugly and functional and it doesn’t seem especially inspired. It takes so much longer than anticipated. It is impossible to see the good poking through. It’s hard to even know what work is happening, just that there is work happening, or at least there should be. And then there’s that moment— that winter sun moment— when the story emerges from underneath all that, when something beautiful and real is finally visible, is finally within reach.

I write for that moment. I write for the way work feels hard and then suddenly feels magical. My favorite thing about writing is that I can keep trying and trying and trying and it feels, on a good day, like if I try hard enough, I will get there. The story will become what I want it to be, or, maybe more likely, a story I never expected but that somehow does work. I love revision. I love the promise of what is underneath, what will someday come to be, and how I don’t know, while I’m working, exactly what that will look like or feel like or, actually, be.

Which— maybe I was right, in fact, about the arch. Maybe I am the Washington Square Arch, maybe we all are. We are the unexpected thing underneath all that work. We are what we are waiting for. We, our stories, our lives, are the moment of tiny joy when we get to see things without the work on top, without the scaffolding.

And maybe we and our stories are all New York, too, or any major city, where the work will begin again, and again and again. Where is always scaffolding. And there is always, too, the promise of it being taken down, and revealing what is special about the perfectly regular thing hiding beneath, beautiful for how hard we have worked on it, and how long we have waited to see it become.

Book News

• My picture book’s release is right around the corner, at the end of April! It would mean the world if you could preorder the book— preorders help the publisher know there is a demand for the book, and can make a huge difference in how many readers the book ultimately reaches. And I would love this book to reach a lot of families. I actually even have the book in my own home now! It’s gorgeous and it represents so much of what I believe about parenting and also life— it’s about being a kid whose feelings are “too big”, and the work of trying to make them fit in small spaces. It promises kids that big feelings are beautiful and that maybe even the grownups have them too. I will be celebrating the launch of this book— hopefully with you and your kids!— on May 5th at 11am at Books Are Magic, Montague location.

Recommendations

• This (and Uno) is my favorite game to play with my kindergartener. Great if you have a very game-minded kid, it does have sort of tricky rules at first, but depending on the kid I think it could be right for ages 5-12, depending on the child.

• I think I could do very well as a tights influencer, and I have two picks for you today— these really beautiful and unbelievably comfy tights that feel just glorious on and look so sleek and elegant and also these GENIUS tights which a friend recommended to me which look like they are sheer but are actually fleece lined, and I’m mad I didn’t come up with this myself, they solve a hundred problems and look so realistic.

• If you follow me on instagram, you have heard me talk about this book. But I have to say it again. It is one my my favorite reads of the last…. five years? decade? forever? I’m not a HUGE non-fiction reader, and this one is an unusual mix of biography and memoir and sociological investigation and… I just think it will forever make my list of top ten books of all time alongside THE GIVER and THE INTERESTINGS and THE HOUSE ON MANGO STREET and THE LIAR’s CLUB and, let’s be honest, VALLEY OF THE DOLLS has to be on that list too. So now WIFEDOM has to join my all time favorites. Please read it. It’s so so so special.

• And one last thing— remember Project Greenlight? There’s a new generation of it on Max, and it’s run by Issa Rae’s production company and it was FANTASTIC to watch, and a great lesson on revising and storytelling and also just a fascinating look at how films get made and how creatives collaborate.