sunrise

Somehow it was a piece of cake to stay up in New Haven until 6:15 AM engaged in intensive writing and design... even though I can't stay up in Mechelen past 4 AM to save my life. Clearly there's something in the air at Yale. Aerosolized caffeine? Or just pure academic energy?

I took a stroll through New Haven to cure myself of a miserable case of jetlag and found my heart brimming with emotions I could hardly identify. I'd always missed New Haven, but yesterday afternoon I remembered some of the precise reasons why. Along the way, I picked up so many summer arts brochures, I could have occupied myself for a week, although I will probably drag an understanding soul along later. I did give in and visit the Ely Slade Gallery while carrying a bagful of Asian loot from the familiar old Hong Kong Grocery on the way home to a third-floor apartment on thoroughly New England-y Trumbull Street.

The diversity of America is such a relief. Not until my stroll did I realize I had not spoken to a single black person in Belgium since my first week of living in Mechelen, when a black lady living there and working in Brussels offered me directions as I was leaving the train for Mechelen, convinced that I was not headed there but to Antwerp (since who would believe in Asians living in Mechelen?). Now I've got two African American roommates (well, one-and-a-half) ragging on the white population of suburbian Connecticut. Thank goodness. Although now that I consider it, my workplace is still entirely white... surprise, surprise, the upper echelons of Yale society.

The openness and friendliness of people is a breath of fresh air. I enjoyed a lively chat with a woman going through Columbia business school on a free ride and a woman who went through Case Western on a free ride on the Metro-North from NYC, and we didn't need a reason to communicate. We just started talking, and discovered we had a few remarkable things in common.

The strangest thing that made me feel as if I had come home was that I had been puzzling for the past few days over a television show I had seen on the Public Broadcasting Station (PBS) when I was maybe six years old and which had inexplicably returned to my conscious memory. The main characters of the show, two children, run into an eccentric artist in an innercity ghetto building a dizzying set of spiraling towers out of the garbage that local residents threw away. I had wondered ever since if the program had described a real person and structure or was, more likely, simply a fantastic story, for that is what it seemed likely to be. Well, the Case Western grad was reading a copy of the New York Times with a photo that I instantly recognized, although I had last seen it perhaps two decades ago. And I finally learned the facts: That program documented the famous Watts Towers in Los Angeles, built by the indeed eccentric and remarkable Simon Rodia.

Welcome back, Tiffany--to your past and your future. And go to bed. It may not bother you in the Yale air, but your fingers are trembling at the keyboard.