Living for the City

Hello there internet. In case you've forgotten, I am Deb and you have clicked on my blog, Deb in the City, which is my coping mechanism to deal with my recent move to a new place. I now unbelievably live in New York. New York City, just like I pictured it, as the blind poet sang. I can’t believe it. OK, I get to live in an incredible house.



And as you can probably tell it’s not really in New York City proper. It’s in Nassau County, Syosset to be more precise. It’s in a beautiful planned community with its own name:



Yes, Stone Hill at Muttontown is where I live. If you go to the web site of Stone Hill at Muttontown, you can hear the soothing theme music and take the virtual tour and see the clubhouse where there’s an indoor pool and you can see a picture of the gates of this gated community. All this, right off the Jericho Turnpike.

But I’m really close to “the city” as the locals call the big town at the western end of the Long Island Railroad and I am drawn there, like a moth to a bug zapper. Pretty hard to get a handle on this giant melting pot and I find a psychic oven mitt of willingness to get lost helpful.

The commuter train required me to change at Jamaica, something I thought geographically impossible, but New York City does have everything, Jamaica included. I duly transferred towards Flatbush and emerged right into Walt Whitman’s “Brooklyn of ample hills” and began my wandering, as Walt would have done. Fort Greene was his neighborhood, after all.

The economic downturn has me in a thrifty mood so I found myself in the Goodwill where I struck up a conversation with fellow home economist, Patrice.


Who it turns out, really is from Jamaica! Patrice was buying things to fill up her barrel of goods to ship back to Jamaica for her family there before she returns for a visit in January. She misses her mother and her sisters, she told me and the hot peppers back home, "that keep you healthy". Patrice is also a fellow nanny and the woman she has worked for the last 20 years recently got fired from her job at one of the famously-collapsed citadels of finance. Patrice does not know if she will have a job for much longer.

Patrice got me thinking that this high-end nanny lifestyle does not offer that much security and I wondered is there a nanny union? We could band together, pool a little money each month and microfinance each other during tough times.

This is Deb in the City, thinking globally but acting locally, saying so long from Long Island.