GAIL HARTMAN: a prose poem

1. I was born in a city of 8 million people called New York. It was crowded and vertical. My hometown newspaper was the New York Times.

2. In the year of my birth, the State of Israel was created. Ronald Reagan divorced his first wife, Jane Wyman. Gandhi was assassinated in New Delhi. Alfred Kinsey issued a revolutionary report on The Sexual Behavior of the Human Male. Tennessee Williams won a Pulitzer Prize for A Streetcar Named Desire. Babe Ruth died, as did Orville Wright. And a first-class postage stamp cost 3 cents.

3. My parents stayed very busy making their mark. My mother saw to it that some good books were published. My father made house calls and paid attention to the hearts of other people.

4. I went to a small all-girls school. I was 18 the first time I met a boy. To tell you the truth, it was anticlimactic, but still pleasant.

5. I made a four-year calendar by hand when I was 14, so that I could mark off the days one by one, until I could get out of the city. While my younger sister loved New York, I hated its loneliness, its crowds, its prohibitions: don’t touch, don’t talk to strangers, don’t cross the street. Danger was lurking everywhere. And 9/11 was 40 years away.

6. I learned some important things in New York: money and happiness have no relationship with one another; ethnocentrism can be a form of prejudice; and psychotherapy is the greatest way to journey inward.

7. I escaped finally to a college in Ohio. This was farther west than anyone in my family had ever gone. My parents feared for me.

8. I loved Ohio. I loved how green it was and how the houses had roofs like triangles, not the flat-line ones of New York. I loved the passion of the antiwar demonstrators. I learned I was a part of an incredible generation. I belonged somewhere.

9. In college, I learned about art history, French literature, creative writing and sex.

10. I moved to our nation’s capitol for a year, married to a nice man. We had two nice cats. I worked at a magazine called National Geographic and I was miserable. I hated the East Coast. I had to get out. Again.

11. We moved to North Dakota, which I know sounds dramatic. It was. My parents almost called the police. There are so many ways to rebel.

12. I fell in love with North Dakota: the flat mustard fields, the summer swimming holes, the adventure of living in a place that was totally foreign to me. I had never heard of the places I discovered: Minot, Manvel, Devils Lake, Durbin, Bisbee, Buxton. The map was like a poem.

13. My marriage was not like a poem, so it ended. He moved to the East Coast and I stayed for six more winters, to be exact. In those years, I found myself. A girl from Manhattan finds out who she is in Grand Forks, North Dakota. Almost a tabloid headline.

14. But just listen to the wealth I acquired in North Dakota: I became a potter; I taught braille; I collected stamps (but only pretty ones); I planted vegetables; I discovered, while driving due south to Fargo at dawn, that the sun rises in the east and sets in the west — which we had only heard about in New York. I studied psychology. I also met and married the love of my life.

15. He and I left North Dakota and moved next door to Minnesota. Years and years of making a household or two, making a baby or two, raising these babies, working at jobs I have loved: at a bookstore, at a radio station, and finally practicing psychotherapy.

16. I have lived in the Midwest for three-quarters of my life. New York is very far away. I almost never go there. I prefer this place, with its magical storms, its grain elevators downtown, its lakes and even its limitations, none of which I can think of at the moment.

17. Illness came into our Minnesota house, but then recovery, for a brief time, did, too. We learned to replace fear with hope, although I never got very good at it. When I drive by a hospital now, I look up and wish all the patients freedom from pain and waiting.

18. Not much time left for me: with good luck, 20 more winters and 20 more gardens. At the beginning, they don’t tell you what matters most: one beautiful ordinary day after another in a place you feel is home.