Rating My Career Through Its Office Spaces: 1962 to the Present

1962 (Winter).  Most depressing office space.  Troy Welfare Department, A tiny steel windowless office with one steel desk and one steel cabinet. It was set in the middle of a storage area that served the floor where indigent nursing home patients slowly died. I was 19 and a Bennington freshman and this was the only job I could find during our non-resident working term.  My best friend had died right before Christmas in a fire. During the next two months in that terrible space, I recorded inventory items on index cards: house dresses, bathrobes, caps, and floppy slippers.  For an hour in the morning I added those that had come in and for an hour in the evening I subtracted those that went out. At lunch I ate a sandwich in a small room a few feet from the storage area with three or four other Welfare Department workers, all older women who had worked there for centuries.  During the rest of the day, I read Kafka and Camus and considered the meaninglessness of my life, terrified both of dying and particularly of dying without losing my virginity. 

1973.  Scariest office space.  Frontlash. A small office on 19th Street and Third Ave., where I served as administrative assistant for the sour vice president of a Social Democrats (SD) front that organized voter registration drives for the unions. A single mother with my small son and daughter living in Manhattan, this was my first job after five years as an Air Force wife.  Being anti-war and ignorantly left wing, I was excited about working for a socialist organization, until I unhappily learned that, although great on civil rights and unions, SD was anti-communist to the extent that it supported the Viet Nam war.  Except for occasional volunteers and a part-time secretary, the staff consisted only of me and my boss, who ran the tiny organization as if it were US Steel.  Although only three feet away in her own office, she buzzed my intercom when she wanted to talk, usually about how to underpay the secretary or berating me for spending my free time trying to prevent the closure of my day care center.   Our office adjoined the League for Industrial Democracy (LID), another SD front, where three other women worked (I don't know what it did).  The neighborhood was shabby and little desolate, and one afternoon, with my boss gone, a young man came through the door pretending to be looking for design work.  Instead, however, he ushered me into the LID offices, where his partner was standing over its staff lying on the floor, tied and gagged. I joined them, tape across my mouth, feeling the cold tile under my cheek, repeating silently over and over as they went through our desks, collecting our meager $25 in petty cash, "Get out, get out, get out, get out." (My response to danger, I learned then, is possum-like.) I was glad my boss wasn't there.  I'm sure she would have gotten us killed.  Frontlash moved to Washington DC a few months later, leaving me unemployed. Secretary jobs were easy to get, however, and my only criterion for the next one was to have it uptown, working for a kind boss, which I did, an elderly economist at the National Bureau of Economic Research, where I spend a pleasant few years and helped organize a union there.

1978 - 1980:  Only time I cried over office space.  Scientific American.  Started as a secretary in 1975, when everyone in this benevolent company had their own office.  Expansion of the company forced me into the hall manning a desk outside my boss's office, feeling so degraded that I wept all day (little did I know that cubes that awaited me in my future).  Nevertheless, I typed out two novels during that period of exposure and was promoted and eventually moved back into an enclosed space.  Ended up not being so bad.

1982-1991.  Best office space. Scientific American. A corner office on Madison and 48th on the 11th floor, where I had a view of Rockefeller Center until a developer constructed a large building between us that eventually obstructed the view.   I spent the years in that splendid office, first as production manager of a very small division that produced loose-leaf medical texts, then its publisher, and finally a vice president within the company itself.  While serving as production manager, I became pregnant with Willie, my youngest son.  Instead of taking the full six-month maternity leave, I returned early and built a nest in the corner of my office, where my infant slept and whom I nursed while discussing paper and print jobs with good natured, tolerant sales reps. Promoted to publisher, I discovered the obsessive joys of working with electronic spreadsheets and entered with my wonderful crew the brave new world of electronic publishing.  Reluctantly making me a vice president of Scientific America in 1984, my new German bosses referred to my management style as Snow White and the 21 Dwarfs.  We struggled, without comprehending each other, for a few years, happily parting company in 1991.

1992-2004. Happiest office space.  Home office. A carved out corner of our apartment, where my Mac, my partner, and I built a small business over the course of ten years and I gave myself an education in web design, print-layout, and medicine. I finally was able to write mysteries that got published -- 102 cases on common diseases, which my partner sold as print and electronic patient information to medical libraries and the growing body of on-line medical sites.  Various cats sat in a basket next my computer, only occasionally stepping on the keyboard.  Michael and my older son Geoff worked a block away and would come home occasionally for lunch.  I was there every day when Willie came home from school, who commented at one point, "Mom, why don't you work in an office like other moms?" It was the best time.

2006-2008.   Most beautiful office space.  WebMD/Medscape. A large open cube protruding at the end of a row of other cubes. Back into corporate life after selling our business for shares, which subsequently tanked, I worked as an editorial director for Medscape, the professional side of WebMD, and was surprisingly content. The offices were downtown in the Meatpacking district, and the editorial group, although perched in cubes, was set apart from the rest of the company, and my cube was set apart from my colleagues.  When I swung my chair around, I looked out along a sweep of windows that provided a view of all lower Manhattan, which included a very tiny Statue of Liberty.  The drama of storms and sunsets coming across the Hudson far compensated for my small cubal area. 

2009-2013. Most absurd and worst office space. WebMD/Medscape. Total cube land, built on the hypocritical premise that it would increase communication and spur creativity, when actually it was designed, like pig farms, to save money. They had moved the editors uptown to 50^th and 8^th Avenue, where even managers were lodged in cubes, so talking spontaneously and confidentially with your boss became impossible. No privacy (phone calls heard by all, computer screen revealed to all who passed), absence exposure so lunch gobbled at ones desk between keystrokes, the only creative communication with colleagues being the occasional gophering (heads pop up above the cube wall, noises made, then shushed down by everyone on the vast floor), and continual distraction by others goffering or appearing suddenly and frighteningly behind your back wanting to communicate something. Upon standing up, the view was a despairing landscape of rectangles, beyond which windows looked out on an equally despairing landscape of corporate buildings.  Everyone wanted to work at home.  

2014. A room with a view: Art Science Code. Back to the home office, this time with windows and sporadic hours.  I'm a partner in Art Science Code, with my other two being Michael and Geoff.   Work doesn't pay much but involves this blog, my unpublished novels, Facebook time, and the occasional welcome contract from Medscape. 

The Body in the Barn

A white van has been parked all day outside the huge apple barn that supports our apartment off of its south side. Michael is in the city, so I am alone here with my cat.  I spotted the van in the morning and it is still here several hours later. A couple of antique dealers rent much of the space in the barn, pleasant guys who have shops in Hudson.  They show up every week or so, bringing in or taking out stuff, but the van doesn't belong to either of them.  And no one is in the barn.  Or at least no one alive.

I take a picture of the license plate and text it to my friend and landlord to see if he recognizes the car.  He doesn't.  He says he'll call Ben, one of the antique dealers and see if he recognizes it.  Ben doesn't, but says he'll come out to the barn and check it out.  I'm not sure what to do until he comes.

Here's what I learned about growing upstate in New York:  it is far crazier and deadlier than the city is. My kids attended Manhattan public schools and no one they knew died.  In the late fifties and early sixties, before I was 18, three of my friends from our idyllic American small town were killed in car accidents and one in a fire. Soon after I left high school, a girl I had babysat for hanged herself after taking LSD and a two-year old, whom I had also babysat for, was run over by a truck.  One of my mother's friends tried to commit suicide and was given electroconvulsive therapy during the era when it made your toes curl and your teeth fall out.   Our neighbor ran off to Mexico with the mailman and came back after several months to her husband, who subsequently was run over by a car after he pushed his prodigal wife out of its path.  The father of a boy I knew in school shot his wife and a few of his children.  We had our very own Nazi bund until the mid fifties, and, no surprise, the girls' female high school coach and the Boy Scout leader were pedophiles.  There were eight very old Democrats; everyone else was a Republican.

Upstate New York itself is the birthplace of several fanatics, notably Joseph Smith and John Brown, and has housed a slew of serial killers -- Joel Rifkin, Gary Evans, Arthur Shawcross, and Robert Garrow.  It provided the original homes for the Shakers and Millerites, who both pinned down apocalypse dates that came and went without incident. Upstate has also been the residence of several famous authors whose books were too depressing for me to get through (Joyce Carol Oates, John Gardner, Hermann Melville, William Kennedy). Richard Russo and Kurt Vonnegut and the cartoonist Gary Trudeau also come from upstate and are much more fun to read but, naturally, deeply pessimistic.

My hometown lies close to the Vermont border, and unlike its New England neighbor, the countryside still retains an emptiness beneath its rough landscape of spare sunlight and stubby grass.  My Peckham ancestors had farmed its impossible soil since the 1700s, where rocks emerge every spring and need to be harvested before the short-season vegetables can be planted.  Winters are eternal.  I often thought of my home country as having no ghosts, only a constant rebirth of unhappy self-inventing autodidacts who learn nothing from their history or genetic code.  

If you take route 43 out of my old town and head toward Vermont, the minute you go over the border, you're in an Eden of cultured lawns and farmlands, fat cows, covered bridges, maple syrup, and universal health care.  I went to Bennington College, which was 30 miles east of my hometown and that might have been 30 light years.  From there, I left behind my upstate neighbors chewing on their bones and snarling in their caves and headed south to Manhattan, my Sane Haven for the next fifty years.

To be clear, until today I haven't considered the Hudson Valley where I live now to be the dystopian Upstate New York of my youth. The river connects Hudson, the town, directly with The City from which it curls up like a languid odalisque, made famously beautiful by the Hudson River School painters, and especially by their leader Frederick Church, who built his wonderful folly Olana right next door to our property. My new town is a mecca for hipsters and hippies and the residence of a diverse underclass, who all help balance the political conservatism of its natives. A friendly spawn of its Great Mother to the South, Hudson is a place where I can live and possibly die.

But now, waiting for Ben to come, I have some doubts that this place is all that different from the rest of the Upstate Death Trip.  The van, which has a bumper sticker in German, has now been outside the barn for seven hours.

 Our apartment is protected from its neighboring cavernous spaces by a single door in our living room locked only with a flimsy hook and eye. I am sure that somewhere very close to me and my cat is a corpse hidden among the antiques, dangling from a wizened puppet or hanging over a steam calliope that will begin playing the minute I open my door. "Don't go in, Carol!" echoes every horror movie ever made.  So, unlike their moronic heroines, I go outside and sit on the wooden swing in the back yard to wait for Ben.  I plan on watching his back when he goes in to look for the body.

Apple blossoms and lilacs scent the air and my garden is becoming lively with tulips, hyacinths, and pansies. The late afternoon golden sun sheds silky green shadows across the grass. It is the best day so far this year.  I swing back and forth like a kid and sort of forget about the van until Ben pulls up and gets out.  He checks the car.  "Oh, I know who this is," he says.  "I recognize the bumper sticker.  Nice guy," He pulls out his cell and makes a call.  The owner, it turns out, is helping out the other dealer who rents barn space and who is at Brimfield today, a major antique show held twice a year in Massachusetts.  The guy will pick up the van when he gets back.  I thank Ben, who loads a couple of old things into his own space and takes off. 

I get back on the swing and squeak it back and forth into the coming bird-filled flower-filled May evening. I should have offered him a glass of Chardonnay.  I have a nice one that I bought earlier from the terrific wine store in town. It would be good to know more people here.

Turning off the Weepy Faucet

I spent the first part of last week in New York, packing boxes and weeping.  I was a leaky faucet of nostalgia.  It wasn't the stuff that brought out the sense of loss -- we can bring all the crap we want with us -- the spaces carved out the memories, people and events that appeared and disappeared like holograms. Our apartment is a set of jewel boxes, each small room shoving ghosts from its walls every time I walked into one.  Our kids sprawled out on beds, playing music, video games, eating, talking, joking around, melting back into their own lives. Toddler grandchildren skating back and forth along the floorboards, becoming longer and slower between increasingly infrequent visits.  Scenes from our marriage riding the sine waves of happiness and conflict in the tiny dark bedroom.  The corners of our home businesses lit up by screens that urged out thought and, amazingly, some money.  The open kitchen where food was delivered into the living area on large platters to serve decades of family and friends, some dead now, some missing, and some remaining, coming to celebrate under the high ceiling our small and large events throughout this quarter of a century.

Then, there are the spaces around the building where spirits rise up from the sidewalks and the streets. The routine morning route from our apartment to the subway, our local restaurants where everyone knew at least our first names, the movie theater around the corner, the glorious Union Square Green Market -- the only mark of weather -- painting the seasons from drab to dazzling.  And, on our corner, the Twins eternally rising and collapsing in some terrible loop where Fifth  reaches to the south; then, on turning, the comforting and solid Empire State Building stretching and yawning to the north.  The small family stories and restaurants opening and closing to the rising rents until only the gaping mouths of the mall stores support the neighborhood, no longer friendly.  “Do you live here?” The New Balance sales person asked when I bought my new trainers last week at their store across Fifth.   I couldn’t speak. 

On Thursday, we headed back to Hudson and had dinner at DaBa's, our local hangout here for great food and bar talk.  Feeling miserable and uncertain about our choices, I chomped on my comforting fish taco and started a conversation with the woman next to me, a heavy set person, who gave her age away when she said she had graduated from Harvard-Radcliffe.  She has a Chinese herbal business in a nearby town, but seemed a bit befuddled, maybe from the martini, and I couldn't quite figure out what the business was.  It didn't sound like she grew or even sold the herbs.  I gathered she was a consultant. Another ex-pat, she moved up to the area about 10 years ago. After we talked a bit about the value, or lack of it, of Chinese Medicine, the conversation began to drift to the local organic/ecologic movements in Columbia county.   "It's the center of everything going on now in the country," she said.  "It's like an underground network for the ecology movement." Anthroposophy and biodynamic farming, alternative energy business, permaculture, the invasive-native species war, locavore restaurants and farmer's markets, herbal remedies and alternative treatment centers, the Cornell extension center, seed libraries, happy cows and pigs grazing across wide green swaths.  "You just have to find the people involved." 

On Friday, the contractor and excavator came to mark out the potential site for building a house -- as green as possible -- on our land, which is chock full of invasive species needing mass extermination, native plants that are homes for critters and pollinators and require a shepherd, potential plots for more local plants and for healthy vegetables -- maybe enough to feed people outside my kitchen.  All of these spaces without ghosts waiting for the final efforts of my life. "Die Kunst ist ewig, ihre Formen wandelnsich" (Rudolph Steiner).  The art is eternal; only the shapes shift. I turned off the faucet.