Roaming Around New Haven

Yesterday, food writer and Los Angeles-lover Jonathan Gold died of pancreatic cancer, a disease so crushing he went from diagnosis to death in just a few weeks. As with Anthony Bourdain’s suicide last month, news of his passing has propelled me into a very particular headspace – at once restless and reflective.

Both Bourdain and Gold were people to whom the notion of place meant a lot. The world was famously Bourdain’s backyard – he was perhaps modern media’s quintessential roamer – but Gold’s relationship to location was different. He loved one place deeply and feelingly: Los Angeles. His writing about the city and its food transformed my impression of LA from Cher Horowitz stereotypes to some semblance of understanding.

And lately, though I write here about the urge for going, I’ve been thinking a lot about the notion of home – making one, cultivating one, sustaining one. On this subject I learned a lot from Gold too. Years ago, when I watched City of Gold, the documentary about Los Angeles through Gold’s eyes, I was struck by the beauty of his home life – his love and respect for his wife, his easy rapport with his kids, and the happily aimless way he ambled through his home, navigating around stacks of books so high they dwarfed his furniture and occupied half the width of his stairs.

Gold was born, grew up in, and died in Los Angeles – his affection for the city was steadfast. I, on the other hand, tend to transfer my allegiance with every new location, every move, every trip. But Gold’s death has gotten me thinking about the first city I ever really loved living in – New Haven, Connecticut.

I moved to New Haven in August 2008. I’d been just once before – for a grad school interview in the dead of the previous winter – but I arrived knowing the city the way you know New York, London, or Paris simply by virtue of being alive. The town’s preppy and ivy-covered aesthetic was as imprinted in my mind’s eye as any cityscape or skyline.

New Haven itself is special, I think. It marries the pretty privilege you’d expect from an East Coast university town with some unspecified edginess that makes it beautiful but not bland. It’s a joy to just hang out in – coasting along cobblestones, perching on the edge of some significant statue to eat tamales, idly watching Skull & Bones to see if someone will arrive or depart from its forbidding front doors (nobody ever does). But I also know better than to think I’m at all objective about the city. After all, the charm I see in New Haven is so personal.

Prior to moving New Haven, I spent all my life pining for a certain kind of world – a world of elsewhere. My high school and undergraduate years were largely eras of delayed gratification – of reading books that transported me elsewhere, of stacking my resume to propel me elsewhere, of studying endlessly to earn my way elsewhere. Then came the first truly extraordinary thing to ever happen to me – I got into Yale’s MBA program when I was 22. Yale and New Haven had been emblematic of everything I’d always wanted but never truly believed I’d get. Then I did. In New Haven, I tried on a new self (and mostly kept it, minus the J.Crew wardrobe). It’s my coming-of-age city and I’m therefore rampantly nostalgic about the place.

A few months ago, I went back with my Mom. She drove there from Canada and we spent the weekend retracing the well-worn contours of my literature-laden New Haven memories – getting scone crumbs all over hardcovers at Atticus, eating sandwiches with names such as Sense & SensiBLT and Hamingway & Cheese at the Book Trader Café, and spending hours lingering over newspapers and the free lobby coffee of my all-time favorite hotel, The Study. New Haven is the first place that I took my love of reading out of my bedroom and into parks, cafes, and other public spaces. It felt great to do it with her.

At the time, the same weekend that my Mom and I were wandering this magically manageable city, I happened to be reading a lot of Jonathan Gold’s old columns. The Los Angeles vistas of his writing – strip malls and superhighways and sun-bleached taco cart canopies – were very different than New Haven’s misty March views. Yet I still kept seeing his observations everywhere I turned. The way light creeps across buildings. The snatches of music and simmering smells coming from restaurant doors as they swing open. The loveliness of just lingering in a place and reveling in all there is to enjoy about it.

I’ll miss Jonathan’s writing. What I’ll miss even more is the appreciation of place he ignited in me. Roaming is delightful. But so is delighting in wherever you happen to be.