Part One:

In Which Our Protagonist Explains Her Westward Inclination

As a Jersey girl, I stayed within reach of Manhattan for most of my life. For those of you who've never been there, Manhattan is less a city than a giant, open-air theater, with pure hits of drama everywhere. Skyscrapers like building blocks and, downtown, row upon row of old brick buildings, European style, built in a time when automobiles had not yet been invented; beautiful and inconvenient, without laundry or parking facilities. They cluster between outdoor cafes and tiny restaurants run by immigrants from countries you never hear of till they make the evening news. It's a land where even the tenements tend to have carved doorways and sculpted molding, and there's the background noise of a hundred different languages.

You can walk through SoHo in the frozen winter with an Oscar Wilde cane, high black boots, and a black fur coat, if you like - there's so much drama already, no one will look at you twice.

I went to school in this town, then tried the usual mixed-nut assortment of writer's jobs - in publishing, computers, finance, low-budget movies. I kept moving west, though. After graduation, my first apartment was on the Lower East Side, off First Avenue. It was cheap, but places across the Hudson were cheaper; my roommate and I packed up and moved to Hoboken - still a gritty city in those days, with broken glass on the waterfront and working-class bars on every corner. The housing Renaissance followed us, however, and when the town started to look too damned nice, we knew we could no longer afford it. We went a little further west first, just three blocks; then we bit the bullet and moved to Jersey City. (A town just to the... west.)

If this keeps up, I thought, I'll be in California eventually. Which would be good, because I'd like to work in television. Perhaps, though, I ought not do it in state-to-state increments. Given the human lifespan.

Then, about a year and a half ago, the bank that merged with the bank where I worked paused to digest (before, as it turned out, being eaten in turn). I was laid off.

Three months later I was living in LA, blinking at the sun glare, seeking an edible bagel, and wondering what was wrong with these people - they were so damned polite. (Perfect strangers would smile and say hello. "Stop it," I thought, "you're making me nervous.")

NY is a walking city, LA a driving one, but there are exceptions. The Venice canals in late afternoon or early evening. The cliff above the beach in Santa Monica. I was not designed for a sunny climate, but I was less displaced than I'd feared. Even so... recently a friend of mine from Jersey moved into the apartment below mine. As I drove her back from an obligatory shopping expedition, she mentioned Ventnor. "You don't know it?"

"I know it from Monopoly," I said doubtfully.

"It's near Atlantic City. Down the shore."

My god, I thought, it is so good to hear someone say "down the shore"...

And the adventure continues.