The Path of the Bookseller

I’m moving to Cleveland. Really. (Well, Cleveland Heights, to be exact. But you get the idea.) As of September, I’m leaving the Bay Area, heading east to be one of the pioneers of the new Tiferet Village.

As I knew would eventually happen, my time here in the Priory is coming to an end. The remaining monks from the order that has run it until now are going off to one of their central houses. A new order is moving in (Franciscans, the classic brown robe and sandals types, though they do hang out on the balcony in t-shirts and shorts), and they’ll need the whole building. I’m the last of the residents in the “guest housing” spaces. So, at the end of June, I’ll have to go.

When I got word that I finally had to move, I had to think seriously about what I wanted to do next. I’d been in a fortunate position living here, since not only was the monthly donation (what elsewhere might be called “rent”) low, but my second job at the church covered it. To keep the job at the church, I would have to remain within a few blocks of it, and there were few affordable prospects in the neighborhood.

I thought of moving elsewhere in the East Bay, or into San Francisco proper, but the costs seemed prohibitive. Booksellers don’t earn much. Thinking of the living situations of my coworkers, I realized that most lived with a partner who earned more, lived with parents, squeezed too many people into inadequate spaces, or lived in the equivalent of a shoebox in a slum. I am, of course, single, and my family is on the far coast. And, at almost fifty, I’ve gotten beyond the romantic excitement of stuffing three or four people into a one bedroom apartment (even without trying to pretend to the landlord that it wasn’t happening).

I also realized that I really hate living alone, and like living with other people with whom I’d get along. In imagining an ideal living situation, I realized that I would like living with other artists of various disciplines, with people committed to Jewish identity and culture, in a city that I could get around in without needing to drive, and in an place that I could afford on a bookseller’s budget.

In early April, I searched the web for “Jewish cohousing”, zeroing in on projects that seemed to match what I wanted. One jumped out of the listings: Tiferet Village.

Tiferet Village is an audacious idea: it would bring Jewish artists, community activists, and students of Jewish spirituality together for year-long fellowships in which they would live, study, and work in their fields together, under the guidance of its founder, Rabbi Yakov Travis. (There’s been press about the project here, here, here, and here.)

I immediately joined the tiferetvillagers mailing list and dove in, introducing myself and asking questions. I got to converse with several other people who were interested and involved. The more I found out, the more I liked it. It was well-backed and well-organized, with appropriate non-profit status and support from business leaders and community members up to and including the mayor of Cleveland Heights. (And one of my favorite bloggers, The Velveteen Rabbi, is on the advisory council.)

Unfortunately, the funding for the fellowships didn’t come through. Several of us decided, though, to dive in anyway. We announced that we were going to come to Cleveland Heights, to find a place together, find jobs, and do what we could working together in the arts. After a blizzard of emails, phone calls, online document edits, and Facebook connections, we had a sort of a plan.

So in September, I’ll be there. Two other people are certain. One is a theatre director with knowledge of and ideas for theatre projects that are beyond anything I could imagine. The other is a sculptor who does large art works that are, again, way off the charts of imagination and skill. Others haven’t yet confirmed, including a brilliant poet and a videographer. And there may be an another, affiliated house forming with people already in Cleveland, funded by another project that specifically focuses on people just emerging from college.

I’m reasonably confident that I’ll have a job when I get there (though I’m taking steps to make sure of it). My company has historically been very good at transferring workers between stores when they need to move for school or other endeavors. We have a store in Cleveland Heights, about two miles from where hoping to live. My pay would be a bit less there, but the cost of living is much lower: you can rent a five-bedroom house in Cleveland Heights for the price of a studio apartment in San Francisco.

And the city has a strong background in and infrastructure for the arts, education, and Judaica. Several colleges are there, as well as an active Jewish community that is working quite hard at attracting creative Jews to settle there and keep the energy going.

I had hoped to move to Cleveland right when my time at the Priory ended, at the end of June, but the timing didn’t quite come together. Fortunately, I’ve found a place to stay through August, taking a room around the corner in the apartment of some members of the church. (Fortunately, their five parrots stay at the other end of the house.) I’ll be able to continue my rounds at the church while living there.

The move is going to be challenging, and potentially expensive. I don’t really have much stuff to move, other than books, CDs, and DVDs. I only own a few pieces of furniture, mostly CD racks that will probably live, with the CDs, at a friend’s house until I can move them later on. I have a really great Ikea office chair, but it would probably cost more to move than to just get a new one. And I hope to pare down my papers, obsolete electronics, etc.

I had thought about moving in a UHaul or something like it, but I avoid driving, and haven’t been behind the wheel of anything in several years. And with the cost of gas as it is now (four times what it was when I did my 2002 national tour!), its cost would probably be prohibitive.

The most attractive possibility would be to use one of those services where a large parking crate with doors appears on the doorstep for us to pack, and then magically reappears at the doorstep where it needs to be unpacked. (It’s rather like the Tardis, except it’s pretty much the same size inside and out.) But that, too, will cost around two thousand dollars to go from Berkeley to Cleveland Heights. Eek.

Since I’m pretty close to broke (see previous kvetching about living on a bookseller’s budget in Berkeley), I’ll have to get imaginative in getting this to happen. But I’m going ahead with it anyway.

I have a lot that I want to get done between now and then.

• Apocryphile Press will be publishing my book The Rounds (created with photographer Chelsey Stewart) later this year, as well as republishing my book Shekhinah: The Presence, so I have to finish work on them. 
• I’ve been posting several of my CDs and live recordings from the past decade or so to the Metatron Press Archives site at the Internet Archive (where I’ve also posted video of the complete performance of Shekhinah from 1992).
• I hope to finish the first draft of The Book of Voices. I’m working on a final chapter, as well as a prologue (though it struck me tonight that the prologue could turn into a story in itself that would wind around the others).
• I’ll be performing a new ensemble piece, “Phoneme Garden (for Toyoji Tomita)” with the Cornelius Cardew Choir on June 21.
• I hope to do some sort of performance at the annual Trans-Bay Skronkathon on July 12.
• I’ll probably have to document my rounds for the church, and possibly train a successor as my predecessor trained me.
• I should brush up my resumé, just in case.
• And then there’s the move itself.

I’m going to miss a lot about the Bay Area, especially the near-perfect weather, excellent food, good friends, and the amazing people I work with everyday at the store.

But it looks like things have lined up in a way that the move to Tiferet Village seems to be the right next step.

Years ago, I had seen the lives of some people that I knew well seem to get trapped in their own expectations, mired in consequences that they regretted but didn’t seem to be able to escape. I swore to myself that I would never have a life that I had just settled for. (Dangling prepositions be damned.)

I realized after a while that any choice would require accepting other circumstances that came with them. We would always be settling for some aspects of a life in order to have others. (For example, I could probably be earning much more money as a technical writer, if I chose to settle for being cloistered in a cubicle rather than to enjoy my active work with customers at the store.) I’ve tried to do the best that I can, then, at being conscious of options, and knowing what I’ve chosen and what I’ve accepted.

So I’m choosing to start out yet again, to move to a city that I’ve never visited, to live with people that I’ve never met, to work on projects that we hope will grow from the eager discussions and learning that we forsee. And I’m excited. Rather than timidly backing into a new situation that attempts to recreate or grasp onto what I had done before, I’m diving in head first. And I’m praying that the waters will be warm. Or cool. Either metaphor will work.