I’ll be honest with you, not too long ago I felt I was falling out of love with New York. It was easier in Upstate New York, new and exciting in Rome, and tranquil in the southwest of France. New York was inconvenient, dirty, and difficult. So we packed up the Brooklyn house (Clara was living in the UK) and said fuck it, I’m leaving this town. I’ll roll in when I need to, hustle a hotel (or to be fair, Yolanda would), do what we needed to do in the city, and head back up to the farm for the rest of our stay until the next flight to Europe. That was doable, if not fun— staying in hotels in neighborhoods I never lived before: Tribeca, Madison Square Park, and the Upper East Side. What I didn’t realize is that all the moving around and living out of a Rimowa trunk was taking its toll on Yolanda.
One night in the house upstate I poured myself a Scotch and headed to the bath. Well into my soak I heard Yolanda stomping around. I yelled out “hey what’s up come in her”— she was clearly agitated about something. She sat on the floor and proceeded to tell me that all these months of moving around and staying at hotels was getting to be too much—she was over it. I said “Ok so how do we fix this? How do I make you happy, what’s it going to take? Do you want to move to California?” (a place where she grew up and for which she has dear spot in her heart.) “No, I don’t know what to do” she said, knowing there was no easy fix. It’s universal knowledge that finding an apartment in NYC is no easy task. But at least we got to the heart of the issue--where is home base? Even though we’ve owned the farm upstate for 20 plus years, it still feels like a weekend place, or during holidays a week-or two max. Then about a year ago we found ourselves in the Delta Lounge in San Francisco, and ran into Russell, a