Chapter Excerpt

I am standing on a platform two stories above the terra firma of Manhattan. In my right hand, I hold the bar of a trapeze swing. The swing pulls me forward, and the only thing keeping me on the platform is the sure hold my trapeze instructor has on the loop of my safety harness. This is not the time to think about my trust issues. My left hand is frozen in its grip to a metal stand on the platform.

I'm supposed to let go.
But I can't.

If I look straight ahead, I can see the towers of Battery Park City, close to Ground Zero. If I look right, I can see the blue-gray waters of the Hudson. I don't look left because I'm too busy looking down. That's where the safety net is.

Manny, the instructor, starts to talk to me gently, the way you would talk to someone perched on a building ledge. Only in this case you want the person to jump.

"I've got you," he says. "I've held on to men who weigh more than three times what you do. I've got you, so you can take your left hand and put it on the bar."

My toes are curled over the edge of the platform, just as Manny told me. I am trying to jut my hips out, just the way Manny told me. But when I lift my left hand from its perch of seeming safety, I don't feel Manny's hold on me; I feel the trapeze bar pulling me down, down, down, to trapeze fatality and, even worse - embarrassment. I return to my death clutch on the iron railing.

You might ask how I got here.
I could tell you it's because for more than a year now I have cycled past the nets and swings of this trapeze school set up by the river, and I have always stopped, caught by the spectacle of someone volunteering for flight.

Or I could tell you that it feels as though I've already made bigger jumps.

Manny is pushing me a little now, to show me he really is back there to make sure I won't fall. It's not often you get a safety harness in life, and I decide to trust this one. My left hand goes to the trapeze bar, and to my surprise, I'm right where I should be. I'm wobbling a little, but I'm still there, balanced on the edge of the platform.

"OK," Manny says. "When I say, 'Hup!' you'll jump." The cry rings through the air: "One-two-three-HUP!"

I spring up on my feet and jump - right back onto the platform. I have gone exactly nowhere.

"No, Katherine." I hear the bemused voice of Manny behind me. "You have to jump forward.

"HUP!"
The same thing happens. Several times. It turns out that I am great at jumping in place. And then- I don't know if Manny pushes me or if I spring forward of my own will- I am whooshing through the air, hanging from the trapeze, my body arcing as I swing forward and then back and forward and then back.

I'm flying.

On Leap Day 2004 I took an actual leap, leaving behind the Midwestern city where I came of age, married, divorced, worked, lived, loved, and prospered for more than two decades, to move to New York. I cried so hard at the airport curb that the strangers milling around me must have thought I was on my way to a funeral. If they had offered me condolences, I would have accepted them. I felt, in fact, that a loved one was dying, that a life so known and dear to me was ending: my old, soon-to-be-former, settled life, in which I knew the tracks of the coming days the way I knew without looking where the spoons were in my silverware drawer. Someone was pushing that woman off the platform, and it was me. There was no safety net. Before that day, I had been an earthbound creature: think root vegetable. Now I was on my way to a new job, a new life, and a new city where I could count the number of friends I had on one hand. I was a few months shy of my forty-fifth birthday, a confirmed daughter of the prairie who had grown up in Moline, Illinois, gone to college and graduate school in Chicago, and then moved to St. Paul, Minnesota. I was as Midwestern as weak coffee at supper and ham sandwiches at a funeral lunch. I never did understand why Chicago was called the Second City when it was always the First City to me. The water and the valleys of the Hudson were unknown to me; I was bound for life to the muddy currents of the Mississippi.

So why was I getting on a plane to New York? Well, as I like to tell people, on Leap Day 2004 I moved to midlife and had a Manhattan crisis.

I had never meant to live in New York. Then again, I had never meant to become a middle-aged woman with bifocals either. It's funny how that happens. One day, your thirties seem to stretch in front of you for what feels like a luxurious length of time, and the next you don't quite recognize that woman in the mirror. I have friends who say soothingly, "Oh, you're not middle-aged," and all I can think is that just because I'm older doesn't mean I have lost my ability to do arithmetic. The odds that I will live to be a hundred are slim. You do the math; I'm middle-aged.

I don't think I moved to Manhattan because I was having a midlife crisis, but I know it looks that way. Some women get their hair dyed; this woman gave up a life and community she'd invested twenty years in to start over in a metropolis that is a fulcrum of youth and power. Midway through the journey of his life, Dante found himself in a dark wood; midway through my life, I found myself in New York and my own version of a divine comedy. I came of age in the Midwest; I came of middle age in Manhattan.

So I'm flying through the air next to the Hudson River. Pedestrians who stopped to witness my fear on the platform now stop to applaud my flight. Django, one of the other instructors, is manipulating the rigging to my safety harness as I fly.

"Hey, Katherine!" he yells up to me. "You can say something, you know."

I can hear him laughing. Well, at least I'm amusing him. Earlier, all of the instructors had shown the sort of diffidence you expect from the wranglers at a dude ranch when they're forced to haul out Brownie, the thirteen-year-old pony, for the tourist who can't ride.

I manage one word and it's this: "Down." On his count, I let go of the bar and flop into the safety net. I bounce my way to the dismount area, and it's here that I encounter my real fear. To get back on the ground, I am supposed to somersault onto a padded mat some six feet below me.

Now this, I think, is crazy. I would rather leap off a pedestal into thin air - I would rather do it twice - than be forced to somersault into a six-foot drop.

"I can't do it," I hear myself say. Django grins. He's amiable - tall, lean, and rangy, probably in his early twenties, with a head of auburn dreadlocks. "C'mon," he says. "You were just on the trapeze. You can do this."

No, I tell him, I can't.

Here's what I don't tell him: When I signed up for this class, I had anticipated my fear of heights. I had anticipated my fear of flying. I had anticipated my control issues. What I hadn't counted on was my childhood nemesis: tumbling. I have floundered at it since grade school, and all the weekends at the Turners Club with little gymnasts in pink leotards never helped me. I feared it then and I still hate it now. In junior high, I once took a D rather than try to do a backward somersault in gym class. I still remember Miss Baum pleading with me, "You'll lose your place on the honor roll!" Normally, this was an argument that would have convinced me to perform any number of untold stunts, but in this case, I didn't care. I hated it that much.

I begin to panic; I can't move. I really, really can't do this. Tears spring into my eyes. Django looks annoyed. The next student can't fly until my can has left the safety net, and my can apparently isn't moving. "Just put your hands here," he says, indicating two loops woven into the side of the net, "and then flip over and I'll catch you."

"I think I have trust issues," I spit out. Now I feel like I'm going to hyperventilate. "Can't I just sort of roll over or jump?"

Django shakes his head. Nope. I could really hurt myself that way.

"Can't I just . . . ?"

Django loses patience. "If you want," he snaps, "you can crawl over to the ladder and climb down."

I look and then realize that getting onto the ladder will require me to swing my body several feet through the air so that my hands can reach and grab on to the rungs- and this is without a safety harness. It's death either way, that's for sure, and I choose the path where at least someone is going to spot me. I clutch the cloth loops, shimmy half my body over the net, tuck my head, and roll.

Django flips me over and I stand upright, a slightly shaken, slightly overweight woman who hates to tumble but loves to fly.

I want to go back up.

You might ask what midlife has to do with Manhattan. The answer is change. Walk the same block in this city for even a few months and you witness transformation- the tiny flower shop morphs into a designer perfumery, the video store suddenly pops up as an espresso joint. Scaffolding and plywood can appear overnight on any given corner, and you can track the daily evolutions on your way to the subway. Change is such a constant here that people have to become accustomed to it, if not inured. Novelist Colson Whitehead was thinking of the transitory nature of the storefronts and corners when he wrote that you become a New Yorker "when what was there before is more solid and real than what is here now." That fine newspaperman of the old school, Pete Hamill, calls New York the Capital of Nostalgia. In his book Downtown: My Manhattan, he tells us that the New York version of nostalgia isn't just about buildings and the people who live in them: "It involves an almost fatalistic acceptance of the permanent presence of loss. Nothing will ever stay the same. Tuesday turns into Wednesday and something valuable is behind you forever. An 'is' has become a 'was.'"

I read those words the first summer I was here, registering an empathetic pang. I had left a job as the host of a regional public radio show to come to New York for a shot at a national audience, as cohost for Al Franken as he jumpstarted the liberal Air America Radio network. It was a calculated risk. Before that point, I had lived a life that followed a careful path; I was vested with a pension when I was twentyseven. Now I was working as a sidekick for a start-up operation so high profile that I could read in the Wall Street Journal about why we didn't make payroll. The week I discovered the payments on our health-care policies had lapsed, I panicked and called my former boss in St. Paul and asked if my old job was still open. He called me back to announce in sorrowful tones that the operative sentiment was that if I wanted to go away so bad, I could stay away. I felt like an "is" who had become a "was." And while my loss wasn't quite the same, I was feeling an overwhelming longing for my old life, its sweetness and its security. I started to joke with friends that I had become an urban version of a hobbit: all I really wanted to do was go back to the Shire. In New York, my life appeared to me in stark outline. I was divorced, childless, and alone in a new city. There were days I walked the streets and thought, How did I get here?

To accept that you are middle-aged means to accept a permanent presence of loss, that Tuesdays are overtaken by Wednesdays, that your thirties have been trumped by your forties - and that they'll soon be trumped by your fifties and sixties and so on. I had already felt loss in my life, and it felt like a harsh bargain that now I had to accept it as a constant presence. I missed those days when I was younger, when thinking about the future gave me the rich feeling of infinite chances, that my future was hemmed in only by the choices I made. It's hard to let that feeling go, to square your shoulders and look at finite reality, to accept that maybe there are going to be only one or two more chances at transformation left.

And that's why, when the offer came to move to New York, I took it.

I wasn't sure how many more chances would come my way.

Of the crew assembled this afternoon for our trapeze lesson, a woman named Paulette is closest to me in age and spirit. Her brother had bought her a gift certificate to the aerialist school for her fiftieth birthday. Our other classmates include a tattooed graphic artist who is on his fourth week of lessons, a slender woman with a slight British accent, and a boyfriend/ girlfriend duo from Brooklyn in their early twenties.

Manny gives us his opening spiel about how we'll learn to hang from our knees on the trapeze, and how we'll learn to do a backflip off the swing. When I ask, "Um, is it OK if we just swing? Because that was the height of my ambitions," it is Paulette who laughs and nods in empathy.

When Paulette gets to the top of the platform, she balks. "I just can't do this," I hear her say. "I'm sorry. I can't." On the ground, Django mutters, "Hope she does it. Hope she doesn't come down."

Paulette starts to climb off the platform. "C'mon, do it," Django says under his breath. He turns to me and adds, "Ninety percent of the people who climb down the first time, they don't go back up."

When Paulette gets her feet back on the ground, I want to put my arm around her.

"It's that left bar, isn't it?" I say. "I know exactly how you feel."

"It's scarier than I thought," she says. "A lot scarier." When it's Paulette's turn again, she hesitates, but we all urge her to go back up. When she ascends the ladder the second time, I am fairly sure she'll succeed. But she pauses on the platform for what seems like many minutes, and I realize that inside my head I am repeating a trapeze mantra for her: You can do it, you can do it, you can do it. Finally, she gives a hesitant jump and swings through the air. Our whole class cheers.

I'm reminded of how, as a child, I was terrified by the deep end of the pool. I would wade from the shallows to the dip in the pool floor that indicated deeper water, but once I had to tread water to stay afloat, once my feet hit that watery nothingness instead of the tile at the bottom of the pool, my fear would always draw me back. When I finally started going into the deep end, I would crouch by the edge of the pool and then fall into the water like a dropped piece of fruit, scuttling back to the side as soon as I surfaced. It took a long time before I could just dive in with aplomb.

And that's the thing about trapeze. You can't sidle into it. And for most of my life, I've been a really good sidler. Django says to me later, "You came here by yourself, didn't you? Looks like you made some friends."

"Well, sure," I tell him. "Bomb threats, subway fires, trapeze lessons- they're all bonding experiences."

"Those are good analogies for trapeze," he says, smirking. Not really, I want to say. Trapeze is a good analogy for life. The reason I climb back up the ladder to the platform isn't because of the sense of flight. What I like is the moment before I reach for the swing, the moment of anticipation before my left hand grabs on to the bar and I am trembling on the edge and it is up to me and the count of one-two-three-HUP! It turns out I like to leap.

Copyright © 2006 by Katherine Lanpher

A different excerpt from Leap Days can also be read in the October 2006 issue of MORE magazine.