2009 June

June 20, 2009 by Joseph Rand

Last night was poker night.

For the past two years or so, I’ve been part of a very fun group of people who play an irregularly scheduled cheap-money poker tournament at various homes in Manhattan. Mostly Fordham Law grads who went to school with my friend Jack (odd coincidence is I used to teach there, but that’s not how I know any of them). I’ve hosted a bunch of times.

So this was my last time hosting, and to make it extra-super-duper-special, we also hosted an extraordinarily unsettlingly competitive game of Cranium run by the wife. People don’t realize what a terror she is at games, to the point that I like playing a completely different game in a totally different part of the apartment when she’s playing Cranium. So she inflicted her competitive zeal on her group, and my group played a nice laid-back game of poker.

So that’s what it’s come to. I guess once you turn 40, and are getting ready to move to Suma, the fun night out really does become poker and Cranium. And, to be honest, I had a lot more fun just hanging out, eating pizza, playing poker, and listen to my wife yell at our friends, than I’ve had at any club or bar or lounge or restaurant I went to all year. Guess I’m getting old.

Lessons for Exiles: How do you get city people to the suburbs?

So my wife and I are looking for a new place in SUMA, and we’re telling our friends about it. Trying to get them excited, because we’d like to, you know, stay friends with them, and it would help if they were willing to, you know, visit us now and then.

It’s becoming increasingly clear that we’re never going to see them again.

And I really don’t blame them, because I never visited my friends who left the city. Once they left, it was like the Morlocks got them. We cast them from our minds. Chris and Kate have left 83rd and Third and they’re now in Rye, and let us not speak of them again….

So I was just as bad when I was on the cool, Manhattan side of that equation. I was never taking a weekend night to schlep out to Scarsdale or Montclair or God-Forbid-Long-Island to go visit someone who had the effrontery to leave this great city. Almost as if their choice to leave, by itself, rendered them somewhat less interesting.

I guess I deserve nothing better. I’m sure I’ll find nice, umm, replacement friends.

Anyway, I do have one idea. When I’ve discussed the houses we’ve been looking out, I’ve detected a common thread in the questions I get. No one seems interested in bedrooms or bathrooms or location or square footage or the type of oven we’ll have, but they seem very interested in one feature of some of the homes we’ve seen.

Whether it has a pool.

The pool is the equalizer, maybe the one thing that elevates a suburban household in the eyes of the sneering Manhattanariat. A pool for those hot days in the summer when your Hamptons share is in an off-week, or you’re afraid to go back and face the friend-of-a-friend that you woke up next to LAST weekend. A pool to escape Manhattan’s summer heat, a place to eat barbecue.

After all, the Hamptons are really just a suburb. I hate to tell that to all of you who just plunked down a month’s salary for four weekends in a five bedroom house on a one-acre lot in a cul-de-sac, but doesn’t that description sound kinda like a typical suburban house? So you’re spending all that income to drive out 4 or 5 hours on a Friday night to sleep in a bunk bed like a 12 year old, in a house that has as much relationship to the beach as Woody Allen, and you’re too good to come visit me a half hour north? Did I, ummm, mention that we have a pool?

Great, see you then.