The kids are back -- me, too, a tenant with dreams

IN TRANSITION #9

By Benjamin Toff, Globe Correspondent | September 25, 2005
Read it on Boston.com

I spent my lunch break the other day browsing furniture shops near campus. I've never felt so old. And poor.

All around me, my former schoolmates laughed and shopped, happy to be reunited for another semester. They frolicked from store to store, buying books and school supplies, planning the decoration of their dorm rooms.

Meanwhile, my mind kept returning to the bookshelf I found abandoned down the street from my apartment -- my new stand-in for a dresser. It beats boxes and suitcases. But this recent graduate is wondering about something more permanent.

My Somerville apartment is finally showing (faint) resemblance to a home. Last week I bought a tablecloth and toaster. This week: My roommates and I christened the living room with toasts of Smuttynose Brown Ale and Sierra Nevada Porter.

The little things help distract us from the age of the floorboards, the draftiness of the windows, or -- shudder -- the thick layer of black slime in the cabinet beneath the kitchen sink.

Someday maybe I'll get bedroom furniture.

That is, if my pockets aren't empty come rent time.

A friend has been searching for an apartment for months. It's painstaking. The lease on his old place ran out in August. He's sharing another friend's studio while he keeps looking. I've tried asking whether he's just being too picky.

''It's too old. And dirty," he complains about every other place he looks at. ''And it looks like hell from the street."

He's from Texas.

''Back home, you could get something four times this size. With all new appliances!"

Of course, you'd have to live in Texas.

Still, he's got a point. If you want to live in the city, you've got to be willing to forgo a lot of amenities. Or sign over your paychecks. If you're lucky, you get bigger paychecks. The only place that has excited my friend costs more than twice as much as his last place.

''You know, I woke up really happy and peaceful the other day and smelled something familiar. I didn't know what it was at first."

He asked me to guess. I couldn't.

''Fresh-cut grass," he responded.

Across the street from his old place in Cambridgeport, developers had laid down a new lawn, part of their conversion of an old triple-decker into luxury lofts. That new lawn and its smell were things he didn't even realize he had missed. They almost brought him to tears.

My brother, faced with rising rents in San Francisco, did what so many have contemplated. He fled. I visited him last month in Portland, Ore., where he now owns his own house.

True, it's old -- with probably 15 layers of paint and wallpaper on the walls. And it looks like a construction zone (months of do-it-yourself renovations have gone, well, typically).

But it's his.

While I visited, he had the fir floors in his kitchen refinished. Within hours, 80 years of black sticky residue vanished. That night, my brother came home and saw the wood grain of his own kitchen floors for the first time. Months of stress peeled away from his face.

''That almost makes it all worth it," he said, his eyes alight.

Maybe there's hope after all.

Benjamin Toff works as a temp and lives in Somerville. He can be reached at benjamin.toff@gmail.com.

'Only' seems to be the hardest word

Desert experience an inward search

IN TRANSITION #8

By Benjamin Toff, Globe Correspondent | September 18, 2005
Read it on Boston.com

This is one in a series of reports about the strange time between getting a college diploma and entering real life.

I always tell myself that traveling will give me perspective, force me to reflect, provide instant answers to all of life's questions. It tends to be -- like most things in life -- only sort of true.

After a grueling summer, I gave myself a vacation. More of a mission, really, to the dry, dusty, inhospitable Nevada desert for an art festival called Burning Man.

For those of you East Coasters who haven't by now heard of the 20-year-old weeklong celebration of all things beautiful, debaucherous, and most importantly alive, I won't be much help. If you don't know what I'm talking about, go attend it yourself. As the burners like to say, ''Trying to explain what Burning Man is to someone who has never been is like trying to describe what a color looks like to someone who is blind."

Maybe it was the severe dehydration (my cracked lips are still recovering), but the days I spent in the Black Rock Desert have stuck with me like a dream. I'm afraid attempts to describe it will violate it; the sounds and smells and stunning visuals might evaporate as suddenly as they once bombarded me.

But I will relay this one chance encounter I had with a musician. It was late one night in the days leading up to the burning of the man statue. My friends were exchanging massages with strangers in the colossal ''Space Virgins" dome. I started up a conversation with a guy sitting nearby, Dave from Seattle, who as it turned out was a songwriter who gave guitar lessons for a living.

''I've never had a real job," he said sheepishly.

We traded stories, talked East vs. West, and eventually moved on to the pros and cons of devoting one's life to a profession that would never pay a salary above poverty. In his case, music. In my case, writing. (After traveling thousands of miles, my mind kept circling back to the same questions as though somehow the foreign surroundings would prompt new answers.) He worried how the decision had affected his love life. His voice dropped when he described his financially successful classmates.

''Think about whether it's the only thing you can be happy doing," he said. ''If it's not your 'only,' you want to be very clear about everything you're giving up."

In the morning, the sun rose, flooding the still-gray earth with warmth and color. A crane modified to resemble an enormous sunflower (a Burning Man ''art car") rose along with it in the distance. I thought of returning to my 9-to-5 routine in Cambridge.

I wondered about the meaning of the word ''only."

After a whirlwind couple of weeks, I've now moved into a place in Somerville. Scratch that: ''moved in" is an overstatement. I have no furniture. I'm still living out of boxes. But at least I have my own room.

Stability compensates for the squalor. At least that's what I've been telling myself. Late at night, the fan in my window rhythmically thwacking (I found it abandoned in another room), I stare at the ceiling. It is crusty with blotches from water damage and neglect. But I see through it to the stars above moving slowly across the night sky, and I imagine spinning slowly along with them.

Benjamin Toff works as a temp and lives in Somerville. He can be reached at benjamin.toff@gmail.com.

Alone, waking up to a nightmare

IN TRANSITION #7

By Benjamin Toff, Globe Correspondent | September 11, 2005
Read it on Boston.com

This is one in a series of occasional reports about the strange time between getting a college diploma and entering real life.

Four years ago, I awoke on the last day of my summer vacation groggy and annoyed. Hoping to sleep late, I had lingered in bed, despite the noisy television in the living room. I thrashed about between the sheets, cursing under my breath. I threw a pillow over my face.

I hadn't slept well for over a week. Last in my dorm suite to move in, I got stuck with the top bunk in a bedroom with a snorer. A loud snorer. So loud, he kept me up even from the futon in the next room over.

However, that night was supposed to be different. For the first time since arriving in Boston, I had the bunks, not to mention the bedroom, to myself. My roommate, home for a funeral in Georgia, had granted me a respite from his snores, and I had charted a night of eight-plus glorious hours of uninterrupted, silent slumber.

That was, until my rude awakening. Fading in and out of a dreamy haze, I caught only muffled snippets from the other side of the door. A plane crash. Evacuations.

Four years later, the exact moment eludes me when I finally succumbed to consciousness, slumped off the top bunk, and stumbled toward the television. Was it before or after the second plane hit? I watched the towers collapse live, in real time. I'm sure of it. The shock. Having to force myself to exhale. I remember it. So clearly. I think.

The events of that unceremonious day, so searing at the time, have inevitably bled together into a painful, jumbled patchwork of television replays, tearful stares, and befuddled introspection. I wandered around campus, still a foreign and unfamiliar place, making eye contact with strangers. How many had family members missing? Would classes begin as scheduled tomorrow? Could Harvard be a target? Would my roommate ever return from Georgia? How far away this city, Boston, where I knew virtually no one, seemed from everyone and everything I knew and loved.

My mother in Arizona tried my cellphone and dorm phone, but couldn't get through.

Her e-mail message: ''There's no way to call long distance all circuits are busy. Thank goodness for e-mail," she had written by noon to me and my brother, who was in England. The subject line? ''Uncertainty."

''This is about the most horrible state of the world I have personally experienced, and having my kids so far away just makes it so much worse."

I told her I would keep in touch. And for reasons that escape me, I went on and promised to ''let you know what's going on" -- as though being hundreds of miles closer to the epicenter of the tragedy made me somehow suited to grasp what was happening.

Classes began on Wednesday as scheduled. After an all-day train ride before the week's end, my snoring roommate returned. And in the midst of such chaos, the semester, like any other, gave way to lectures, papers and midterms, staplers, books, and pens.

Today, people across the planet will mark this fourth anniversary with vigils, marches, and moments of silence. As a newly initiated member of the real world, this is my first Sept. 11 out of college.

I am wide awake now. I just wish I knew what to do.

Benjamin Toff now lives in Somerville. He can be reached at benjamin.toff@gmail.com.

Going through a 'temporary' phase

IN TRANSITION #6

By Benjamin Toff, Globe Correspondent | September 4, 2005
Read it on Boston.com

This is one in a series of occasional reports about the strange time between getting a college diploma and entering real life.

To my shock, driving to work on the last day of my summer internship I had to turn up the heat in my Honda. Way up: the driver's side window is busted. The cold air kept seeping through.

Fixing it had been on my to-do list for weeks. And now it sure felt like fall.

For the first time in my life, school would begin without me.

With my internship over, I took a job elsewhere as a temp. A promotion? No. As an intern, at least I knew my role, however limited. I wasn't expected to carve any long-lasting impression on the organization. But I was on track. I worked to immerse myself in an environment, to gain experience that might one day be valuable in a respectable career -- and there would be one.

As a temp, I just work. I perform the unenviable role of substitute. It implies only the sense that I am between things. Temping pays the bills, but leaves a knot in my stomach.

While there may be no shame in temping, there's certainly no glory.

At a staff meeting the other day, scarfing down the lavish continental breakfast (breakfast is a rarity in my life), I tried to be discreet while the other employees went around the room introducing themselves. All but two were women. Several were more than three times my age. They welcomed a new assistant, pretty and petite, with smiles and flattery.

Then they turned to me.

''I'm temporarily working as a replacement," I mumbled into my plate of crumbs.

''Are you just out of school?" whispered a woman next to me. I nodded. ''So this isn't really what you want to be doing," she added, relieved for my sake.

But I wasn't relieved.

An hour and a half of shallow backslapping later (''The work you all do is so important to us"), I returned to my (pretend) office in a daze. An out-of-place kid, one who missed his summer vacation.

That day, I spent my lunch break outside in a park, soaking up the dying summer light. Two toddlers wrestled on the grass, twisting in and out of the shadows that fell upon them. In my head, I replayed highlights from the summer -- returning time and again to July 4, the trek back to Cambridge along the Charles, the dazzling fireworks display still dancing in my retinas, the cheap beer at the MIT fraternity keeping me going with a slight buzz, my friends alongside me, laughing, singing, full of life.

''That was a quick lunch!" my boss exclaimed, surprised to see me when I returned to my cubicle long before the hour expired. I had no answer; simply nowhere to go, nothing to do. For the 10 minutes that followed, I stared at the curser blinking on my screen, waiting for something to jolt me awake.

Earlier this summer, I scoffed at spending my 20s in a job that bored me. It felt like surrendering the last shreds of my youth. Maybe it is. Yet a salary with benefits, if not the holy grail of employment, would help settle my stomach.

Soon the students will be back. Temping will end. How long is the grace period before I'm just plain unemployed?

Benjamin Toff is living on a futon in his former college roommates' apartment in Cambridge, but he is moving to Somerville soon. Reach him at benjamin.toff@gmail.com.