Joisey goil
It's funny, you know? All my life I've heard about Jersey, that armpit state across the Hudson River. And now I live here. I have a driver's license that says so. And it is emphatically not New York City here. And what am I doing here? Can this be home?
But it is now. And I find I like it. And it's New Jersey.
What I've seen so far:
With the exception of certain well known industrial towns and seedy small cities, the state itself is remarkably pretty. Bucolic country towns that remind me of the Berkshires. Wooded paths along small lakes emerging onto rocky plateaus with views of New York City, the Empire State Building and the Chrysler Building smaller on the horizon than your thumbnail.
New Jersey likes its diners. Along every state route, in every shopping center, off every interstate exit. Shiny stand-alone buildings redolent with the smell of hamburger meat and pancake batter.
People who grow up here often don't leave. Or, rather, they leave for college and come right back. A man from Jersey and a woman from Westchester? Gotta live in Jersey if you love me, babe.
Not as many women have big hair as I'd anticipated. Maybe I'm in the wrong part of the state.
They do, however, have accents. Thick, strong accents, sometimes, a cartoon version of the famous New York twang. The not-pretty sound makes me feel all warm inside, a reminder that I'm really here.
Drivers creep waaaaay out past their stop signs, practically into the intersection, to see if they can safely make a turn. Forcing the issue? I'm not quite sure. But it's disconcerting.
Road signs are apparently not legal unless they're hidden behind foliage or otherwise obscured from view. I know this because the streets that don't have obstructed signage? Don't have signs at all. Some government official must have removed truckloads of them on account of illegal visibility.
Our town is famous for its cosmopolitan feel. On the local "Watercooler" email list, someone referred to a nearby town as "Whitebread, I mean West Caldwell." I chuckled, because yes, I suspect there are a great many white bread suburbs around us, but Montclair is not one. It's always had a substantial black population but now it also has an immigrant majority. Immigrant? From where? Oh, Manhattan. Also brownstone Brooklyn. An outpost of Park Slope, this town.
The local deli has chopped liver and also egg custard and even knishes. Not to mention black-and-white cookies. A generic-looking bakery in a nearby town has cannoli in both cream and chocolate varieties. Most bakeries around here have them, I think. Jewish and Italian influences everywhere. There are Thai, Vietnamese, Ethiopian, etc. restaurants in this town. Much like the city, all this. And yet, of course, not the city.
This state has more Native American-derived place names than anywhere else I can remember. This makes for towns with names that sound strange to our ears. Mahwah, Parsippany (which I keep calling Parsnippity by mistake), Pequannock, Weehawken, Packanack, Hoptacong, and my favorite, Ho-Ho-Kus.
And yet is there a Native American presence? Not so much.
And yet parks are often called reservations: South Mountain Reservation, Eagle Rock Reservation, Mills Reservation. I think they're reservations in the sense of reserves, preserves, parkland. No native peoples, just trailheads.
Pizza here isn't bad. Apparently sometimes bordering on excellent but I've only tried two places to date.
That’s all I know so far. I'll report back after I collect more data.