I have some Nick Hornbyish qualities. I make constant lists of books, movies, music, quotes, party guest lists, and chores. Unlike his, my lists are the storage devices of a magpie, rather than an effort to rank the world into comforting order.

Herewith, as Tim Bray says, a working list of my heroes. I add to it all the time. Some are famous, some only to me. You won’t find many giants here, the Mandelas and the Da Vincis. Rather, these are the people on whose qualities or careers I’d like to pattern my own life, and for the most part they’re not out of reach.

I’ve listed some for their curiosity, warmth, or morality, not necessarily their artistic output. With others, it’s their ability to collaborate, catalyze, and cross-pollinate. And still others, their staying power.

Henry David Thoreau
Terry Gross
Nora Dillon
Ira Glass
William Maxwell
Bill Murray
Elizabeth David
Tavis Smiley
(more…)

Some regular readers have asked how Ranger Tim has weathered the transition from naturalist in the Canadian woods to Silicon Valley executive. I had worried a little myself. I’ve been to Silicon Valley a few times, and couldn’t imagine that its narrow culture had room for his pioneer soul. He doubted it too. “Brooklyn,” he wrote from some public library on the long drive from Lake Superior to San Jose, “will always be a lost paradise.”

But he’s a good naturalist. He finds life in unlikely places. Craigslist helps. Here’s a letter he wrote to Chris Corrigan, an Irish/Ojibway kindred spirit he met through this site:

“Well I’ve been through something of a whirlwind of change since I was at Bowen Lousy excuse for not staying in proper touch, but there you have it.

While I was in Vancouver, a recruiter for a tech company in San Jose contacted me, and I was going down to the Bay Area anyway to visit friends, so we ended up setting up some meetings with the firm. Everybody hit it off, so I drove back east and picked up my stuff from Superior and Kedey Island, hung out with my family over Christmas, and drove back west with a trailerload, following the old Emigrant Trail, more or less. My welcome to California was four feet of snow in the Donner Pass. Fortunately I did not have to eat any of my fellow travellers there as is the ancient custom.

I lucked into the Ranch through online want-ads. I had a pretty firm sense that I didn’t want to live in the wastes of Silicon Valley, and knew that there were some shockingly wild places in the mountains nearby. But I didn’t expect to waltz right into such an agreeable situation so painlessly – it was the first place I looked at. Then again nobody who knows me well is the tiniest bit surprised. It’s my kabin karma, they say.

My abode lies on a spread of 100 acres (note Dervala’s issue with orders of magnitude!) of wooded canyon in the Santa Cruz Mountains, remarkable for being a mere 20 minutes from downtown San Jose, ground zero of the Technology Boom. California is amazing for the way the terrain compacts bio- and socioeconomic diversity across small linear distances.

There’s a quirky little community of 10 tenants homesteading there with me, close enough to help one another out, far enough that seclusion is easy to find when you need it. Very northcountry pioneery in feel. Even a little tribal. There was a barnraising of sorts this weekend to help me install hardwood floors in my shack, and next weekend I’ll be helping somebody strip and old trailer for salvage, and so on.

You probably get to enjoy this sort of thing on Bowen Island all the time, but it’s ages since I felt so connected with my neighbours.

On the off chance you’re in the Bay Area for a conference or for pleasure, please look me up and plan to come frolic in my montane idyll. The facilities ain’t luxurious but standards will come up a notch when I’m done converting my galvanized stock tank into a hot tub, and we can all soak our bones under a canopy of Bay Laurel, Madrone and stars.”

I needed an estimate of the cost of moving my stuff to California. Ken at Meyer’s Moving checked the schedule and said “Okay, so you’ll be seeing Igor.” He gave a little laugh; not unkind. His own parents had given him a name so plain-vanilla American that he could only be Chinese. But Igor bore his amusing name with sad dignity.

He was tall and good-looking, and wore the flashy black clothes of a mid-eighties English pop band. There was a suit jacket with some complicated zipped neckline, and long, swishing black coat. He wore those too-long, gelled sideburns that are a usually a giveaway of Irish guys abroad. He seemed as young as a cop.

When he came to the door he looked dour, but he flowered under careful applications of his name and cups of coffee. He asked shyly for a piece of toilet paper to blow his nose, which dripped in the cold. Then he stalked my bedroom with his clipboard. There wasn’t much to see. “This is it?” he said, “This is everything? There is nothing in storage, in a basement? A bicycle, maybe?” He asked if I were paying for this myself. I was cagey, not wanting a padded estimate. “Because, if you’re paying for this, you should pack yourself. Really. You don’t have too much breakable stuff, and it will save you three hundred dollars. That’s what I would do myself. Save the money.”

He asked if I’m driving out there, told me that my iPod works great as an FM receiver in the car. I told him I couldn’t drive. He said that he had driven three times in his life before he took his test, and the next day he was driving trucks. It’s super-easy, he said.

Now his card says “Relocation Consultant” and his English is as groomed and careful as his hair. He’s going to make it.

When you live in a great city, intriguing people cut your hair, move your boxes, or drive your taxi. Last month my beautiful Polish dentist and her Chinese-Filipina assistant talked about what it meant for us to be thirtyish immigrant woman in this city that saw us as we wanted to be seen, where we hung on against the tidal pull of home and family. “Don’t you think, Dervala?” demanded Agnes, née Agniewska, as she rootled around in my mouth. She had come here at 17 on a gifted student program. In return for her Barney’s shopping bags, her litigator boyfriend, and her New York lacquer, she had lost the way back to Poland. I mumbled my own story through her fingers, dribbling.

There was the Afghan taxi driver who sat for twenty minutes outside my apartment after he’d driven me home from a drunken staff party. He had fought against the Russians for two years, but by training he was an architect. He could have been the father of the National Geographic girl. His family was related to Hamid Karzai. “We’re royalty,” he said, “as if that matters.”

There was the sad-eyed, handsome Staten Island Czech who helped me move in here in May, borrowing a van from his weekday delivery job. He sucked down Pall Malls and seemed too fragile to manage my third-floor walk-up, so I helped. Eventually he smiled to show his missing back teeth, and talked about Prague. Three hundred bucks a month was all you could make there, he said. What was the point? He grew animated as we drove down Atlantic Avenue, with me navigating from the rumble seat. Then we stopped to pick up a bed for my new apartment (found, like him, and like the apartment, on Craigslist). The American who was selling the bed was confident and loud. I liked him, but it was uncomfortable to be caught between their worlds as he directed Ivan. “Hey, man, you’re not going to get it down the stairs that way. Habla espanol? No? Turn it around. Like this, see? No, no, no—watch it! Okay?” Ivan went quiet, then. We sat on my new stoop with a couple of Pilsners before his dignity returned.

There was Olu, the taxi-driver from Lagos, who railed about the death of Ken Saro-Wiwa. “Why did I come here? Well, it’s the greatest country in the world! I wanted to test myself! You are an American girl. You do not need to make these choices.”

He liked to read at stoplights. He showed me the books on his front seat; on Shambhala Buddhism and American history. I asked him what his dream was, and he was coy. “I can’t tell you that. I am afraid if I talk about the dream too much, the talking will become enough and I won’t do anything to make it come true. That is always a temptation. My brother dreamed of being an engineer and now he is and so he can talk about it. But I am still driving a taxi so I can’t say yet.” Five minutes later, as we drove through the tunnel, he blurted. “I would like to be a writer! That is my dream!”

There’s someone every day. Usually, though not always, a fellow immigrant. I listen to them for as long as they let me, or until the subway doors open, storing up their stories to occupy me in the nursing home or on the desert island. Lately I’ve taken to scribbling sketches in my morning notebook, for fear I will forget them. I don’t want to forget them. When it comes to people, I’m a pack-rat.

I’m moving to Kaleefornia. A company called Stone Yamashita found me, mostly through this website, and they’ve hired me as a copywriter/strategist. They do work that’s as solid, smart, and beautiful as an iPod.

“You won’t like it,” my New York friends tell me morbidly. “You can’t even drive.”

On my last business trip to San Francisco, a woman on the car rental shuttle said “Excuse me, I need to get my bag.”
    “See?” hissed my sweetest New York co-worker, seizing on this atrocity. “That’s what they’re like out here. Passive-aggressive!“

My San Francisco friends tell me how much easier life is there, how people never look back. How effortlessly you can get into nature (an American phrase that always makes me think the outdoors is some new Class A drug). I tell them that when I’m evaluating cities I don’t start with how easy they are to leave, but they smile good-naturedly. I’ll learn. My friend Keith has told me for months that I have to move.
    “Every single woman we know who comes out here ends up getting married.” Is that a threat or a promise, I ask him. Ranger Tim, installed on a 5,000-acre ranch off the grid in Los Gatos, writes sorrowfully that for him, Brooklyn will always be a lost paradise.

On the flight west I stare out the window, mapping the coiling rivers below to the seat-back display on JetBlue. Is that really the Mississippi? I know so little of this country. I’ve spent a grand total of ten days in San Francisco, including a vacation eight years ago. But I have faith that I’ll come to love it. People I like very much count it as their favorite US city. I’ve already been adopted by some simpático locals, and reunited with lost pals who moved from my coast. These are the true Twin Cities.

I move on Valentine’s Day; a good day to start another urban romance.

On New Year’s Day, strong winds at Dublin Airport blew an Aer Lingus plane off the runway and into another parked plane, knocking out two international jumbos from a small fleet. More than a week later, the schedule still shudddered with the force of those flapping wings. My flight was delayed for hours as Aer Lingus borrowed planes from the neighbors to ship emigrants back to Boston, Chicago, and New York.

I sat in front of Jonathan, who was unhappy about the delays. He was 16 or 17 and made like an egg: round, pale, and hairless. He wore a beige knitted hat pulled down tightly like a swimming cap. He was getting over the ‘flu, and wailed as his stuffed-up sinuses expanded in the pressurized cabin.
    “No no no no no no no NOOOOO! I’m getting very angry. I hate it I hate it I hate it. Hurts TOO MUCH. I hate going on an aeroplane.” He pounded my seat. When the baby opposite started to cry, he stuck his fingers in his ears. “Shut up shutup shutup SHUT UP!”

Though he kicked my seat like a metronome for ten hours, I grew fond of this raging bundle of id, who gave the only sane response to airborne life. Why shouldn’t you weep and wail and protest, Jonathan, after being herded like a veal calf, stripped of belt and shoes, finger-printed, photographed, kept waiting, strapped to a too-small seat, and fed ugly food? I knelt up on my seat to distract him from his torment. He lived in Ireland, he said, but he lived in New Jersey too. New Jersey was where he went to school. He was sick and his head hurt. He didn’t like flying.

I had gathered as much.

When we landed at last at JFK, he broke free of his bonds and launched himself into my lap, not bothered by the fact that he would have made two of me. He grabbed a handful of my hair and began to sniff it, then pointed to his meaty shoulder.
    “He wants you to pat it,” said his mother weakly. I had little choice. He sniffed another handful of my hair and demanded another pat.
    “I like you,” he shouted cheerfully. “Are you looking for a husband?”
    “A marriage proposal. Now, isn’t that a grand start to the new year?” said the man across the aisle.

Clarice, my landlady, lives downstairs with her daughter, Veronica. Veronica is twelve. Every day I forgive Veronica for caterwauling R&B tween ballads first thing in the morning, and for screaming while she gets her hair combed out. I’m not sure what she forgives me for, but we have managed to become great pals. When she’s happy she cackles like a banshee. She took Ranger Tim aside on his July visit. “Are you her boyfriend?”
    “I don’t know,” he said, “You’ll have to ask her.”
    She shook her head. “I don’t know, Tim. That sounds baaad.”

I’ve lived here since May. It’s the top floor of a beautiful, ramshackle brownstone, and the first place I’ve lived in that’s been mine alone. I love it. I love its airy rooms, its picture rails and pocket doors, its scuffed oak floors and enormous bathroom. I love the light that streams in to wake me every morning, and the view of the Williamsburg Savings Bank flipping Manhattan the bird. When friends visit I force them to admire my walk-in closets, a great prize in New York, and gloss over the fact that my galley kitchen requires snake-hipped cooks.

There’s a blizzard outside today, “from Canada”, say the newscasters with a note of blame. The north wind is spraying fine snow into banks that look pillowy enough to dive into from my third-floor window. The radiator in my bedroom isn’t working, and the old sash windows whistle with Canadian wind, so I’m bundled up in the living room, playing with my new Mac. Outside, my neighbors are smudges of New York black shovelling clean snow.

It’s a mistake to fall for a rental apartment, I’ve found. I’ve loved four: one in Dublin, one in London, and two in Brooklyn. Those are the four I’ve spent the least time in. Last week I called Clarice to tell her I’d taken a job in San Francisco, and I’m packing up once more. Yesterday she came to sit in my living room.

    “How long are you going for?” I told her it’s a permanent job. She thought for a bit. Then she said “I want you back. I’ll sublet for a year. You mightn’t like California. They’re kind of flaky out there. Not like Brooklyn people.”

I wanted to cry. “I have to think about how to tell Veronica,” she said. “She’ll be so disappointed Miss Dervala is leaving.” We called her upstairs, and Clarice cleared her throat. “Ronnie, some bad news. Miss Dervala found another opportunity, and she’s going to California. That means she won’t be living here with us any more. But she’ll be here for another few weeks, and you can visit with her and hang out in the meantime.”

    “Oh,” said my sweet Veronica, and shrugged. Whatever. “Mommy, can I try your lipstick?”

I used to work in the Bertelsman Building in Times Square. It was the headquarters of the BMG record company, and P. Diddy—he was still Puffy then—had offices on the floor below us. Once he got meeting locations mixed up and ended up on our floor. Our gentle receptionist, Paulette, wouldn’t let him in.

This was shortly after he’d been hauled up for punching out a record executive, and his ‘roids were still raging. He leaned over the desk and yelled at her to find the meeting room NOW. The office manager scurried out to see what was going on. They argued briefly. Puffy threatened. Steve told him to leave immediately or he’d call security. I’d like to have seen the confrontation: our slight little hippie with center-parted hair, a handlebar mustache, and tie-dyed shirt ordering Puffy and his people to get out. It’s a mark of how nerdy we were in that software company that no one recognized him, even while his remix of Sting’s creepy stalker song was number one. Afterwards his people sent please-don’t-sue flowers.

A few days ago I stepped into the elevator at work next to a tiny woman bundled up in what looked like a black duvet, speaking to a friend in…Swedish? Not Swedish. I picked out bits from the lilting: “hurdy gurdy gurdy…Public Enemy…” The clear, girlish voice was familiar, but it took me four floors of sideways glances to work out that it was Bjork.

That morning I’d started a book that had been on my wishlist ever since my friend Max told me it was his favorite novel: Halldor Laxness’s Independent People. Max has great taste in everything but women, and sure enough, this is a gem. It’s an Icelandic novel about sheep. If you deserve to read it, that won’t put you off. Iceland’s storytelling tradition is as strong as Ireland’s, and this book is reminds me Liam O’Flaherty’s Aran Islands stories. It even starts with Columcille, an 8th century Irish missionary. Battling the elements is good for art.

The introduction to my edition says that “Self-Standing Folk” would be a better translation of the title, and in Bjørk I see Laxness’s people. It takes self-standing folk to wear that swan dress to the Oscars. (It’s in the Met’s Costume Institute now.) It takes self-standing folk to have her quirky perspective on human beings. Her Debut album was the soundtrack to my college years. Tiny and scrubbed, she still looks like a college girl years after the rest of us have had guilty thoughts about Botox.

Maybe if I’d had Independent People in my pocket instead of on my desk, I would’ve told her how much her joy meant to me. But Bjørk’s been known to punch out stalkers, too, and I didn’t want to interrupt her chat. We got off the elevator and walked down Broadway side by side. I silently wished her extra warmth, along with her duvet and her stripy tights, against from the New York winter.