All Hooked Up

I am sitting in the kitchen of my cute little new townhouse while the cable guy marches up and down the stairs in his fluffy white shoe covers and sighs an occasional exasperated sigh while he attempts to get me set up for what I hope will be long cozy hours spent as a certified couch potato.

I pretty much gave up on the cable boxes in my old house years ago. At least now things are happening, now that I am getting a fresh start and a brand new account number. No matter how huffy this cable guy becomes, moving to a new house promises to be a lot simpler than waiting in line at the world (world meaning my world as opposed to the real one) cable headquarters for hours hoping that this time -- just this one time -- when you get to the one window that is open to folks other than those trying to save a stamp by paying their bill in person the clerk behind that window doesn't decide it's time to go to lunch or pee or go in the back room and do a word search puzzle.

Much to my relief, the cable guy looks nothing like Jim Carrey. He looks a bit like Colombo, actually, not quite as adorable as Peter Falk but just as disheveled, with a thick end of cable tubing hanging out the side of his mouth instead of a cigar. He stops by every so often to give me a progress report and ask me the same questions he's already asked more than a few times, and each time he seems to be really deep in thought. Just one more thing, I keep expecting him to say as he pivots back toward me and shakes his head before moving on again to solve the mysteries of the universe. My universe, that is.

Just about every day now I visit my cute little new townhouse, even though I don't officially need to move out of the old one for more than a month. Other than the kitchen table that my daughter and I managed to stuff into her car and the five carved wood coyotes that have stood watch at my front door for years, there is no furniture here. There is diet coke and water and wine, and plenty of toilet paper. Within a few hours, there will be cable. (I'm considering telling him not to bother with the wireless, since I had no trouble logging into somebody's unsecured network.) All I need now is one comfy couch and I am set. I cannot, for the life of me, figure out how or why I have accumulated so much other stuff over the years. There is so little I really need.

Yesterday, I took a walk in my new neighborhood. I am only minutes from some of my favorite stores, which is a shame since there's really nothing I need to buy. Still, it's nice to window shop, even to wander through shops stocked with expensive items that serve no purpose that I can think of but are certainly pretty to look at. Nowhere near as pretty as the view of the lake, though, just a few short blocks away. I paused at the edge of a bluff thick with tangled tree branches and autumn leaves, listening to the sound of the gentle waves and marveling at the flat crystalline surface of the water as it prepares to freeze for the long winter. As useless, I suppose, as many of the luxuries for sale in town, but that view, well, you just can't put a price tag on it.

The houses, which became noticeably bigger the nearer I got to the lake, were all quiet. I wondered about the people inside, even wondered a bit about their "stuff." No doubt there is a lot of it, and, to be fair, the most useless stuff can be enlightening. Even the Halloween decorations give me clues about the nature of the beasts inside.

I am guessing I will fill the rooms and closets and drawers and any available nooks and crannies in my cute little new townhouse with more than water and diet coke and wine and coyotes and toilet paper. Some of it will be useful, most not. As is my custom, I will have no Halloween decorations. (I stand not on principle but on pure laziness.)

Inside, I will try my best to keep it simple. As simple as hooking up a new cable account. As simple as a fresh start.

Shell Games

Early on, I realized I was not hard wired for fantasy. Fantasy in the literary sense anyway.

I was in first or second grade. This I know because I had not yet left behind the old fashioned rows of linked wooden desks with attached seats and obsolete holes into which boys from previous generations dipped the long hair of girls sitting in front of them. By third grade, many of the classrooms in P.S. 217 in Brooklyn had been updated with modern laminate desks, free standing shiny rectangles into which you could stuff your notebooks with covers decorated by Peter Max and textbooks protected by optimistic book covers bearing Ivy League insignias, and, more importantly, from which you could easily extract assorted candies you had purchased during lunch at Morty and Eddies across Coney Island Avenue to help get you through the afternoon. By 1967, a jawbreaker was always within easy reach; there was no need to surreptitiously lift the creaky hinged wooden flap and pray the teacher wouldn't notice.

The scrap paper in those days was so thin and soft it almost felt like cloth. I remember those grainy five by seven sheets of yellowed paper that looked as if they had been shaved off an ancient and decaying bit of tree bark. Once a week, a story would be piped in over the public address system, and, when it was over, the teacher would distribute the flimsy pages and ask us to illustrate what I suppose would be our version of a "take away." I remember thinking the stories were a bit silly, but maybe I was just missing the point.

One week, the protagonist in the story was a fellow named Mr. Turtle. If there was a message in the tale I couldn't tell you, but Mr. Turtle, as I recall, had a wife and some kids and spent his days doing the kinds of mundane things that most dads did. If Mr. Turtle had a first name, it was never revealed. It was the same for Mrs. Turtle, which made more sense because she was a minor character.

As always, I did my best to color the best picture in the class. To me, anyway, my figures looked lifelike, and everything appeared to be drawn to scale. My coloring was precise; I never went outside the lines. My rendering of Mr. Turtle was so realistic it could have been mistaken for a photo of a neighborhood dad, maybe even mine. I was proud to print my name on the back.

The teacher collected the drawings and held them up for everyone to see, one by one. The deeper she got into the pile, the more mortified I became. Everybody else had drawn Mr. Turtle as a turtle, not a human. It had never occurred to me that a turtle would do things that a person would do -- eat breakfast at a table, drive a car, speak English. It had not even crossed my mind that someone named Mr. Turtle would actually be a turtle. When the teacher got to my picture, she looked concerned. The boy behind me, the same one who had squeezed my hand on the first day of school so hard it made me cry, snickered. I wanted to crawl into my inkwell.

All these years later, as I try to write a novel, I feel like that little girl who wants to disappear into the inkwell. Fiction, to me, is as far fetched as the most fantastical fantasy, at least when it comes to creating it. Somehow, every character is a hodgepodge composite of me and the people I've come to know along the way. As hard as I try to escape reality, it shadows me with every keystroke. The stories I write are remarkably similar to my own stories, then and now.

I fear I am destined to be a turtle without a shell, exposed, at risk, unable to imagine life as anything but a turtle.

Lost in Space

Almost everything about the house seemed perfect. Walking distance to town, close enough to the high school in our old town so my daughter doesn't need to adjust her alarm clock but far enough away to at least give me the illusion of a fresh start. A third bedroom in case an adult child stops by. A fenced in yard for the blind dog. A brand new refrigerator, updated bathrooms, polished wood floors.

There was one major drawback: no storage space. None to speak of anyway. Every inch of the place was designed for living in the present, with just enough square footage devoted to closets that would keep us well stocked with necessary food and clothing. There was no basement crawl space where I could put the excess furniture and boxes containing who knows what, stuff that has travelled with me from home to home, some of it more than once. There were no extra nooks or crannies where I could hang unworn clothing that I have promised myself I would wear one day, where I could stow folded sweaters that I might one day unfold. One day, maybe, when hell freezes over.

It was love at first sight, except for the tiny problem of squeezing a five bedroom house filled with enough crap in the basement to fill up another handful of rooms into a wildly efficient vertical apartment. Really big square peg, really small square hole. Spatial reasoning isn't my thing, but I felt fairly confident this was not going to be an easy fit.

The rent was just a smidge on the wrong side of my upper limit, but the owner admitted she would rather negotiate a bit with a person she liked than grab the full amount from someone who didn't strike her as an ideal tenant. I could tell she liked me. We bonded over lots of topics -- kids, colleges, New York, favorite restaurants. By the time my older daughter stopped by with her posse to offer up a second (and third, and fourth) opinion, I knew I was golden. We had our cell phones out, and we were showing each other pictures of our dogs. I could almost hear the reverse cha-ching of her mental register knocking off a few bucks.

I couldn't sleep that night, so I counted, um, rooms. And square feet. I thought about what I could take with me and what I would have to leave behind. It occurred to me I could take just about everything I need, and what I could not take was the stuff that has been languishing so long in the far reaches of my basement and closets I can barely see it under the dust. And even if hell does freeze over, I probably won't have much use for sweaters that have been folded so long the creases would defy even the most heavy duty steamer.

Not a drawback at all, the lack of storage space. Come to think of it, it's one of the most attractive features, and I should probably pay a premium for it. But I won't. Not after we've shared pictures of our dogs.