Trigger Happiness

On the day I moved, one of the movers handed me the key to a file cabinet I had never bothered to lock. He had taken the liberty of locking the drawers for me, presumably just to keep them from flying open. I thanked him profusely, and carefully put the key away for safe keeping.

Safe keeping and ready accessibility, just as I did with my extra checkbooks and my favorite scarf. All the items that, weeks later, remain safe (from me) and, if they are readily accessible, it must be to someone else. I cannot for the life of me remember where I put any of these things.

Despite repeated promises to myself that I would shed all that is unnecessary, relocate with only the bare essentials, I have spent the better part of the weeks since my move unpacking boxes filled with things I could certainly live without, many of them things I had forgotten I even had. Occasionally I muster up enough stoicism to toss an extraneous memento, steel myself against the onslaught of old memories that, unlike those of the short term, don't get lost but simply remain dormant. Memories that spring to life with the slightest provocation, memories coated with the kind of silver lining that eludes the more recent ones. The kind of silver lining that will make the already forgotten breakfast I had this morning seem, one day, to have been a royal and happy feast.

I think ahead now to my next move, and have learned to cherish the much maligned but surprisingly utilitarian phenomenon of short term memory loss. No matter how many times I dash out to replenish supplies, garbage bags are disappearing at an astonishing rate. I assess every component of every new arrival in the house, and I eliminate every unnecessary item immediately, racing to avoid any triggers of sentimentality. Birthday cards, thank you notes, pretty packaging, coupons, gratuitous refrigerator magnets and pens. My trash can runneth over, but my storage spaces seek some arbitrary but constant level. When I move again, I will have accumulated very little in the way of useless stuff. All but the most significant short term memories will remain buried, and when, one day, the assault of silver lined images of my past begins in earnest, much of the clutter will be gone.

No doubt, though, I will one day enjoy a few "eureka" moments -- when I find the key to the locked file cabinet drawers, my extra check books, my favorite scarf. I will open long inaccessible file cabinet drawers filled with insignificant things, my misplaced checks will have long been replaced, and the scarf will be a relic of some "what was I thinking" kind of fashion. But, like it or not, finding these things will be like reaching into a grab bag of surprising treats. Treats that remind me of a time that, by then, will seem to be a time of youth and adventure and simplicity.

At the very least, recovering these mundane bits of my present will coat the hectic and exhausting days of this move in sparkling, untarnished metal. I will remember fondly the time I left the house where my kids and I grew up and began to build a new chapter, a chapter filled with ordinary and sometimes downright infuriating moments that will one day make me smile.

Postcards from Heaven

I received a text from my dad just before I woke the other day. I had never gotten a text from him before -- it had not yet become popular when he died, in the late nineties -- but this one was brief and clear, as real as any text I've ever received. "Go to Starbucks," it said.

Most of the time, he watches over me quietly. He was never one to meddle. Occasionally, though, he hovers close, makes some noise to get my attention. I got out of bed and made a mental note to listen to him. Even when he was alive, he would rarely butt in; I could forgo the drive thru Dunkin Donuts only minutes away from my new home and brave the cold, just this once.

Like the scraps of paper on which I tend to jot reminders, my mental note was nowhere to be found when I finally headed out for coffee. It didn't turn up until I returned home and dropped the still full cup of Dunkin Donuts brew on the stairs as I tried to balance several other items on my arm and save myself another trip down. Trying to hang on to the rest of my load and keep the dog from lapping up the lethal liquid as it trickled down the steps, I remembered my dad's text. This was his handiwork; a minor catastrophe just to remind me I should have listened.

I would make it to Starbucks. I made another mental note. Again, the mental note was quickly misplaced as I began to obsess about a particular phone call I awaited that would reassure me a certain pesky item of business had been worked out. I busied myself with more unpacking while I made a concerted albeit unsuccessful effort to not think about the phone call and managed to forget about the text with pretty much no effort at all.  To pass the time, I attacked the stack of framed wall hangings the movers had encased in bubble wrap that was as impenetrable as a steel safe. Impenetrable as a safe, maybe, but nowhere near as secure, I realized, when I heard the tinkling of falling shards of glass that used to be my downstairs bathroom mirror. Dad, again.

This time he had orchestrated a minor catastrophe that was far more likely to get my attention, and not just because of the prospect of seven years of bad luck. It was the mirror we had purchased and hung in his honor, finally heeding his complaints about the naked and useless wall over our powder room sink. Back then I didn't necessarily lose mental notes; I just ignored them. But my husband and I had scored a funky (and, come to think of it, quite hideous) frame in a market somewhere in Mexico City, and we both knew immediately what we would put into it and where it would go. Dad, as usual, was right. It was good to have a mirror in the downstairs bathroom, and the hideous frame and the story of our adventure in acquiring it amused him.

The broken mirror certainly got my attention, at least momentarily, and, again, I promised myself I would make it to Starbucks, even though I was no longer in the mood for coffee. My back hurt from mopping up coffee that had managed to drip its way down every step (thank goodness I didn't get a large) and blood continued to flow from the place where my hand had encountered a particularly sharp edge of glass. What I really needed was a stiff drink.

I remembered the elusive mental note. I thought about my dad, and I thought about how I always knew he would make things turn out all right. He was my fixer, my safety net. He was the guy waiting with open arms for me in the pool, his dark hair slicked back after he dove in and swam under water the entire length of the pool and back while I teetered on the edge, marveling at his power and his grace. He would coax me gently but he would wait as long as it took, and he would catch me, and the water would feel strangely warm as long as his arms were wrapped around me. And we would race down the length of the pool and back, and he would stay just close enough to me to let me know that he was not so much winning the race as leading me in.

He must have seen me teetering the other day when he sent me that text. Go to Starbucks. It wasn't that he thought I needed caffeine; he just wanted to remind me he is there, waiting for me in the pool. And as long as he is there, everything will somehow turn out okay. All I have to do is listen. So I went to Starbucks. Nothing spilled. Nothing else broke. And the phone call came almost immediately, reassuring me that the latest pesky item of business had been worked out.

My new home is taking shape. As I continued to unpack yesterday, I stumbled upon a DVD my brother had sent me years ago with home movies from our earliest days. I fast forwarded to a random frame. My father was holding me tight while my brother jumped up and down at his feet, just itching to torment me. I made what appeared to be a half-hearted effort to squirm free. Even then I somehow knew my dad would make sure everything turned out all right.

New Tricks for Old Dogs

You know what they say: big hands...big feet; big feet...big shoes. Something like that. Maybe they also say new house, new car. Well, maybe they don't; I think I'm the one who said that, but who cares? After all the time I have spent trying to find my own voice, I might as well listen to it. 

So I did, and there you have it: new house new car. And new beginnings, at least according to the artsy wall hanging given to me by friends earlier this week. Sounds like a plan. Nevertheless, as what seemed like an inordinate amount of time between signing the contract to sell the old house and officially closing the deal winds down, I feel woefully not ready to begin anew. My body aches from weeks of sporadic packing and irrational bursts of heavy lifting, but I remain overwhelmed by mental lists of tasks as yet undone and unanticipated piles of stuff that continue to reveal themselves no matter how hard I work to clear everything out. I have begun breaking small promises I made to myself only weeks ago. Maybe I'll rent a storage locker for a few months after all. Maybe I don't need to toss all the things I haven't used in years. After all, I might need those crystal goblets one day. Or maybe I'll get the urge to hop on the recumbent exercise bike, now that it's no longer buried under mountains of old clothing.

It's difficult to imagine starting anew when I can't seem to wrap up the old. The past clings desperately to every surface of my existence, refusing to loosen its grip. Progress is slow; it's like trying to clean up a raw egg that's cracked on the counter. Eventually you win the battle, but the viscous mess puts up a pretty good fight. 

My new friend Rodrigo, along with a revolving posse of relatives and friends, has been helping me unload some of the big ticket items. I busy myself moving small things while they carry out old cribs, tables, chairs, beds; furniture that is no longer of any use to me, some that I have forgotten I ever had. Still, I feel wistful, and take comfort in the shrinking but conspicuous clusters of useless items that still litter the floor, the shelves, the closets. I noticed Rodrigo's wife staring at a set of six thick glasses and a matching pitcher I had purchased years ago somewhere near Guatalajara. I remember staring at it in the market, thinking I just had to have it. I have never sipped from the glasses, had long ago removed the set from a prominent spot on my kitchen counter. Once, I killed a fly and I had to scoop it out of the pitcher. Rodrigo's wife looked as if she had struck gold as she carefully carried her newly acquired set of glassware to her car. I'm sure I'll get over it, but today I kind of miss it. I even considered calling her to tell her about the dead fly.  

Though the new house is filled with the promise of brand new beginnings, it is also quickly becoming filled with the things that got away from Rodrigo and the occasional charity pickups, the things I just can't let go. Nobody's perfect, and there's no such thing as a totally clean slate. The new car seems filled with promise as well; there's no more hideous death rattle when I start it up, and there's no more ragtop blindspot to make lane changes and backing out of parking spaces death defying. The blind spots that await as I move forward, well, neither the new car or the new house filled with old things will help with those. 

Manny, my blind dog, was not thrilled about the extra effort he had to exert to hoist himself up into the higher seat of our new ride. He gave me that look, the one that says Really? First the new house and now this? But, as he always does, he gave his hind quarters a zesty shake and he persevered, resigned to blanketing the unfamiliar upholstery in his smell and his hair. 

He sniffed. I sniffled. "Yes, really, Manny." Big hands, big feet, big shoes, big gloves. New house. New car. New blind spots. New beginnings. That's life. No worries, though. The cookie jar is coming with us. 

Head in the Clouds

When clouds are pasted onto the horizon in the still dim light of early dawn, they can look like mountains. As I drove eastward this morning toward the rented townhouse that I have been slowly filling with the stuff I can live without temporarily but cannot leave behind -- a motley collection of coffee mugs, crystal goblets, uncomfortable shoes, cocktail dresses -- I imagined that I was visiting my vacation home. A small chalet, maybe, tucked away from reality on the ledge of a rocky slope.

In a few short weeks, the rented townhouse will be my reality, no longer just a haven where I can escape for a brief visit. The house I have lived in for almost twenty years will be emptied of my stuff and filled with somebody else's. A young child whose name I do not know will sleep where my children once slept, unfamiliar aromas will permeate the kitchen, another woman's jeans will be shrinking in the dryer. The worn molding around the front door will become just something else to repair; it will no longer be a fond reminder of a beloved dog unable to contain his excitement when the UPS guy visits, or a squirrel scurries across the lawn, or when a leaf blows by. Eventually, the insidious puggle hairs that defy vacuuming and settle onto every inch of fabric will dissipate, and all evidence of our life there will be erased.

It's odd. What I love most about the townhouse, my vacation home, is that it is a clean slate. Yet, almost every moment I spend there is spent examining spaces and figuring out where and how my stuff will fit. I travel with measuring tape, I envision still unfurnished rooms configured in ways that will seem familiar. I envision puggle hairs floating through the air, scratched walls, carpet stains with known origins. I imagine faded Pepsi stains on the ceiling from the time my son and his friend decided to see what happens when you boil a soda can, V-8 stains in the bathroom from the time I tried to bathe a skunked dog in the sink. I wonder how long it will take for my blind dog to figure out the path to my bed each night, how I will explain the new bedding that still smells fresh.

Technically, my old house, the one from which I am slowly erasing myself, is not the house where I grew up. I lived in several homes before I landed there, in that house more spacious than any I had ever known, in a suburb I had never intended to live in, living a suburban life I had never really imagined living. In many ways, though, it is the house where I grew up. It is where my family took shape, it is where I started to figure out who I am. It is a place filled with wonderful memories and a place where I learned many lessons, some of them painful, most of them useful. There was life before that house, and I hope there will be much life after that house, but the meat of my story happened there. It is changing hands, and it will soon be spruced up and coated in new paint, but it will always, in some fundamental way, be mine.

My townhouse in the mountains will likely be temporary, as fleeting as the backdrop of jagged cloud formations in the distance this morning. Maybe it will become more than just a pile of brick and mortar to me, maybe it won't. There are no mountains, but there is plenty of new terrain.

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.