We did it. Moved. On, to a new home. I suppose there are ways in which moving to a new home is not moving on, but I think it mostly is. It has something to do with motion. I’ve written about my love of motion, of travel.
But moving on has more, I think, to do with change. A lot of people don’t like change. It upsets them. They resist it. It causes anxiety in them. Julia and I embrace change. We need it.
Edgy New Yorker that I sometimes am, ingenuous small-town Nebraskan that Julia is, we didn’t, when we met, in our forties, make the most natural match. Could a wise guy from Lagos, Nigeria and a farmer from rural Bangladesh have been any more different in origin than we? A joke of mine from our early years to describe our different temperaments was to offer the contrasting responses we would have to being told by someone to go fuck ourselves.
Fuck me!? I would surely respond, furious that such an offense might be leveled against my person. Fuck you!!!
Julia, in contrast, would just drop a nice Midwestern wave at the wrist, smile benignly in earnest rejection of the insult, and reply, “Oh, you don’t mean that.”
But beyond the climatological and temperamental differences between us, Julia and I share multiple passions, and one of them is in that embrace of change. We don’t like to get stuck. We reject routine. We need to keep being born. I’ve written about that before, too.
Because of the life she early on chose for herself — freelance photojournalist and documentarian — Julia led a rather itinerant life for the first twenty or so of her adult years. She knocked about a lot. I got knocked around a lot, by misdirections and mischances and then some self-corrections and big decisions. Before we met, (in addition to several with my family, as a child) I’d moved 13 times as an adult. But Julia more than doubled me, at 30 times. Together, in nearly 28 years, we’ve moved 11 times.
Sometimes life scales us up, sometimes down. Things go into storage. Some things come out.
At one point, I had to put all my books and their cases into storage for nearly five years. I pined.
When the bookcases and books finally emerged, the volumes returned to their shelves — each and every one of them — I washed their hair, I pared their nails. The books were reborn from their sleeping boxes, old souls with outstretched arms, emerging at random before my eyes, including, I recall — I sat back on the floor with a smile to read — the Collected Poems Vol. 1 of William Carlos Williams, co-edited by Princeton's late A. Walton Litz, under whom I briefly studied when he visited at Columbia. I opened at random, to Spring and All, XIV:
Of death
the barber
the barber
talked to me
cutting my
life with
sleep to trim
my hair—
It's just
a moment
he said, we die
every night—
And of
the newest
ways to grow
hair on
bald death—
I told him
of the quartz
lamp
and of old men
with third
sets of teeth
to the cue
of an old man
who said
at the door—
Sunshine today!
for which
death shaves
him twice
a week
My books!
When we traveled the country for a year in our motor home – lived in it for 15 months – 99.9% of what we possessed was crated for storage. We had rented out the only home we ever owned, in which we’d lived for an astonishing 5 years, and when we returned, we didn’t want to live in it anymore. We took an apartment not very far away and continued to take tenants until we sold it, and by then we had moved to downtown Los Angeles, which had a lot to do with accommodating Julia’s new devotion to street photography.
In DTLA, we lived in four different lofts and apartments over 13 years.
One of those moves accommodated our fulfilling my long-held dream of living a bicoastal life, and of living in New York again. We took a second, Brooklyn apartment, which meant dramatically scaling down in L.A.
We kept the Brooklyn apartment for 4 years. Then, one March, Julia was with me in New York, leading up to my birthday on the 14th. On Thursday, the 12th, she moderated a Q&A at the Strand Bookstore with photographer Fran Forman. We ate dinner after at a nearby Italian restaurant and pizza emporium. We had tickets the following evening with friends for the new Justin Peck-choreographed West Side Story on Broadway. Saturday night, my birthday, there was a reservation for dinner at Manhatta, for which I was scheduled to wear my brand new, feathered black fedora, with long black coat to match. I would be stylin’ into my advancing age. Only, that very Friday, West Side Story shut down and Manhatta canceled all reservations to come and shuttered. People were dying by the thousands, all over the country, and the world was closing up, and Julia, not I, was ticketed to fly back to L.A. on Sunday the 15th.
If we separate now, I said to her, who knows how long we may be apart. My classes had already transferred online, so I quickly made a reservation to fly out of an empty JFK the next day in a quickly purchased seat beside Julia. With the help of my nephew Rob, we closed up the Brooklyn apartment long distance and never saw it again.
There are always particular circumstances. There is always this exigency or that, leading in this direction and to that outcome. Convection is the way of things.
The embrace of change as I matured into adulthood came partly in response to the unhappy accidents of my life (what was the alternative?), partly to dare myself to live. A shy and dreamy child, prone to retreat into the safety of home and family, I shamed myself with fear of the world. Courage I recognized to be out there. Life was out there, and I wanted to live, not just dream of living. I needed to move out there to unburden myself of shame. And every movement is a change.
O, Heraclitus!
What emerged from this movement became one of my thematic preoccupations: the nature of lives lived close to home and saturated with a resonant knowledge of the familiar; life extended, in contrast, into the trembling uncertainty of the shimmering new.
Three years ago, I began work on a poem intended to explore the theme. I titled it “Devotions and Departures.” I intended three exemplars: the life lived close to home, the traveler who journeys long and far and returns, and the adventurer who never comes back. It was while doing research on the third of my exemplary lives that I stumbled upon the full story of Ferdinand Magellan. That story of bold adventure into the new became a novel in progress, and I never returned to finish the poem.
But the second of my three exemplary lives – the great traveler who returns – served as the poem’s pivotal life, with the drive to depart and the draw, in the end, for most, nonetheless, of home. For that life, I chose Marco Polo. From “Devotions and Departures”:
The Death of Polo
Wayfaring stranger to his merchant father,
Marco Polo knew the Great Khan,
marvels and myriad routes of journey,
long gone, to travel home.
There, from the family manse in Cannaregio,
to close time, touched his failing finger to his will,
his wealth, and said, Non ho scritto
neppure la metà delle cose che ho visto.
Scritto – Not even half.
Behind his glassy eye, then, opaque
and fading under scrutiny, Polo saw
what no one other ever sees --
iris dissolve of what recedes and expands
in final revision -- the far field.
What tone now hummed in the tired bones
as measure of his departure, his return?
The courtyard footfalls, Rialto waters lapping,
did they lull?
Now, last week, Julia and I stood at the kitchen island that had served as a nerve center of our lives, work, and discussion these past four years, counting up the moves, figuring the further stats, like a Bill James baseball analysis of WAR for residential reorientations toward the future.
“I’ve moved every 2.1 years over my adult life,” I said, peering at the calculator and leaning in on my elbows, “but every 2.5 year since we’ve been together.” I looked up. “You’ve made me more stable!”
We both laughed at that one. We stared at each other.
“Here we go again,” Julia said.
“Here we go.”
“You and me.”
“You and me, kid.”
AJA
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Poet. Storyteller. Dramatist. Essayist. Artificer.
The poem is truly wonderful. I hope that you publish more of it.
As someone who had actually attended 12 schools by the time I graduated high school (I include having studied in Israel in that count), I understand the desire to move and the fearlessness it takes. Haven't moved so much in my adulthood unless you count all the moving back and forth from college and grad school. We have now been in the same home for almost 25 years. That is what is really scary.
May you only have joy in your new home!