27 March 2022

The inspector came on Friday to inspect the repairs we've had done on the house lately. We were pretty nervous about it. We have learned the hard way over many years of experience that it is generally best for us if we are not inspected too closely. It is generally best for us if we are, instead, observed only dimly, in passing, and from a distance, so that we can retain an air of considerable mystery.

We went into this whole "inspection" thing, therefore, with some trepidation. 

So the plumbing inspector showed up at 8:59 a.m. and was finished by 9:03 a.m. (I looked at the clock.) 

We passed. All was good. No problem. We had even begun to celebrate the fruits of our victory by drinking from the hose in the backyard.

But then the other shoe, as it inevitably does, dropped.

The ELECTRICAL inspector showed up. We had not realized that we were going to be electrically inspected as well. There had been no mention of it during our lovely friend the electrician's multi-day residency at the house. We were taken unawares. And I'm sorry to report that we did not pass the inspection.

It turns out that we need a new special kind of circuit-breaker now. It is a new regulation that has only come into effect recently and has apparently surprised everyone. It certainly surprised us. The inspector was quite kind and did not blame us for the state of our circuit-breakers because there is really no way we could have known. But the fact remains that our lovely friend the electrician will have to return for another engagement in his residency. Sort of a postdoc, I guess.

So we passed our test, but failed the pop quiz. Having given so many pop quizzes myself during my career, I can only wonder if this is not instant karma coming back once again to bite me.

24 March 2022

Today, in anticipation of the plumbing inspector's exciting visit planned for tomorrow, I decided to make a quick run to the storage unit to stash one wicker chair and a bushel basket full of seashells (such are my irreplaceable treasures) to get them out of the way.

Unfortunately, when I got there I noticed a fine pale yellow dust covering the lock to our unit and the hallway outside it. "Huh," I said to myself, while nevertheless going about my business.

Unfortunately, when I lifted the door of our storage unit, a rain of this yellow dust fell down on me.

Unfortunately, when this happened, I looked up to see what was going on.

Unfortunately, I reflexively opened my mouth as I did so.

Unfortunately, as a consequence I got a big mouthful of pale yellow dust, which tasted quite bitter.

Unfortunately, someone had accidentally set off a fire extinguisher in our hallway and sprayed it all around. The dried residue was the pale yellow dust that was now all over the place -- including inside my mouth.

Unfortunately, that shit is toxic.

The joy of the storage place is, unfortunately, beginning to wane.

23 March 2022

In five days, I will begin teaching my last ever class at Colorado College. There will be a month of intense activity and then another month of desultory bureaucracy as I play at being the Acting Department Chair and then it will be over.

I have packed, sorted, donated, and otherwise disposed of everything that can reasonably be packed, sorted, donated, or otherwise disposed of given that we still need to live here a few more months. I have in some cases perhaps even gone too far and Jonathan wandered around the kitchen rather forlornly last night searching for a drinking glass, but mostly we are fine with our pared-down life.

I am not doing any writing just now -- feeling very burnt out after the big push to get my final scholarly book out. But also just suffused by the feeling that I am waiting -- waiting to begin, biding my time in a sort of stasis.

But I am very bad at doing nothing, I have discovered (although I have high hopes of developing that skill soon.) So yesterday, while waiting, I decided to learn how to make stop-motion films. Here is my very first effort:



My brother Joe says that the existence of Nick Park is proof that we are living in the best of all possible time lines, all other evidence to the contrary.

21 March 2022

Jonathan has been away for two days and two nights now visiting his parents -- playing the first out-of-town gig of our farewell tour. I was thinking of getting t-shirts made, but then we would just have more clothes to pack and, frankly, I'm starting to run out of boxes.

For a long time, I have thought of having children as a very long, very hard lesson in learning how to say goodbye. Giving birth, ironically, was the first goodbye -- saying farewell to the child who was living inside my body where I knew they were warm and safe, and letting them depart to the big outside world where they would cry (inevitably) and be hurt (inevitably) and where I would often be powerless to fix what was wrong (inevitably). Then sending them off to school and the first overnight at a friend's house and the first time they drove a car all by themselves (made even more truly horrifying by my having so recently experienced their driving skills up close and personal as a passenger) and then off to college, which was exciting for them and exciting but also heartbreaking for me.

There was this one moment when I took Tris off to college, sitting in his dorm room waiting for time to go to the opening convocation, after which I would leave him. He was sitting at his institutional/functional dorm room desk, reading through the contents of his Welcome Packet. I was sitting on his functional/institutional dorm room bed looking out the window at his new sky. It was quiet except for the muffled sounds of the functional institution around us coming through the cinder block walls as other people went about their business. I thought, "This is very familiar to me -- I have done this before with this child." And I realized that I was remembering the day he was born, holding him in the functional/institutional hospital room, waiting for my parents to come and bring Aiden to meet his new brother and for us to go home together to begin our new life. He was quiet then, too, and my heart was breaking with love then, too.

Right at this moment, they are both hundreds of miles away from me. Tris is even on the other side of an international border. They are both well. They are both happy enough. So why do I feel this sense that I am once again saying goodbye to them?

We got a mouse in one of our permanently out and baited no-nonsense-because-mice-carry-hantavirus-mouse-traps during the first night Jonathan was away. I heard the snap very clearly at 2:00 a.m. and fretted away the rest of the nighttime hours thinking about how I would have to dispose of the corpse in the morning. In our house, we have very separate magisteria -- I do the taxes and take out the trash and handle the majority of the yard work. Jonathan washes dishes and bakes bread and vacuums. But dealing with spiders and dead mice is definitely his domain. Alas, he is away on tour and I am the only one here. So I did what I had to do. But my spinal cord insisted that I scream my head off the whole time I was doing it. Screaming at mice is the only traditional gender role performance at which I truly excel.
 


17 March 2022

For a long time, I didn't have a winter coat. I thought I had a winter coat, but that is because I grew up in Arkansas. And what is a heavy winter coat in the South is merely a light jacket in the North. I discovered this, to my chagrin, in the midst of the very first ever blizzard of my life when I sallied excitedly forth to get donuts and ended up, shivering and breathless and stunned, taking shelter in a subway station beneath the streets of Boston. I was so traumatized by my newfound knowledge that I immediately bought a very long, very puffy down coat in a lovely shade of plum and spent the rest of that winter dressed as an ambulatory purple mattress.

I mention this because after eight years of living in temperate North Carolina and forgetting my hard-won New England lessons, I moved with my little baby to the Colorado Rocky Mountains high and promptly almost froze us both to death. 

Fortunately, my friend Andrea came over to the house, saw what I thought was a winter comforter on the bed where I was huddling with my infant on icy December nights, and immediately went back to her house around the corner and returned with a heavy, thick, real winter comforter that made all the difference in the world. I still have it here.

I also have a million (rough estimate) other blankets, quilts, comforters, afghans, and throws that I have hoarded up with great diligence for 26 years now. In my defense, we did lose power for several hours once about 20 years ago, so all of this is very reasonable.

Today I made two enormous lawn-and-leaf bags -- one for the ARC and one for the animal shelter -- filled with extraneous warm bed coverings to give away.


It's a little embarrassing to discover that I had so many. It's also a little embarrassing to admit how many I still have left. But although colloquial expression has it that Hell is burning hot, Southerners and readers of Dante know that, in actual fact, Hell is freezing cold. The prudent among us, aware of the states of our own souls, prepare accordingly.

16 March 2022

I have a song stuck in my head. It is "Rene and Georgette Magritte with Their Dog After the War" by Paul Simon. Here it is:



I would never suggest that Jonathan and I have been through a war -- the comparison would be obscene and grotesque.

But the part about seeing mannequins in a store window bringing "tears to their emigrant eyes" is a sentiment that I can understand. Both Jonathan and I have, for different reasons and at different times, been emigrants and found ourselves very far away from anything familiar. And I know how it can suddenly hit you when you catch a glimpse of something seemingly trivial that reminds you of your life "before." It can make you lose your head, if only for a moment. (I once [very, very briefly] took up with a bunch of Mormon missionaries because I was feeling lonesome and they had American accents. The less said about that, the better, really.)

We are in absolutely no sense refugees. We are choosing to go, consciously searching for "the deep forbidden music we've been longing for." I have always emigrated by choice and in incredibly comfortable and privileged circumstances. But I have still been surprised into tears by the most unexpected things -- a voice, a song, a Snickers bar. You would not think that a package of Twinkies could ever be viewed so tenderly, ever be seen as so precious. But even the most rambunctious and gleeful emigrants may -- in some hidden part of their hearts -- be looking for home.

Last week we had the excitement of signing rental agreements and de-coding Italian bureaucracy. This week we are back to the more mundane reality of cardboard boxes. I said good-bye yesterday to two different friends whom I will most likely never see again. And I, who cries copiously even at long-distance commercials, was completely dry-eyed. I don't think the reality has hit me yet. I will probably break down sobbing in the middle of some Italian grocery store six months from now at the sight of Gatorade. God help me if I run across Kentucky Fried Chicken.

13 March 2022

Update: Having found this treasure trove of new pictures of the rustic farmhouse, we shared them around with our nearest and dearest. Not a single one of them said, "Oh, wow -- an outdoor wood-fired oven!" Every last one of them said, "Oh, wow -- a split-level bathroom!" Somehow, I don't think they're quite getting the romance of it all. Or at least not in the same way that we are. After all, everyone has their individual tastes and predilections and I don't want to be judgmental.

It turns out that if you obsessively google around about something, bringing to bear all of the internet skills that you have honed over the entire lifetime of the internet itself, you can find things out. This morning, I found out that our rustic farmhouse in Italy has an outdoor wood-fired oven. Here is a picture of it:


Jonathan and I keep looking at each other, all goggly-eyed every time we discover a new wonderful feature of the rustic farmhouse, and squealing.

We know we cannot live there forever -- the senora who owns it has been very clear that our tenancy is temporary only. But we will have almost a year in the rustic farmhouse, eating wood-fire pizza and drinking beauty.

Tris's first year of college -- our first year of empty nesting -- I was on sabbatical and Jonathan took a year-long leave of absence so that we could be together all the time, all day, every day, just the two of us. We called it The Year of Love. We told people that it was because we were taking a year to do only what we loved, but that was not the real reason.

So we are going to have almost a year in the rustic farmhouse on a hillside in Tuscany. We have decided to call it The Year of Farming.

11 March 2022

Well, this is delightful. The word on the street is that you are supposed to save all your financial records, etc., for seven years. Or one hundred and seven years. Whatever will fit in your basement, apparently. It's unclear.

In any case, I have spent an exhilarating two hours going through just some of them, but now I have decided to stop so that the exquisite joy of sorting and shredding can last longer, drawing it out like a lingering kiss or the last piece of a particularly decadent chocolate cake. I would hate to do it all today and thus deprive myself of this rarefied bliss tomorrow. And probably the next day. And the next day. And the day after that, too, I'm guessing.

Jesus. The pleasure just never fucking ends.

10 March 2022

 

After three weeks of email and telephone conversations during which I understood about ten percent (generous estimate, counting things like "buon giorno") of what was being said and, in passing, learned the Italian phrase for the equivalent of a US social security number ("codice fiscale"), today we got the rental agreement contract. We are officially renting the rustic farmhouse of our Italian dreams.

I am so excited that I actually feel sick. This is, however, a good omen (despite the very real possibility of vomit.) The most amazing things I've ever done in my life -- give birth to my children, touch down in an airplane on Rarotonga, marry Jonathan -- have all been immediately preceded by this terrible feeling in the pit of my stomach (the result, obviously, of my own chicken-hearted cowardice and fear.)

The night before Aiden was born, the first contractions woke me up a little after midnight. I lay there in bed by myself, timing them by the light of the clock-radio and saying goodbye to my life as it had been. I kept thinking, "This is the last night I will spend by myself for who knows how long?" Then I started throwing up.

I puked my way through the next eleven hours until he was born. It is pretty safe to say that I am not at my most attractive (or fragrant) during these big life-transition moments.

But these things that have terrified me have all, in the end, been worth it -- all, in the end, the best experiences of my life. I have learned the truth of that over the years. But it doesn't change the fact that I need a nice cup of ginger tea and perhaps a cool compress on my forehead right now.

09 March 2022

It spit snow most of the weekend. More is expected today.

I have been working with my senior thesis students who are coming to the end of this process. It is wonderful -- they are all working so hard, so thoughtfully, with such intensity and dedication. Or maybe with such fear and desperation. Hard to tell. It is (at least for me, who doesn't have to actually write a thesis myself) joyous.

My friend Neena asked me the other day how it feels to know that this is the end of something -- and, in a way, the end of someone. These are my last thesis students ever. I have already taught, for example, my last Social Theory class ever. Soon I will have, again for example, my last discussion of Resistance Through Rituals, a book that I first read almost 40 years ago and that I've been discussing constantly (in one way or another) ever since. I have been a college professor for over half of my life and I have loved it. I still love it. Except, you know, when I don't. I am not sitting in a faculty meeting right now, so perhaps my view at the moment is overly rosy.

When Henry David Thoreau left his cabin at Walden Pond in the fall of 1847, he wrote in his journal, "Perhaps if I lived there much longer, I might live there forever. One would think twice before he accepted heaven on such terms."

In the meantime, Benjamin is making a film for his thesis and sent me a photo of his set for one series of shots. He has used a lot of my old sociology books as props. Even at a distance, even mostly turned away from me, I can identify every one of my dear old friends. "Look!" I want to say to ... someone, "It's Harrison White!"

It was lovely while it lasted.



06 March 2022

It is snowing today, so we are not going to the storage unit. Carrying very heavy boxes around in the icy wind would be too grim. Instead, we have been gathering up things to donate to the ARC. They have gotten to know us there lately, but seem glad to see us anyway.

My dad died two years ago, just before the pandemic hit. Going through all of our stuff, I keep finding odd things from him that I've kept over the years.

This morning I found a note he sent to Jonathan thanking him for a gift of a book about an Italian sculptor from Brescia named Rita Siragusa. It read:

"Thank you for sending me the book about Rita Siragusa. I appreciate it. My aunt had the exact same name. In futherance of that, I contacted this Rita in Brescia with the information that I felt sure we were closely related and would it be possible for me to get a discount on one of her smaller sculptures. At first she seemed amenable but when I suggested that we meet for cocktails in Bald Knob, Arkansas, the line went dead."

I have also found copies of the letters he used to send to the local newspaper in his town in Arkansas. They were running a contest to give prizes to worthy local citizens who had shown true community spirit and deserved to be publicly recognized with a whole variety of Civic Leader Awards. There were many categories. You could nominate people you knew by sending in a letter detailing their civic-minded activities.

Dad made up a dog named Rosie and kept nominating her for a variety of awards, writing long letters about her activities, which mostly involved having drinks, affairs, or the occasional line of coke with various disreputable local elected officials. In our town, there were plenty of scoundrels to choose from and Rosie had made the rounds.

Rosie went all out in her campaign for an award. In one letter she had been on a goodwill tour of the local dog food factory. Unfortunately, she came back unexpectedly quickly with just one word: "cannibals."

Dad was the child of immigrants, grew up in Brooklyn before it became fashionable, and got his education with scholarships and ROTC. He served in the navy with Leonard Lauder, Estee's son, and when their ship was docked in Rhode Island, Len invited my dad and some of his other friends to Estee's mansion in Newport Beach. It was pretty snazzy in the eyes of a kid from Brooklyn.

Dad said it took him quite a while to figure out that the strange, dour, lurking man was the butler. The butler then carried around a silver tray with glasses on it filled with liquids in different shades of brown and clear, asking these ebullient young sailors what they would like to drink. No matter what outlandish thing they requested (and the requests became increasingly outlandish as the afternoon wore on), magically, it was on the tray. Dad asked for a "sidecar," which was a cocktail he had read about in books, and the butler gave him one of the glasses. "Was it really a sidecar?" I asked. "How would I know?" he said. Fifty years later, his imaginary dog Rosie was drinking them with the mayor.

I was with him in his last days, when he was so sick. Death did not come easily. When the hospice nurses came to visit, they would ask him questions to test his mental acuity. "Who is the president?" one of them asked him. (This was before the 2020 election.) Dad sighed. "Dipshit," he said. The nurse laughed and marked it down as correct.


He would have come to visit us in Italy. He was the only one who ever came to visit when we lived in the South Pacific.

03 March 2022

Our lovely best friend the electrician came to visit yesterday and stayed with us for seven and a half hours. He is very friendly and capable and he fixed absolutely everything. We now have working lights with non-taking-your-life-in-your-own-hands wiring down in the basement and all of the electrical outlets (both inside and outside of the house) now have actual electrical current reaching them and the ceiling lights in the bathroom and the dining room are no longer sort of dangling. He even replaced the light over the kitchen sink that went on the fritz immediately following his last visit. It was more than just the broken baklava and he had to replace the whole thing, but it is all new and shiny/shining now.

As things had slowly disintegrated over the past couple of decades, we had gradually gotten used to it -- carrying a flashlight down in the basement, not plugging things in on the front porch. We had accommodated ourselves. But now it is blindingly bright and electrified everywhere and we even practically need sunglasses in the basement. When Jonathan first went down there, he said, "Wow!" When I first went down there a while later, I said, "Wow!" It's like we are Neanderthals discovering fire.

Our dear friend left about seven o'clock, leaving us (at long last) in a house where every single light, outlet, socket, wire, and switch was in perfect working order. We sprang into action making some dinner. Jonathan turned on the light over the stove and -- may the gods strike me dead this very moment if this is not absolutely true -- it came on for two seconds and then died.

02 March 2022

Too much excitement at the storage unit today. Yelling happened (not by us), threatening happened (not us), slamming doors and storming around in a huff happened (not us), cowering happened (us -- well, me, at least. Jonathan was pretty stoic through it all.). Gun fire did not happen, but it did occur to me that it very well might.

The issue was that the entry doors open with a PIN. The PIN keypads don't work 24 hours a day -- only during business hours, which start at 9:30. At 9:33 (no exaggeration) they were still not all working because they have some sort of technical glitch (the repair person is coming next week) and so the front office person has to individually activate each one when she gets in every morning and she wasn't quite finished doing all of them by 9:33 (I looked at the clock). And so this guy who was waiting completely lost his shit.

Thus the yelling and stomping around. A very tightly wound guy.

For a few minutes there, I felt real (and justifiable, given the culture of violence in the US and the ubiquity of guns) fear.

It puts a whole different spin on the leisurely pace of house-hunting in Italy. It will be refreshing to live someplace where people don't completely lose their minds when things don't happen instantly. And where things like "house hunting" don't happen with actual guns.

I wish I could say that Jonathan and I spent the time while this was going on kissing. But that didn't occur to me because I was so busy being worried (again, justifiably) that we would be hit in the crossfire. The next time, though, I will be better prepared and will instantly start kissing my husband. So if you hear that I was tragically gunned down by a maniac at a storage unit, please know that I will have gone out while doing what I love.

01 March 2022

Last week seems so glamorous compared to this week. Last week we had the electrician in and the rustic farmhouse with trusted gardener in our headlights. This week we only have boxes.

Yesterday I scored two empty paper boxes at work. Today I took them, filled with books, to our storage unit. Every day I take a few boxes filled with books there. Every day I discover more books that I cannot bear to part with.

Thank god for books in my life. If you grow up a weirdo kid in the Ozark Mountains of Arkansas, pretty much your only choices are lots of books or lots of really hard drugs. By the time we were old enough to drive, legally or not, I started having friends who had killed themselves going ninety miles an hour over the edge of a mountain road, too fucked up to steer, too fucked up to care. Books got me out of that place alive.

But hauling them in boxes to the storage unit every day -- I have to admit that it is definitely not glamorous. The electrician will be back on Wednesday, though, so that will add a little spice to the week. We still have not heard more from the rental agent about the rustic farmhouse with trusted gardener. Ah, Italy!

I dreamed last night that Jonathan and I were trying to escape from some bad guys by flying away in an airplane made out of a cardboard box. It flew just fine, but we were having trouble fitting inside it -- not enough leg room. 

I think I am spending too much time with boxes.