There seem to be people who live in their storage units.

During the day, these people keep their doors open and we can see as we go past that the units are furnished inside with comfy chairs and wall art -- places where they can go about their business or their hobbies or where they can just relax for a while with a good book. 

It is a strange society that we live in now that this shadow world exists, this hidden village of the not-quite-completely dispossessed. I have no idea where the inhabitants of Storagia go at night -- perhaps to homes, perhaps nowhere. During the day, they seem happy enough. 

A couple of weeks ago, one of our neighbors was sitting on his threshold playing the guitar -- a lovely rendition of "Here Comes the Sun." He played very well, as far as I could tell (which is not at all). Yesterday, he reported that there have been a series of break-ins on our hallway. Sure enough, the metal bolt that keeps each individual door shut and to which the actual lock is attached on the unit directly across from his had been cut open with bolt cutters. 

The guy (whom we call "Santa Man" because he does, in fact, look like Santa Claus and for all we know Santa summers in Colorado, where he has plenty of time to hone his guitar skills -- also, he refers to himself as "Santa" and may not be kidding) said that "some really valuable guns" had been stolen from one of the units, which makes the whole "there are people living in their storage units and apparently they are armed" thing as American as possible. Jonathan is concerned because now, he says, the thieves are armed -- as if there was even the slightest possibility that they weren't already armed before. I'm only surprised that they had the wherewithal to take someone else's guns given the number of guns they were probably already carrying themselves. Meanwhile, the gigantic American flag flying on a flagpole outside is at half-mast.

I don't worry too much about our stuff being stolen -- the photo albums and baby shoes and used books and mementos of our dearly departed Spotty have no re-sale value. Nevertheless, I do not want our unit broken in to and these things that are precious only to us destroyed in any way.

Our next door neighbor was around yesterday and we agreed that too many people are owned by their property rather than the other way around and that we are only building prisons for ourselves with all this stuff we accumulate. Then she happily took a dozen ceramic plant pots that I have have gathered over the years back to her house.

Other than Jonathan, my brother Joe is my best friend. We have done lots of things together. In 1986, together we traded currency on the black market in a back alley in Shanghai. That was in the days when Americans couldn't get into China very easily and I would have been scared of doing anything illegal there, but I wasn't because Joe was with me. He was with me when I got pushed into an open ditch in Jakarta during a cholera epidemic and there was a corpse already down there. He was with me during an epic blizzard in New York City so monumental that the parked cars on the streets were completely buried with only the tips of their radio antennae sticking up and we started laughing so hard that we had to sit down in the snow in the middle of Fifth Avenue.

And he was the one, back in the late 1970s who first went down to the only real record store in our benighted little Last Picture Show hometown and came back with the first LPs from The Clash and The Sex Pistols and I finally heard music that matched all the things I felt then.

So last week, it was only right that we went together back to that town where we grew up for one final visit before we never go there again. When people asked us what we were doing there (we are obviously strangers now), we told them that we were there to visit our father's grave, which was true, but not the whole story because the whole story, as is often the case, is far too difficult to explain.

The town itself has not changed much. The population is still almost what it was when we left. Maybe most things are a little shabbier. The grain elevator at the feed mill right near downtown blew up three days before we got there. I would have thought that this event would have caused more excitement among the populace than it appears to have done. I guess grain elevators exploding is just a fact of life that people there are resigned to. We had a view of the remaining part of the feed mill from our hotel room window and it seemed to be fine.

Also, itinerant muralists apparently come to town every summer now and paint a mural on the side of one lucky public building. I was surprised by the choices of subject matter and, again, would have thought that it might have caused more comment than it seems to have done. My favorite was the two-story-high mural of an irritated possum, but Joe was partial to the big weasel which we could also see from our hotel room window. It was, taken all together, a million-dollar hotel room view.

We arrived in the late afternoon, having driven all day through the flat and desolate Arkansas rice land. After checking in and enjoying the fenestral panorama, we walked down to the river where we had gone so many times during all those growing up years. It was still exactly the same -- the same weeds and clover and ancient trees, the same worn rock shelves reaching out into the same muddy water that you can't even see an inch down into.

I had my first ever taste of beer while sitting on those worn river rocks, under those same ancient trees. It was believed by the high school kids then (and possibly now) that if you were drinking underage down at the river and the cops showed up, if you could manage to swim across the river to Oklahoma on the other side, the cops were legally prohibited from following you and you would not be busted. Although this was always the working theory -- held as gospel among all the teenagers in town -- I never knew of anyone who had ever actually tried it. This is probably just as well seeing as how the far-side bank is a good ways off and anyone drunk enough to try it was almost certainly drunk enough to fail at it.

But the bigger idea -- that if you could just manage to get across that river, you would somehow be free -- that idea was a strong one and I wasn't the only kid in that town who ever looked across that muddy water with silent longing. Probably every kid who has ever grown up on the edge of a river thinks about escape. Rivers do that to you.

And when I did leave, when I was 18, it was in fact across that river, being driven over it and on into Oklahoma to the airport in Tulsa (the closest airport there was) for a plane to Boston, which might as well have been the moon. I hardly ever came back after that, even to visit.

Standing there on those same old rocks that first afternoon back, my brother and I didn't even have to say anything to each other -- we both just bent down and touched the water with our fingertips.

Later we went to the little bookstore in town that has just opened up right before my father got too sick to go to bookstores anymore. He had bought two books there, not because he particularly wanted them, but because he wanted to support such a thing as a bookstore opening there in amongst the river and the feed mill and the weasel art. I bought a book for Joe and he bought a book for me because that's what Dad would have done. "I'll buy you any book you want," was his mantra of our childhood. He knew that those books were building us a bridge out of that place.

The next day we went to visit his grave in the Catholic church and when I touched the holy water there with my fingertips, it was a strange echo of the river.

Here is something that you might not know: there are no closets in Switzerland.

They tried to explain the reasons for this to me -- something about tax codes. I think I could perhaps have understood it if only I hadn't stopped paying attention three words into the explanation ("Well, tax codes...")

So when I fell in love with Jonathan, I had the choice between moving with my little boys to a land without closets or giving up forever the very breath of my body, the very beating of my heart, my bones and dreams and blood.

I chose the breathing and went shopping for wardrobes the first week we landed in Zurich.

It is beyond me to describe the carved Gothic horrors selling for thousands of francs in the only used furniture store in Zurich. Not having the need to house any sleeping vampires -- although not necessarily opposed to it in principle, you understand -- and not having thousands of francs to blow on what is basically a big box, I ended up, as one inevitably, lamentably, does, at Ikea.

I don't know if you have ever been to Ikea.

Ikea is functional.

Ikea is affordable.

Ikea is practical.

Ikea will take your soul out through your nose with a long hook like the ancient Egyptians did with human brains in preparation for mummification.

I guess worse things could happen. 

So we got wardrobes and assembled them with much cursing and then put our clothes in them. For the one my little boys shared, I decided to paint on it -- make it less corporate, less bland, more festive, more ours.

The little boys were five and eight years old, so (as required by Little Boy Law) we painted a dragon on it. I copied a picture of a dragon from one of the (many) dragon books around the house and then we filled in the outline with poster paint, making the scales by dipping our fingers in the paint and pressing our fingertips (mostly) inside the outline.

And there it has been for almost 20 years. It came back across the ocean with us and has been in their old bedroom all these years, holding a progression of bigger and bigger jeans, bigger and bigger shoes, shirts with ever longer arms, soccer shin guards and woolen hats and t-shirts commemorating long-forgotten events, eventual suits and ties. And every time I looked at it, I saw again my little boys in the alpine afternoon light, concentrating, dripping paint everywhere, working away on their dragon, the three of us together.

Today, we put the wardrobe out at the curb and ARC took it away.

It has been 14 days since my last post. In those two weeks, so many things have happened -- and they have been at so many places on the emotional map -- that I have no idea how I am feeling about anything at any given moment.

Some (by no means all) of the things that have happened (in no particular order, because putting things in order is laughably far beyond my capacity at the moment):

I got a letter from the South Pacific telling me that Emily has passed away at age 101. I lived with Emily in her old and rambling house by the sea for a year when the boys and I were in the Cook Islands. We used to sit, Emily and I, on the shady veranda in the afternoons and watch my boys playing in the dappled sunlight of the garden and talk about many things -- long conversations that meandered like butterflies in and out of time and memory and places in the languid Polynesian air. The night I left to come back to the US, she put her arms around me and held me for a while. "I am your mother," she said into my hair. "Don't ever forget that I am your mother."

My actual biological mother, a few days after I got the letter about Emily, was pushed down a flight of concrete stairs by the man she had been having an affair with and whom she married just weeks after my father's death two years ago. The saga of the past two years has involved so many crazy Southern stereotypes -- double-wides, buzzards, shotguns, defrocked evangelical ministers, handgun-toting ex-wives lurking in WalMart parking lots, possums, indoor-outdoor carpet, snake oil sellers, deep-fried catfish -- that it would be literally incredible to me if I heard it any other way than first hand. It got to the point that when my mother was telling me about her plans to have semen injected into her back in the abandoned JC Penney store out at the mall (now converted into some sort of fly-by-night, off-grid "medical" clinic), I didn't even blink. Later it turned out that she wasn't saying "semen" -- she was saying "cement" with a heavy Arkansas accent. Better, I guess, but still... Anyway, she's in the hospital and my brother and I are heading there in a doomed attempt to see if there is anything we can do. 

Simultaneously (as in the very same day), I found out that my new book manuscript has passed review and will -- fingers crossed, there is still some work to do -- be coming out in Spring 2023 from a really great press. Yea! This amazes me and I am sure there has been some mistake, but I am hoping to lay low so that it is not discovered. Aiden says, "I would expect nothing less from you."

I also finished everything from my last class ever at Colorado College, turned in my last final grades ever, advised my last students ever, and have nothing left to do now but attend my retirement party (tomorrow) and turn in my keys. The sadness of leaving this part of my life has been very neatly balanced by the exquisite joy of realizing that the last few onerous administrative tasks, meetings, assessment reports, etc. are the last. It is impossible, examining my moods, to know from moment to moment whether nostalgic melancholy or sheer fucking relief dominates.

And eleven days ago, I watched my littlest baby graduate from university. Sitting there in the audience, I thought my heart would burst from pride and love. And also, frankly, from relief. And, it must be said, from nostalgia, too. I remember when I used to have to bend down in order to hold his hand. I remember when his hand felt so small in mine.

There is more that has happened in these last 14 days, but those are some of the emotional roller-coaster highlights that are happening while I live here surrounded by boxes and packing tape and trash bags and dust. Right now, Jonathan is six feet away from me trying on many pairs of old trousers from the back of his closet to see if they still fit. He is wearing his "Nachos in Space" underwear while doing this. So at least for this one moment, I am purely, absolutely, uncomplicatedly happy.