I am feeling chastised by my tea bags.

The latest one says, "The unknown is where all outcomes are possible; enter it with grace." Inside my head, the tea bag says this in an exasperated voice, more like: "For god's sake, try to enter it with some fucking grace, unlike your usual pathetic MO." So here, on the precipice of this big life transition into the unknown, I am trying to muster some fucking grace.

This mostly involves keeping the plants watered and eating things other than tortilla chips. Sometimes. Last week I ate some raspberry sorbet, which I feel is a more graceful thing to eat than queso dip straight out of the jar with a spoon. 

I realize that the tea bag is not meant to be censorious and that my reading of it is entirely about my own longstanding feelings of self-doubt and inadequacy. But the demands of the moment do not exactly make adequacy easy to achieve.

The contractors are here working on the basement all week and my finished manuscript is due at the publishers on Friday. I am in the footnotes/bibliography/permissions phase and have been for several days now. It never occurred to me that The Chicago Manual of Style would ever come to play such a large part of my emotional life. But here we are.

I have typed the sentence "I am in footnote hell" into a few emails. Scarily, this had led the data-mining algorithm that rules our lives to switch all the ads I get on YouTube. They used to be dominated by ads for Vrbo vacation homes. Now they are almost all suicide prevention/counseling/antidepressant ads. This, I think, is going too far. While figuring out how to get permission to reprint text from a now-defunct one-off 1937 magazine is tedious, I'm not going to kill myself over it. Not while I still have all these tortilla chips to eat.

The landscapers have come and gone, taming our overgrown jungle, once so wild and tangled. Now it is a tidy and respectable yard that any normal person would be pleased to have.

"I hope you get a chance to enjoy it some before you leave," the head landscaper said on his way out.

"It looks great!" I said. I did not say that I had enjoyed it the way it was before or that I had always thought there was something magical about the jungle. I did not say that the wildness was on purpose.

When I first moved into this house, I painted a poem on the ceiling of my bedroom with green paint. It was nice to have poetry to read in the night when the babies were at last asleep and I could hear the sounds of the trains when they came through town in the dark and the quiet.

It was a long poem and it took me two days to paint it. It is surprisingly hard to look straight up for two days. At the end of all that time balanced on a step-ladder with my head bent back, a paintbrush in one hand and a can of paint in the other, I had a newfound respect for Michelangelo. Painting just one poem on a ceiling almost permanently debilitated me. The Sistine Chapel must have been a bitch. But it was worth it for the poetry in the night.

Then, when we moved back into this house after our two-year Swiss sojourn, the movers who were carrying our boxes in assumed that we were new to the house. One of them saw the poem.

"Jeez," he said, scowling and perplexed. "Did ya buy this place from some Satan worshippers or something? There's a poem on the ceiling in there!"

I didn't tell him that I had painted it myself, that I had always thought there was something magical in it, that the poetry was on purpose. The Devil apparently speaks in rhymes -- the better to beguile us, I guess.

But the poem is gone now, too. Anyone normal would be happy to have this house.

Last night, I found a spider in our bed -- for the second night in a row. Not exactly an event to send you sweetly into the land of slumber.

I think we must have done something to rile them up - probably all of this talk about Marxism that goes on around here. The are uniting in fellow feeling with the other bloodsuckers (I'm looking at you, oil company executives) to take us down.

But Tris says it's just because Jonathan and I are now sleeping on a futon right on the floor, depriving the spiders of all the welcoming dusty places where they used to lurk so comfortably underneath the bed. The charm of sleeping together on the floor like we used to do in college has begun to wear thin.

The real estate agent was here last week to talk about "staging" our house.

"Don't move your furniture out," she said, standing in our living room.

"We already have," I said.

Apparently, we look like the sort of people who would have a decorating scheme that features cardboard boxes from the grocery store as a decorating focal point. Perhaps we specially hired The Grinch to come in and do up the place with his famous "nothing left on the walls but some hooks and old wire" aesthetic. The garbage bags marked "ARC" right inside the front door are an especially elegant touch, I think. Architectural Digest agrees -- they are bringing a photographer by later this afternoon.

I screamed when I found the spider last night and Jonathan came running with a shoe to vanquish it.

"You know," he said, "there will be a lot more spiders in Italy."

Yes. But there will also be -- famously -- a lot more shoes.

The landscapers are here today, using actual muscle power to dig up the weeds that I have been merely snatching at in a desultory way for over twenty years. The workers seem very competent and knowledgeable and efficient. After experiencing me all this time, I hope the contrast doesn't cause the lawn to die of shock.

 

On a sudden whim this afternoon, we booked our non-refundable, one-way airline tickets to Milan. In nine weeks, we will fly out of the airport in Colorado Springs, where I have flown out so many times. And in nine weeks and one day, we will land in Milan. I am already anticipating the tears in my heart when I close the door to this house for the last time.

But also I am anticipating arriving in Italy and beginning a whole new life there, Jonathan and I together. Jonathan's friend Jennryn said to him the other day, "Ah, soon you will be sitting there with a glass of wine and a fistful of prosciutto!" We laughed and now hold that image as a beacon in our heads while we take camping gear and cookware to donate to the ARC in heavy boxes and bags.

And so I lead a schizophrenic life -- half of me trying to savor every last feeling and sound and smell and image from this world where I have lived so long and half of me lost in daydreams and visions of a new life far away. I can't wait to leave; I don't want to say good-bye.

And so without ever planning to do so today, we have bought our tickets. When torn or in doubt, I have always chosen to act rashly. I have no regrets.

 

In many ways, I became an academic in the first place because I love to read. Ironically, now that I have retired, I finally have time to read books for pleasure again. Even more ironically, the book that I am currently reading purely for pleasure (and enjoying enormously) is Mary Gabriel's biography of Jenny and Karl Marx, Love and Capital. I am currently up to the momentous year of 1848 and Gabriel's discussions of the horrors of unfettered capitalism, wealth inequality, and the economic transformations of industrialization are riveting. And enraging. That a society would be OK with people having to live like this!

Mudlarks, for example, were people (often children) who were pushed by poverty into trying to scrape the most meagre living by scouring the mud on the banks of the River Thames in London for whatever they could scavenge that they might be able to sell. There among the garbage, raw sewage, and corpses of dead dogs and cats (and sometimes humans), they might find a few pennies worth of something to sell and eke out another day of existence. 

Mind you, this was happening in sight of the towers and palaces of the rulers of an empire, of Queen Victoria herself. Those rulers had every reason to fear that Marx was right and that these oppressed and starving people would one day rise up in revolution. Justice would have demanded it.

I met a mudlark at our storage unit a couple of days ago. She cleans out houses that have been foreclosed and apartments where people have been evicted. Quite a lot of stuff is usually left behind and she scavenges what she can and stores it in her unit, hoping to be able to sell it somewhere. 

We talked about the recent spate of robberies at the facility. Someone has been cutting through the locking hardware on the individual units with bolt cutters and making off with the stuff inside.

"But who would want all this junk?" I said, looking at our stacks of used math books and boxes of baby pictures.

"Oh," she said, "People will take anything they can get these days."

Alas, in this version of 1848, we seem more likely to end up with fascism than any utopia.

Writing aobut the events of 1848, Marx said that everything in history happens twice -- the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. Perhaps if we are lucky.

 p.s. After dinner tonight, I went out to the backyard and buried my face in the honeysuckle, inhaling it. After a day spent fretting about the damp, it is important to remember the honeysuckle.

We had maintained a high degree of hope. This is because an unflagging optimism is the essential hallmark of our characters. And also because the recent residencies of both the plumber and the electrician had led us into an, as it turns out, unreasonably rosy view. But the real estate agent, who came for the first time today, did not beat around the bush.

We have damp.

Not fatal damp. Not damp that cannot be ameliorated. But damp nonetheless.

How is it possible, we ask ourselves, living as we do in a freaking desert, that we have damp? Wildfires rage around us. The backyard shrubbery withers in the relentless sun. My own personal skin is so dry that I am beginning to look like beef jerky (well, I'm pretty pale, so I guess chicken jerky.) But my house! My house has moisture to spare! My lips are cracked, the skin of my heels is like hooves. My hair is as dry as straw. But my basement is moist and glossy.

The Clairol Company called. They want the basement to star in a new series of conditioner advertisements where there will be several slo-mo shots of it to show how silky and moisture-rich it is. I asked if we would shoot on location or if the house would have to travel to Hollywood. They are checking with the producers and will call us back. We hope the residuals will cover the costs of repairing the damp. Fingers crossed!

The honeysuckle is riotously blooming out back. I cut some tendrils and put them in a champagne glass that we haven't packed yet -- saved out in case we need to drink champagne. One never knows. I have the honeysuckle next to the camp chair, which is one of the few chairs left in the house. Now I get little whiffs of summer whenever I am sitting there.

We rented a cargo van just for one day and made good use of Tris's muscles to take everything that won't fit into the back of the car to the storage unit. Consequently, we are eating on a little side table, the three of us huddled around it like Macbeth's witches, and we are sitting down wherever we can find a place. Jonathan and I are now sleeping on a futon on the floor, just like we were doing in 1986, only the floor seems to have gotten lower down than it was when we were in college. And harder. I congratulate myself whenever I get up off of it, perhaps too much.

And today I found out that Stanford University Press has accepted my new book -- one that I have been working on, rather intermittently, for almost ten years now. It started sort of as almost a joke -- just something to say whenever anyone asked me what I was writing when I wasn't writing anything. But the more I thought about it, the more real it became and somehow somewhere along the way I actually started really working on it.

And now I have five weeks to finish it up. Tomorrow, I will write a methodology. I will not mention that it all started as sort of a joke.

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.

A lot of action here at the house this week. The contractor has come and given us an estimate -- 6000 clams to get everything done. The landscaper ditto -- 10,000 clams. That's a lot of clams before we even get to the part where new paint and wallpaper are installed by someone who actually knows what they're doing (i.e., not me). I prefer to think of the cost in clams rather than in dollars because that makes it seem more palatable.

It also makes me much more reconciled to the idea of selling the house and never again seeing the ineffable quality of light in the boys' old room. At 16,000+ clams, those are some pretty f-able sunbeams.

We are at the stage now of donating furniture -- a big chair, a big table, a little refrigerator, other things that seemed like a good idea at the time. This is a happy part of the moving process if only because someone other than us (strong young whippersnappers from the ARC, presumably) will be the ones to lift it all up.

I was really elated yesterday to find that the rolling cart which had disappeared from the storage facility for the past month has now returned. It was the best news of my entire week. This says something profound about my life this week.

What it says is: "For someone supposedly so passionate about Marxist theory, I sure own a lot of shit."

Yesterday was it -- the last day ever of my teaching career. The last reading assignment was two chapters from Magali Sarfatti Larson's Behind the Postmodern Façade and the very last line of reading that we discussed was Robert Venturi's quote about valuing the "the difficult unity of inclusion over the easy unity of exclusion" and how inclusion may indeed be more difficult, but it is also so much more beautiful.

The class is a group of really lovely students and they had made a card for me and we took a picture together and several of them spoke to me afterwards in really heartfelt ways and I, naturally, cried hard.

But now that part of my life is over. This morning, I am sitting home drinking coffee while they are beginning their final exam. I have grading still to do, of course, and the last scraps of bureaucracy. But the thing that has been one of the centers of my life for three decades -- talking with undergraduates about ideas and issues -- is over with now. I have no idea what my new reality will be.

It will certainly involve power tools, though. The contractor came in the afternoon to look at the hole in the basement wall created when Jonathan fell through the window-well two years ago. His comments on seeing it can be summarized mostly as, "Oh, my god." He is sending an estimate for the work today or tomorrow. The work itself probably won't be completed until June.

Jonathan and I shared a split of The Widow last night (in commemoration of the teaching, not the contractor) and ate some treats from our favorite bakery. And today, as I sit surrounded by boxes and empty walls, I am acutely conscious of the fact that it is time for class and yet somehow I am not in class.