History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.
Stephen Dedalus (James Joyce, Ulysses)
How does it feel
to be without a home,
with no direction home...?
Bob Dylan
...sadness didn’t really kick in ‘til the necessary stop back at the old house...the overwhelming sense of need to say goodbye...(unwilling nostalgia jostling with an equally painful desire to have it all done with and move on)...though the house is still there, certainly, though nobody lives there anymore, and, in fact, I’ll be need to be back, probably a lot, in the months to come, to go through stuff, clean up, scrub the place clean of memories and home...
...and though it’s been a long time since it’s been my own address...(though junk mail with my name on it still comes, thanks to the boundless memories of schools, political parties, and non-profits...though now there's nobody to put it in a neat pile on my childhood bed)...it's the home that's always been back there, where mom and dad and then just mom still lived, until a few days ago, when we moved her in to the swanky retirement community with the river view most Manhattanites would kill for....a good and necessary change, definitely...but...
...dogs buried in the yard, traces of pot smoke doubtless lingering in the attic, growth marked in pencil on a wall, since painted over...the world of someone's long-gone childhood and adolescence...not that those exactly constitute a paradise lost...more like a nightmare from which I’ve been trying to awake for three decades...the comfortable old house a burden in more ways than one...and yet, the birthplace, nesting place, launching pad of dreams and hopes...that shit about as ephemeral as ephemeral gets and yet still anchored, there...
Fundamentally, not one thing exists,
So where is the dust to cling?
Hui-neng
...same as it ever was...
David Byrne
...though of course as any Zen monk or Talking Heads singer can tell ya, those anchors, any anchors, really, are ephemeral as it gets, too...that we all, really, have no direction home...perhaps even more so when we don’t realize it...and that realization is, if anything, a good one...even if it doesn’t always feel that way...
10 comments:
Aww shooot! I was writing a post called No Direction Home. Something in the air...
It is a good and important realization, even if it feels sort of rotten.
Poignant! I know this territory, too. Life unfolds & changes our beliefs & perspectives as we go. Best to you on the journey.
Dude seriously you have been trying to leave the place for thirty years? I think by now with a bit of a flip of the switch you could be less sentimental about somewhere you left behind long ago...but then maybe that's me. I left the family homestead at 17 and never went back. Wasn't any point to it really when I think of it...
I waited to long to leave to want to return for more than a quick howdya do.
I am in a similar situation but I said goodbye like that to my childhood house a couple years ago. One thing I have learned about life is to embrace change. Wonderful writing as always. I agree about childhood being something you awaken out of and into the solid lucidity of adult life, maybe you meant in a different sense though.
i really like this post- it reflects what i often feel when something changes. Even if for the most part I'm ok, I deal and move on (happily actually), this reflects the twinges and small moments that occur in the transition.
At first I thought you were going to tell us that your mother had passed away, so this turned out to be a reallyreallyreally happy post for me to read. :) I think her new life sounds splendid and I wish her well settling into it. But if you think she isn't full as or more full of all the complex feelings you so beautifully expressed here, well....I just bet that she is.
You really have a lot of emotional stuff to contend with right now. I'm so glad you wrote this so I can be thinking of you in the weeks ahead. I still have boxes in storage to go through and I cleared out all of my mom's stuff from her house when she died in 2000. It is such dreary work for me, something I obviously do not enjoy in the slightest or I would have gotten through it by now! At least when I sold her house it was simply her last house and not one I grew up in. You are being served the full-meal deal, Jay, so take care.
After my visit earlier I continued reading blogs and read a post by a blogger in Finland that goes more deeply into the topic of packing up, etc. Not all of the Finnish words translated in to English (seems an impossibility!) but I understood most of it. I left the link to your post with her, and now vice versa:
her post.
I had the same feeling when we cleaned out my grandparents' home after my grandfather's death. Because my parents were always working, my grandparents' house was the one I felt closest to in my early childhood. When I said goodbye, it stung--no more family dinners with kids in the kitchen and adults in the dining room. no more secret passageways. no more finding hidden treasures. no more walking into my grandfather's greenhouse and feeling like i was in a jungle.
The Mister's dad's house is up for sale now and I feel like he's probably feeling the same way. I brace myself for the day when it finally sells.
I have wondered for ages if the reason dance/yoga resonated with me at an early age was because the only place I consistently felt "at home" was in my own skin, while moving. And this home- though with us until the end- is constantly changing, and we have to constantly re-learn it.
Good to read you after many, many moons.
Change is the ultimate truth, actually most loyal truth.Nothing lasts forever only 'Change' does. Thank you for your nicely expressed feelings.
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