last stage

State finally coughed up my passport without my having to go to Washington to administer a bureaucratic Heimlich maneuver. It is in my open briefcase, and Earl at the moment is trying to perforate it with his remaining fang. He seems to like the way it smells--maybe made from recycled tuna. All the paperwork for the move is done now except for the USDA health forms for the cats, which must wait until late next week.

Monday the packout starts, and we have nearly completed sorting and shuffling and some preliminary packing of things that are more fragile or beloved than other possessions. There is something quiet, soft, and gentle about this stage of a big move--a putting away of the past to make room for the new. Cleaning out boxes in the attic storage has meant rediscovering fragments of my past, particularly recalling other times I have had major moves. The Roman Capitoline museums have been frequent visitors to my sleep lately, and half-formed fragments of images from those displays have been strolling through the hallways of my mind just the way I strolled through those museum hallways in years past. Instead of time-travel through bits of inscriptions on tombstones, busts, and Roman mile-marker fragments, I found my mind drifting into the past via a frying-pan shaped ashtray from Harlingen, Texas, an item that was in the welcome kit when my family moved there when I was 11; a baseball bat nicked from the bluestone bits I swatted from our driveway in Vienna, Va; framed photos of the kids and grandkids that no longer look like them; a picture collage Bruce made in high school; a Japanese robot toy of Ben's from Okinawa; a caricature of Karen on skates, drawn at a fair in Quebec on a 1984 vacation....

Endings.... As Thackeray sort of put it, it is time to put away the puppets and close up the box, for the play is played out. Well, this act, at least, is about over. The future beyond Dulles on the 22d has scenes but, as yet, no dialogue for me to rehearse before we leave. My mind at this stage refuses to travel beyond July 22.