Home Is Where the Cat Is

Back from Wiener World for three months now, we are happy to be near family again.  Returning has been a mix of huge change and no change.  My big gold reading chair, finally arrived from Vienna after three months at sea, sits as before in its sunny corner by the low windows, with my stacks of books again accumulating beside it.  Walter the Cat, as was his habit before we moved to Vienna, perches in the afternoon sunshine on the overstuffed arm, his eyes half-closed in a prayer for the election campaign to end, bewildered that Vienna has disappeared, and comfortable and vaguely pleased to recognize the air of his native land.  Soon he will fall into a sound sleep, dreaming perhaps that he is living again in our apartment on Grinzinger Allee, lose his balance, and fall, raking the chair-side upholstery with his claws on his way down; he will land on a pillow that I have set on the floor for him, next to the chair, in anticipation, as these tumbles are almost a daily occurrence.  Although our landing at home has not been so abrupt, it has featured a similar reluctance to letting go.  The reentry experience, which remains a daily awakening, grows slightly gentler and softer each day.

Sleeping and Waking

Since we have returned, letting go of our life in Europe has conflated with much other letting go, sometimes wistfully so, yet always freeing.  Among other changes, the return to life here has featured readjustment to space, mental and physical, as we continue to merge what were for many years our separate households. Most of our possessions were kept in storage while we were in Vienna, and only now are we dealing with the duplication and excess.  The size of our present house has required us to discard the duplicates, the dated if not obsolete, and the cumbersome.  During the unpacking, I have picked up a great many books that, I realized, I am unlikely ever to wish to open again, nor, most likely, would whoever finally handles my estate.  And so they have by the dozens gone into boxes for donation to charity.  The books sometimes take me back to college years or later times when I first acquired or read them; other objects have returned me to childhood, and those have been more difficult to let go of.  Many of the items that we have donated and discarded had histories as the only reason for their survival; some traveled with me for move after move over the decades, though their utility turned to dust years ago.  I am reminded of an awful painting by Andrea del Sarto that probably still hangs in the Corsini Gallery in Rome:  with a shifting, inconsistent perspective, a dull-eyed baby Jesus with a nose bridge as wide as a goat's and arms and head freakishly out of proportion, stares into space, and Mary's stultifying gaze invites the viewer to fall into a coma. The Corsini cannot consign it to the landfill or the Goodwill store not just because it is by a well-known artist, but also--and mostly, I suspect--because it is old.

My father treasured a few humble items that belonged to his parents:  a razor strop, a shaving cup, a wooden pestle.  I still have them, put away in a box, where they are likely to stay.  For me, the links to his childhood can be only vicarious; it is as if I would be disappointing him or dishonoring his memory were I to discard those items.  For many years I have hauled along with me a small table made of pine. When I was a child, it stood in our kitchen, and I had many a family supper of roast, boiled potatoes, and overcooked vegetables on it. The legs became wobbly and had been braced anew twice over the years, and I could have repaired the table yet again.  The time had come to euthanize the memories.  I thought of a deconsecrated church in my old neighborhood in Rome that was being used as storage for a nearby household furnishings store.  This holy relic of my childhood was now just taking up space, I thought. The first step in letting go of it was to deconsecrate it--repeating to myself that it was a decrepit wooden table, the utility of which was, like my childhood family, no more.  A few days later I set it at the curb for trash pickup, and a tousle-haired man in dirty white coveralls tossed the pine bones into a huge white County Waste Disposal truck, Death's winged chariot.  And I am glad to have the space.

Another feature of our readjustment has meant purchasing a few pieces of new furniture to replace what was too worn or not the best fit.  Along with storage cabinets and shelves in the garage to hold some of the kitchen overflow neither of us is yet ready to toss or donate, we have acquired a set of shelves for our kitchen, a headboard for our bed, and a curio cabinet for our diningroom--all from the same furniture store. Each time we have visited the store, the same salesman, CB, has emerged from a grotto of desks, computer monitors, and furniture catalogs.  We like CB.  He is the main reason we go back to the store.  He is about my age and similarly coiffed:  he has no hair on top; there are closely shaved white sidewalls with matching forehead dimples from a forceps delivery, as if his entry into the world, like our return from Vienna, was a bit reluctant.  His bright blue eyes bulge slightly, his chin juts just a bit, and his ever-present, extra-wide smile shows large, even teeth as white as his closely cropped mustache.  His smile, stretching past the incisors to the molars, says "Welcome.  I just tore the skin off some fried chicken with my teeth, and it was delicious."  As CB shows us the store's selections in the kind of item we want, he drawls about the past--the history and demise of American furniture makers--and about the acquisitive habits of his wife, who, he alleges, owns 12 cabinets exactly like the one we are considering buying.  A number of the items that he shows us, he notes, were made by a company in "Chicargo."  CB sprinkles his speech with the compensatory 'r'.  Dimly aware that he omits that sound where it does belong, he generously supplies it elsewhere like Gothic phonological ornament.  We will fill the cabinet with relics from our two years in Vienna, knowing that someday our children will deconsecrate most of them, and, like my books, they will find their way to the landfill or an estate sale, their histories and identities lost in what Oliver Wendell Holmes called the uncatalogued library of Oblivion.  Perhaps the cherry curio cabinet will last longer than my pine table.

Glad to be back, and yet...

Here the landscape seems to change rapidly, and Americans' inclination to preserve often has more to do with natural tracts than with our history and civilization.  US cultural extraversion, though at times loud, oversized, and enervating, is also embracing in a comfortable, secure way if only because it is familiar.  And we are back with grandchildren's soccer games, pumpkins on our porch, college football, family dinners, community theater, concerts, ethnic restaurants, and the anticipation of Thanksgiving and Christmas with our families.  There is so much to love about being home, I say to myself, as I begin planning our trip to Europe in the spring...fully aware that, at its conclusion, I'll be clawing the upholstery on the way down.