making home
(i am still figuring out how to make writing here work for me. a lot of this entry is cobbled together from entries i’ve written elsewhere over the past few days, but i think that the whole created here is more than the sum of its parts. so.)
i am in the honolulu airport right now. i’ve got about two hours left here. a four-hour layover to save a hundred bucks or so. for lunch i ate greasy chow mein and some yogurt. where is my papaya, huh!? waiting for me on the big island, i bet.
i’m pretty excited and a little apprehensive. i have never traveled like this before. i am going to stay (more or less) in one place for a month! but only a month. i am having visions of the jungle the same way i had visions of walking on viennese cobblestones in the snow last fall. it ended up raining in vienna, but it was great anyway. of course. but expectations are unavoidable. in pahoa it is supposed to be 81 degrees and raining for the foreseeable future. dripping through huge green leaves, right? big fat warm cleansing drops?
i spent the past few days at my parents’ house near seattle, packing the dusty and neglected museum of my life into boxes. it is a bigger job than i or my parents anticipated, and it’s not done yet, though i have filled eleven boxes with books and mementoes and notes and journals and scraps i can’t bring myself to throw away. i read a story some time ago–i guess it was in extremely loud and incredibly close, by jonathan safran foer–i couldn’t remember, but some friends identified it for me (thank you!)–in which the narrator is shown around a small museum by a woman–the woman has basically collected together all these artifacts of her husband’s life and lovingly arranged them. she’s telling the narrator about this object or this other object that played whatever role in her husband’s life. at the end of the story, the narrator finally meets the husband, who says something along the lines of “my wife has been showing you her museum? very good, now come see mine.” and his museum, of course, is all about his wife. i thought about this while sorting through my things.* the thing is i don’t care what any of this crap makes any one else feel… i just like the way it makes me feel. making discoveries. the note on the back of a picture pulled out of a picture frame; an old address book; a film canister full of sand from a certain beach; love notes left with small presents on my desk in college. really very cozy to remember these good things that i have had in my life.
the boxes i packed will be as much an adventure to unpack as they have been to pack. if i were a famous artist i could totally get away with arranging everything in glass display cases with little explanatory notes, like, “white feathered wings to be worn around shoulders, gift from first love, circa 2002″ (those are kind of beat up. i haven’t decided yet whether or not to keep them.) or “wooden canoe paddle, 5′ long with painted ‘CF’ logo, earned for excellence in canoeing august 2000 at camp fernwood, poland, maine.”
i have so much “STUFF” but, i dunno, i really like museums. there you go: that is a truth of me. home is where i keep the footnotes to my past. my proof and documentation.
anyway my parents are moving to portland, of all places, which is why all the packing and stacking. my brother is pretty sure he’s moving there, too, from the bay area. i was surprised and delighted to hear it, a few months ago. portland is more home all the time, and i am pretty sure i could not have picked a better place. this is all tied together… i admire in a sorta aesthetic way people who own only what they carry on their back and have only enough books to fill their windowsill, that sort of thing; but i am an accumulator. i would not enjoy traveling like i do if i didn’t have such a clear solid knowledge of the home i am returning to. beautiful.
of that home: my last night in portland: at a friend’s house where six people with six different musical instruments (guitar, acoustic bass guitar, guitjo, accordion, viola and bagpipes!) played a jig together and a kitten with an enormous fluffy tail named breakfast climbed across my lap. i asked how breakfast got her name. her name was “food” until they realized a dog who also lives in the house knows what “food” means. why food? the kitten really wanted food. i wonder what it would be like if everyone were named after their deepest desire, or even just something they wanted. i wonder what my name would be.
i feel that i am in control of my own destiny. this is not a feeling i take for granted anymore.
my heart is in so many places at once, and instead of feeling as a result like it is nowhere (as i have often in the past), i feel like it is everywhere.
* Give back your heart / to itself, to the stranger who has loved you // all your life … Sit. Feast on your life.
–Derek Walcott