Home to Stay

When we moved to the 1920s stone house in Raleigh, a house so charming that passers-by would literally stop and stare, I never expected to move again. Why? It was the perfect house, the one we had admired from our apartment across the street and never dared to dream that we would be so lucky as to live in. I confidently expected to grow old and die there, although both events seemed reassuringly remote. I could not imagine a chain of events that would lead to voluntarily abandoning that house. But clearly I lacked imagination.

Nine and a half years gone, we are moving again, and again I entertain the notion, though far less complacently, that this might be the last home. Why does moving always bring thoughts of that final move? I guess in the right frame of mind everything can remind you of death. The day before Halloween in Cobble Hill, when the brownstones are draped with fake cobwebs and rubbery bats and glowing skeletons, seems to put one in that frame of mind.

We are buying an apartment, something that until very recently seemed as impossible as buying our house did lo those many years ago. I should be happy; look at me. I feel many things -- fear, for example -- but happiness is not one of them. A sneaking sense of the return of domestic sensations I had nearly forgotten, like an uncontrollable urge to collect paint samples and shop for switchplates on Homeclick, might be the closest thing to a postive emotion I can muster, but I am not sure how far to trust the domestic impulse. It can lead you down a garden path, literally. (Note to self: need future posting on the delights of being free of the tyranny of mulch. How much money and time I wasted carting bags of mulch home from Home Depot, simply because it had to be done?)

Happiness is hubris, tempting the gods and fate. Sticking your finger in the socket. Do I really believe this? I think I do.

Bouncing, explained

From the Oxford English dictionary:

That bounces: in various senses of the verb relating alike to loudness, brag, and vigorous or ungainly movement. Often also (like ‘thumping, whacking, whopping, strapping’, and other words meaning vigorous striking) used with the sense of ‘big’, esp. ‘big rather than elegant or graceful’. bouncing putty: a soft elastic silicone polymer (see quot. 1950).
(In many of the quotations the exact shade of meaning is doubtful.)
1579 S PENSER Sheph. Cal. Aug. 61, I saw the bouncing Bellibone. 1588 Marprel. Epist. (Arb.) 34 Can they not be satisfied with the blessing of this braue bounsing priest? 1602 Return from Parnass. IV. i. (Arb.) 50, I am well prouided of three bounsing wenches. 1606 J. R AYNOLDS Dolarny's Prim. (1880) 97 The bounsing Doa, vnto the brakes did come. 1611 Coryat's Crudities Pref. Verses, Oh for a bonny blith and bounsing ballet To praise this Odcomb'd Chanticleere. 1662 F ULLER Worthies (1840) 363 His mother..lay down her burthen at Elmeby..where this bouncing babe Bonner was born. 1736 H. W ALPOLE Corr. (1820) I. 8 A bouncing head of, I believe, Cleopatra. 1743 MRS . D ELANY Autobiog. & Corr. (1861) II. 237 [She] is as bouncing as ever, and as loud. 1773 G OLDSM . Stoops to Conq. 111, I never saw such a bouncing swaggering puppy since I was born. 1807 T. J EFFERSON Writ. (1830) IV. 101 The bouncing letter he published, and the insolent one he wrote to me. 1813 W AUGH Let. in Mem. v. (1839) 310 An inexperienced, bouncing but well-disposed young woman. 1837 J. D. L ANG New S. Wales II. 378 It has even given birth to a school of oratory in the colony{em} the bouncing school, it may be styled. 1841 MRS . M OZLEY Fairy Bower iv, She was..bold Belle, and bouncing Belle, and every thing but bonny Belle. 1847 B ARHAM Ingol. Leg., St. Cuthb., Stephen de Hoaques..had told all the party a great bouncing lie. 1944 J. G. E. WRIGHT U.S. Patent 2,541,851 (1951), Novel compositions which because of their unusual properties may best be described as ‘bouncing putties’. 1950 Jrnl. Brit. Interplan. Soc. IX. 56 Another contribution by General Electric is ‘bouncing putty’, a viscous and highly resilient silicon material previously used as a core for golf balls. The idea is that certain delicate equipment is buried in the material and shocks thereby distributed evenly over the entire surface of the instruments.

Hence {sm} bouncingly adv., boastfully, blusteringly.
a1677 B ARROW Pope's Suprem. (L.) Pighius said, bouncingly, the judgement of the apostolical see..is far more certain.

A Belated Birth Announcement

Since Robin doesn't have time to post this, I am happy to report that Colin Gregory, a bouncing baby boy of 6 pounds 12 ounces (not 12 pounds, 6 ounces, as initial reports had it) entered the world on October 10, 2006, at 12:34 p.m.

Congratulations to Robin, Colin et al!

(And why do people say "a bouncing baby"? I have always wondered about that. Babies do NOT bounce, at least not in the usual sense of the term. Trying to bounce them is ill-advised and could lead to serious injury. I can only think there must be some archiac meaning of "bounce" that survives only in this expression.)

A Very Good Day for Finding Things

One hidden benefit of living in New York is finding free things on the curb. Without trying at all, we have accumulated a nice rolling office chair, several milk crates, a small rolling metal cart that required only minor repairs before becoming a handy shoe rack, and several large ceramic planters (which we took to my parents' in Connecticut).

And I still rather regret letting a plastic pizza man figure, who was about three feet tall, the sort of thing that stands outside restaurants, get away.

But the best thing to find are books, in a densely populated land of readers and small apartments. We have found many excellent books on the street, but today was particularly fruitful. A beautiful fall day of strolling around Carroll Gardens with the dog. On the way home from the bakery we found:

Bullfinch's Mythology (c. 1949)
Who's Who in the Bible
Mansfield Park (a very nice Penguin edition in good shape, the only Jane Austen novel I don't already own!)
Anna Karenina (another Penguin)
Julie & Julia (which I had wanted to read for while: the author's memoir of cooking her way through Julia Child's French cookbook)
The Red and the Black

Back in the apartment buidling, we discovered someone had discarded about 30 suit hangers, the sturdy curving wooden kind. We took those home and got rid of all our remaining wire hangers from the dry cleaner's.

Weather report

It’s been a while since I gave a Denver weather report. That’s because the weather here in summer and winter is pretty predictable: Summer is freaky hot; winter is cold, punctuated by periods of freaky cold and positively balmy. But fall and spring here, they’re a mixed bag and you just never know what you’re going to get.
Today it was in the 80s and absolutely sensational – cloud-free, tranquil, a great day to be outside.
Wednesday it is expected to snow, with a high of 36.
Thank goodness I bought the kids those winter coats last weekend, even if I almost went into labor in the middle of the store.

A request for Emily

As a postscript to Kathleen's eloquent entry, I'd like to mention a request by the parents of Emily Keyes, the girl who was killed here in Colorado. A TV producer friend who covered PeaceJam (more follows) told me this, and I found it touching.

Just two or three short weeks ago, before all this madness, Emily attended PeaceJam, an annual event here in Denver where Nobel laureates get together and give a series of talks about what we can do to promote peace in the world. One of the lectures Emily attended was given by the Dalai Lama, and she left inspired.
So in her name, her parents have requested that each person commit a random act of kindness each day. They say it's what Emily would have wanted. I'll say this again, at the risk of sounding like a broken record: What could be wrong with more love in the world? Sending love into the world can only make it a better place. And maybe, maybe it will tame some of the people out there who, for whatever reason, are wont to turn into monsters.

Here is an interview with her parents, in which they talk about Emily and about trying to move on.

The reek of good living

One of the first times I ever felt like I finally wasn’t being treated like a kid was when I was in seventh grade, in Ms. Maguire’s class at Apex Middle School. The morning news was filled with devastating tales from a city in India called Bhopal, where a leak at a Union Carbide plant spewed a chlorine cloud into the air that killed nearly everyone in town overnight. We had always been encouraged to keep up with current events and have lively discussions about them, and I found the discussion invigorating even as I found it disturbing that a gas cloud could envelop you in the middle of the night and suffocate you.
Suffice it to say that yesterday, with all Apex schools closed and half the town evacuated, the similarities between Apex (motto: "The Peak of Good Living") and Bhopal are not lost on me.

Living Inside the Whirlwind

I have been quiet lately and it's partly a function being busy -- at work, which has been more demanding than usual, and with my second job, trying to buy an apartment. But I think I have been also been stunned into silence a bit. Horrible news from Colorado -- a dragging, a school shooting -- superseded by horrible new from Pennsylvania -- another school shooting, in Amish country, no less. A colleague's wife gave birth to 3-pound twins, one of whom developed complications (beyond the mere fact of weighing 3 pounds, which tends to make daily life difficult) Her struggle for life in the neo-natal ICU is documented on a Web page updated daily. Shortly before the twins' premature birth, another colleague abruptly died at the not-so-ripe age of 60.

In short, people have real problems. So what am I doing here with my little complaints?

To complain is to live; adversity is what makes us real and gives impetus to plot in fiction. Part of the problem of imagining paradise is that it would be so boring. A perfect little world -- oh, and it never ends. How incredibly tedious. I have noticed that the more fortunate people are the more ridiculous the things they find to find fault with, as if the impulse to complain is uncontrollable and searches for an object, however flimsy.

I realize to my dismay that I am channeling Tolstoy; I have spent the better part of the last month reading "War & Peace" and this is it what can do to a person: make you write paragraphs like the one above. But the experience has been worth the damage to my prose style, to live inside Tolstoy's mind for a while, with his god's-eye view of the human condition and sometimes amazing insightfulness.

When I read one particularly horrible detail of the Amish-school shootings, how the gunman fastened the legs of the girls so they could not flee, I suddenly found myself thinking of the passage I had just read, when Pierre, at that point a prisoner of the French and accused of being an arsonist, is taken to what he thinks is his execution and sees the men ahead of him getting shot:

The convicts went up to the post, stopped there, and while the sacks were being brought, they looked dumbly around them, as a wild beast at bay looks at the approaching hunter. One of them kept on crossing himself, the other scratched his back and worked his lips into the semblance of a smile. The soldiers with hurrying fingers bandaged their eyes, put the sacks over their heads, and bound them to the post.

A dozen sharpshooters, with muskets, stepped out of the ranks with a fine, regular tread, and halted eight paces from the post. Pierre turned away not to see what was coming. There was a sudden bang and rattle that seemed to Pierre louder than the most terrific clap of thunder, and he looked round. There was a cloud of smoke, and the French soldiers, with trembling hands and pale faces, were doing something by the pit. The next two were led up. These two, too, looked at everyone in the same way, with the same eyes, dumbly, and in vain, with their eyes only begging for protection, and plainly unable to understand or believe in what was coming. They could not believe in it, because they only knew what their life was to them, and so could not understand, and could not believe, that it could be taken from them.