Three more nights

Sunday night will be our last in the apartment that has been our home for ten weeks. We became the deed-holding owners of our new house on Tuesday and my wife has been overseeing the delivery and installation of ceiling fans, of lights, of washer and dryer, of telephone hook-up, of natural gas connection, of storm front door, of insulation and drywall to finish the garage, of a new piece of "entertainment center furniture," of the chandelier we brought to North Carolina from California, and of things my wife has spared me from even knowing about.

I've been feeling a bit sad about vacating the apartment, even more than I felt upon leaving our house of 25 years. The contrast has made me wonder whether I need more time than two months to "process" a home. Twenty-five years seems to be longer than necessary; everything in the old place seemed to have been worked through, digested, eliminated.

During our time in the apartment we haven't continued to collect vegetable matter for composting, but we have continued to recycle. The apartment complex has bins for plastic bottles, metal cans, and glass bottles and a dumpster for cardboard. I carefully segregate these items and flatten the cardboard. I don't put my collection bags into the receptacles. I don't put cereal and other non-cardboard containers into the dumpster. I've followed these practices for years (decades).

The complex has no receptacles for newspapers, glossies, or "mixed paper," but we still sort and collect them, and when I'm in the vicinity of the dumpsters near where we used to live (in Orange County, with its more aggressive recycling policy than Durham County), I've recycled them too. My three big paper-collecting bags are currently stuffed again. What am I going to do, have them moved with our furniture and packed boxes to Alamance County on Monday? But we haven't learned yet how enlightened Alamance is about recycling....Anyway, with all else that is going on this week, including going to work, I'm still concerned about recycling our paper! I admit that the thought crossed my mind this morning that I could just toss the big bags into the apartment complex's garbage dumpster and be done with it. But I don't, and won't.

It has long puzzled me why so many other recyclers aren't very careful about it. Cardboard dumpsters would hold a lot more if cardboard boxes were broken down and flattened. But week by week I've seen the dumpster overflow, with boxes in their original state on and around it. I guess people put cereal boxes into the dumpster because no bins are provided for that kind of paper. Or maybe they don't know the difference. And maybe they don't flatten the cardboard because they don't know they're supposed to (a sign on the dumpster requests it) or haven't thought about using the dumpster more efficiently.

Or maybe...they're ambivalent about recycling in the first place? Doing so is so far removed from the evolutionary history of the race, when the primary activities were gathering food and mating. Individuals recycled personal things that there was a clear advantage to recyle. The supposed advantage of taking certain things to recycling centers is "not natural." Maybe many people take their stuff to the center (because they're supposed to), but balk at doing it mindfully, with deliberation, taking the trouble to sort it properly. Maybe they're making a statement, the way I imagine certain people are making a statement when they throw their garbage along streets and roads. "I don't have to. I'm free to do what I want."

Or maybe not. Anyway, that's what I imagine. I imagine I'm making a statement myself by doing it the way I do it. I don't think I'm just acting out of habit, recycling because I've always done it, because I want to conform. I'm not a conformist. Ninety percent of Americans might "believe in God," but I deny that there is one to believe it. Blasphemy is a victimless crime. Many if not most voters vote their self-interest, but I vote what I consider the common good. No, by caring and taking trouble, I think I'm making a statement:

Life and the stuff of living are, as I used to say, holy. Holy in the "this is it" sense. This is all there is, or all that I will have. I do this in my own kind of remembrance.

Rounding third

I've felt this morning as though I were again a potent young male brimming with juice and the motive energy to deliver it in continual spurts of seminal fecundity. (Either feeling that way or like a middle-aged female novelist making up phrases for her next commercial romance?)...At any rate, my almost manic sense of having so many ideas desperately wanting to be expressed inspires the lust for life I sometimes feel in whose sway I simply do not want to die, must not die yet, not yet.

Alas, the young-male metaphor is, in fact, just a metaphor for this gray-headed sixty-five-year-old. Yet the feeling of that restless sexual motive is real and does, as I say, seem apt for the élan vital (or something) that was sweeping through me...Was sweeping through me? Yes, now it seems already to have died down and left me in its wake rational and contemplative. But hopefully not spent. So many ways to go, in which to head?

Home

On a particular day in early May our move from the house of twenty-five years to the temporary apartment (on the way a few weeks later to the new house abuilding) arrived at that point where we had to start sleeping in the apartment, which I may have thought could never for a moment achieve the status of "home." On that day, and for a couple of days thereafter, both of us (my wife and I, not to mention perhaps our dog) were confused and ambivalent about what to call "home." The day after our first night in the apartment, for example, one of us said, as we returned to the old house for some more things to remove before the closing, "Let's go back home...."

But for weeks now we've referred to the apartment as home. I call my wife from the sidewalk waiting for the bus to tell her I'm leaving work, I'll be home soon. Or last night, at the president's barbecue, we looked at each other and one of us said, "Ready to go home?" (Ready to go home and watch another episode of "Curb Your Enthusiasm"?....) I noticed, even on our vacation in California, and on Bainbridge Island, that we spoke of "going home," back to my sister's house from the harbor after getting off the boat from Santa Cruz Island, back to our daughter's condo from watching "Iron Man" at a movie theater, back from the Suquamish Museum or from the Naval Undersea Museum to my high school Latin teacher's condo we used on Bainbridge Island for our last three nights on the West Coast.

What makes a place home? Possibly it's having the sheets you slide between to sleep at night. Or the place where you park your toothbrush and dentifrice. Where the coffee beans are in the morning. Something utterly basic and essentially everyday. Even the visiting team's third-base coach unselfconsciously waves his (or her) runner..."home." Home is where you score?

Where is Mecca?

Yesterday's post got me to wondering whether there's any place on Earth (or anywhere else in the Universe) that is "Mecca" to me. My first thought was that it certainly isn't Disneyland, and I've spent an hour on the Internet trying to find a drawing by Ralph Steadman showing a couple of tourists wearing a cap of Mickey Mouse ears leaning over the rail of the Fantasyland bridge throwing up into the moat. Alas, I couldn't find it. But if I do, I'll stick it in here. (Or if you know where it can be found, please let me know.)

The only place that resonates Mecca-like for me seems to be my home. I look forward to returning here every time I go out. I always enjoy returning home from vacation more than I enjoyed leaving home to go on vacation in the first place.

Surely I'm not such a homebody as that? This will bear thinking about further....