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?