Housekeeping Twaddle:
After the Move
1 December 2014
I’m no good with a camera early in the morning. But, like the gentleman above, I’m a great admirer of City Hall, which was arguably the last handsome building to be erected anywhere. This large image fills an alcove in what used to be the DMV, on Worth Street. Now people go there for marriage licenses and civil weddings. On Friday, two very good friends got up early in the morning so that they could be first in line. Kathleen and I managed to show up at the last minute. Then there was a period of waiting. At last, we were ushered into a chamber. At the climax, I was wondering how the officiant would replace, “You may now kiss the bride.” Elegantly: “You may now celebrate your marriage.” Or something like that. It was way before my bedtime, and I was busy taking lousy pictures with my iPhone.
***
Then we came home and went back to bed. For the first time in my life, I rested. Lying in bed in the middle of the day without feeling sick was an absolutely novel experience. I read for a bit, fell asleep for a few hours, read some more, and slept for another hour. It was bliss.
Then I woke up, and got back to work on the move, which, I decided last night, is now over. Done.
There’s still a lot to do, and about fifty boxes of books remain to be unpacked. But since when is my library not in some sort of crisis? With significantly less shelving for books than I had upstairs — and a determination to reject, as long as possible, any schemes for adding more — I’m going to have to cull my collection much more aggressively than I did while I was packing, and I’m going to do it while I unpack. If this means that we’ll be living with boxes of books for a while, so be it. The apartment is fully habitable, or will be so as soon as the Venetian blinds arrive and are installed. Dozens of pictures remain, either to be hung on the wall or disposed of. Doubtless there will be adjustments, but I do believe that, but for the dining area, and setting aside the armoir that Kathleen talks about having made for her side of the bedroom, the apartment is fully furnished, and everything has been placed where it belongs. So I can stop thinking about all of that. I can try to turn off the inner computer that, from the very first walk-through, registered a clear impression of how the space would work for us — how well it would work. I don’t know where the gift comes from, but I came wired that way.
But moving house is a kind of crisis, and I’m worn out by that aspect of the business. Also, Kathleen is out of town. She’s not actually out of town yet — I just spoke to her at the office — but she’s leaving for Dana Point, California, early this afternoon. She’ll be home on Thursday, but she’ll turn around on Saturday and head to Phoenix, after which she’ll stop in San Francisco for two days. She won’t return for good until the following Saturday. It’s probably not worth the trouble to spell out why her being absent means that I have to be rooted, but Donne comes to mind:
If they be two, they are two so
As stiff twin compasses are two,
Thy soul the fixed foot, makes no show
To move, but doth, if th’other do.
Since I can’t be moving in two directions at once, I must be at home, and no longer in transit.
Another indication that the move is over is the pile-up of doctors’ appointments. I see the Mohs surgeon this afternoon about a nasty growth over my cheekbone. Then, on Wednesday, the dermatologist again. On Thursday, the rheumatologist will give me a pre-Remicade exam, and I’ll have the infusion itself next week. All these appointments were postponed or scheduled as if postponed, until after the move. After the move must therefore have arrived.
Finally, there was tea. Ms NOLA, her husband, and her parents came to tea yesterday. I had meant to join them for a tour of the Museum, but, looking ahead, I saw all those appointments, and I didn’t want to overdo the running around. So I stayed home and, preparing for their visit, I cleared up a few pockets of disorder here and there. This was largely a matter of putting books on shelves where they don’t belong. More crucially, I made a batch of madeleines — the first baking that I’ve done in the new kitchen. And what a pleasure it was. I had plenty of room, and I knew where everything was. I polished my grandmother’s silver teapot, which had been neglected. I don’t know where I’m going to put it when I’m not pouring tea for what my mother used to call company (not that I ever saw her pouring tea), but this is not a problem related to the move. The sad fact is that I had stashed the teapot, along with all the other pieces of “hollow ware,” in a desperate, inappropriate place. I must think of something better. Provisionally, I have ordered two zippered “silver bags,” made of cloth treated with a sulfur resistant.
One of these days, I shall write an entry about silver — not the knives and forks but the serving pieces that have come down to me, most of them from no more ancient date than my parents’ wedding in 1942. I sometimes think that silver is still something that I have to get over, or outgrow, and I consider getting rid of the lot of it — everything, that is, except that teapot, which is shaped like a jolly pumpkin, and the coffee pot and sugar bowl and cream pitcher that go with it. I’ll be holding on to those.
So long as I’m holding onto anything. In the paper this morning, I read the obituary for Frank Yablans, the movie man who, among other things, produced Mommie Dearest. He was only 79. (How’s this for curious: “His son Edward, who confirmed the death, said that Mr. Yablans had been in declining health but that he did not know the precise cause.”) I’m not nearly as far from 79 as this death notice made me wish I were.
Ms NOLA’s mother mentioned that she’d looked through the Times for an announcement of the wedding that we attended on Friday. Of course she found nothing. Our friends, now spouses (or spice, as we say), were very quiet about tying the knot, and some family members were not told until the deed was done. I had actually expected them to run off alone together, and to enlist a volunteer witness at the DMV, so great was their determination to avoid any kind of show. But they elected not to enlist a volunteer, asking an old friend instead, and in the event they were attended by a party of five. They treated us to a wedding breakfast afterward, five chilly blocks away, on Hudson Street.
So, now our friends are married, and we are very happy for them, because we believe that, if you can find the right person, marriage is a happy estate. But it will be a while before I stop mulling over the changes that made marriage more equitably available. The shift was certainly for the best, but I rather envy the young people who won’t have to go through it — who won’t remember the bad old days when sexual preferences were everybody’s business.