The Empty Pocket

The days the lockdown order came down occurred in slow motion. Those ~72 hours are just a freeze-frame memory now, everything is in place. Reliving it is easy, whether I want to or not.

When my son-in-law came to pick me up, there were two sets of keys in my pocket. One to the place I was gradually moving out of; the other to the place I was gradually moving into. The transition was happening in slow motion.

The keys also symbolized two rents, two piles of utility bills, two mailboxes, two collections of personal possessions. They added up to one bifurcated life.

Home is an emotional concept. I no longer felt at home in one place and not yet at home in the other. I was suspended in space.

Soon I was in the third place, with family, leaving everything elsewhere but a computer bag and two grocery bags of clothes.

At night, trying to stay quiet so as not to wake up the others, I felt my pasts falling away from me.

The days turned familiar over time. New routines, new conversations. Now and then we would return to my old place and empty out more possessions, saving a small number, leaving the rest on the sidewalk for others to claim.

One day my daughter told me we were down to the last trip. What was left there to be saved could fit into the back of the car and she and her husband could handle it.

But there wasn't room for me in the van. I sent my keys with them instead.

Sometimes you don't get to say goodbye to a place. Everyone knows that; we're adults. But when I was small that day came every time when we packed up our camp and headed back home.

The leaving day always found me feeling nostalgic. I'd wander around the campground, noticing the sticks, the leaves, the soft dirt, the little scraps of items left behind by previous campers. And everything made me sad.

As we drove away, my parents encouraged this emotion. "Look out the window, say goodbye."

One down, one to go. Extracting my possessions from the second apartment proved to be an ordeal. I sent a final rent check for thousands of dollars while my things waited patiently for me to claim them.

When the day finally came, again there wasn't room for me in the van. My son went down there; the maintenance staff had piled my stuff outside for him. He drove it all to a storage facility.

All that is left for me to do now is to mail in the keys. They are over there, waiting.

Apart from my books, files, journals and old yellowed news clippings, I'm free-falling as a memoir writer. I can't check my memory against the notes jotted down simultaneously as the events unfolded.

It's been a lifetime of leaving, arriving, enduring, losing, trying to remember and trying to forget.

One time I was in a distant corner of Asia. It was a warm morning as I looked out of my hotel window when I saw the rest of my party packing into a bus to go on tour.

I didn't want to go. It was one of those days I was feeling deeply alone, so I stayed behind.That night, when they returned, a few of them came up to me.

"Where were you? We missed you."

The idea that anyone would miss me had never occurred to me. So that was one lost day, among many. What is lost can never return.

But if our mind can carry us backwards, why not let it carry us into the future as well? The future that may or may not include us.

In my vision, I've finally completed this bloody memoir; it's been published and somebody is getting ready to interview me. We are in the Green Room before the event and I have one question for the host: "Which side of me do you want to talk about?"

That is a reasonable question, the kind only an experienced guest would ask when he is on the set.

The host has his notes and his prepared questions. He has an objective, for this encounter.

Meanwhile, I have had a mixed-up jumble of a life that I have tried to squeeze into a book. Luckily, it's easy for me to be entertaining, if that is desired; I can be quite the amusing fellow. If I know what you seek, I'll deliver that particular piece of the puzzle.

My young granddaughters are very good at putting together puzzles. It astonishes me how fast they can do it, and these are complex adult puzzles, not childish toys. They see the patterns and read the visual clues; it's all intuition unattenuated by experience.

When adults encounter the unknown, our ability to fill in the blanks is limited by all the little ways we've censored ourselves over the years. the ways we've curtailed ourselves. Those times we stayed behind rather than gotten on the tour bus.

***

There are no longer have any keys in my pocket; technically I'm a legal resident of nowhere. Someday this will be resolved.

"And I think it's gonna be a long long time
'Till touch down brings me round again to find
I'm not the man they think I am at home
Oh no no no I'm a rocket man
Rocket man burning out his fuse up here alone"

-- Sir Elton John

***

It's Memorial Day. Probably every one of us has somebody to remember. Today I am remembering my cousin Daniel Anderson, who died last November. He served in Vietnam.

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