Friday, April 30, 2010
Now that the arduous work is behind me; now that the truck has come and gone and taken all my furniture, my appliances, my files and my voluminous (read: heavy) library with it; now that I have cleaned out the apartment and vacuumed the floors, done the walk-through and handed over my keys, I am already distancing myself from the last 13 months I spent at my erstwhile apartment complex, The Park.
This is not denial. It is not a coping mechanism. It is a refrain, a recurring theme.
In Los Angeles I lived at Serrano Tower for five and a half years. It had been a decent enough habitation for an aspiring Angeleno starting from scratch and reaching for the stars — “a very fashionable hovel,” to borrow a line from Elvis Costello — but I moved out after a couple of plumbing catastrophes pushed my patience past its limit. Two weeks later I returned to Koreatown to get a haircut. (My barber was one block down, one block over.) I parked right in front of Serrano Tower’s green-awninged entrance, and as I both exited and later returned to my car, I felt no instinctive pull toward the building.
It was as if I had never lived there.
I don’t know whether I’d feel the same way if you parked me in front of the Riviera, the greener pasture for which I abandoned Serrano Tower. I haven’t been back to the new old neighborhood since I departed L.A. for the Midwest four years ago, and it’s anyone’s guess what emotions would surface.
It’s not a hard-and-fast rule, but it does seem to apply to those places I’ve departed for a place deemed better or a situation imagined as a bold step forward.
My parents have owned their house since 1986, during which time it has always been — and will always be — home to me, whether I’ve lived there or not. But I have driven past the duplex on Switzer that was our home for the first eight years my family lived in Kansas City, from sixth grade through my freshman year at KU, and it’s as if I never lived there.
I can’t forget the experience of my first rental apartment, the one I shared with mi hermano de otra madre, a mere two buildings down from my friend Melissa, but the edifice itself, overhauled somewhat in the intervening two decades, would likely mean nothing to me today. Next came the house on Belleview in front of which Melissa and I were robbed at gunpoint — certainly I’ll never forget that night, but can I even fathom today that I occupied the top floor of that house for three years? Not really.
I left the former for the independence of the latter, the latter for the adventure of Los Angeles. When the time came, I left L.A. to return to K.C. and eventually found myself at The Park.
The best thing about The Park was its location in a nice, walkable downtown neighborhood, close to a coffeehouse (read: office), with barbershops and good restaurant options, two sports bars and a post office. The best memories I have of it are those times when Adriane came to visit and shared that space with me — the closest it ever came to feeling like home. As I sit here now, a couple of days removed from my tenancy, the most charitable and accurate description I can summon for the apartment itself is that it was a place where I kept my stuff, watched movies, slept fitfully, and spent long hours on the phone and on webcam with Adriane, dreaming together of the day that is finally at hand.
Tomorrow I will take to the road once more, bound for Wyoming to meet the moving truck and supervise the loading of Adriane’s household, then onward to Sacramento. Before I even arrive at that better place — both my new street address and the arms of my beloved — before the truck arrives to turn our two households into one, before we take that bold step together into the future that we’ve dreamed of for nearly three years, The Park will have faded into the distance of memory. Already it’s as if I never lived there.
Will I feel the same someday about our white duplex with its neatly trimmed lawn, its wide white hearth, its butter-yellow bathroom, its spacious kitchen with the retro copper wall clock, its ample back porch and patio and our own personal orange tree in back? Time will tell, governed somewhat by the magnificence of our next better place or the magnitude of our next bold step forward.
Or perhaps Adriane and I will fill that house with so many memories of our own that someday we’ll return and it will feel as if we never left.
