You Can't Go Home Again

With apologies to Thomas Wolfe: I'm finding his comment to be very true.

Take New Year's day, for example. After talking through the midnight hour with a new, dearer friend, I took a plane home; or at least I thought I might. I had misread the departure time and arrived to check in just three minutes before my flight left. This proved to be, fortunately, a minor obstacle and arrival was only delayed, still in time to make a New Year's dinner with family. But all the similarities with past years aside, this celebration was different in a quiet yet dramatic way: Amelia wasn't there. My chair was the last on the right, the odd-numbered one.

Before that, however, I had arrived first at the house (no longer, you see, "home"). The closets were mostly empty, and so were all the hanging clothes bags in the basement where she kept her seasonal stuff, and the drawers in her dresser. Gone were the teddy bears on the dresser top; gone the dress she wore at Husayn's wedding--that sunny day of happiness, a blessing that nearly slipped from her grasp; gone her little slippers and her slips and her tiny cotton tops and her panties, both the ones with the little holes in that she could never quite bring herself to toss, and the good ones, too--all gone. (Today I did come upon a fairly alarming fur wrap hanging in a bag downstairs, one she inherited from my littlest grandmother; I'm sure Husayn was as startled as I upon finding it, and must have backed off warily, as I did).

Now Husayn, out of the goodness of his heart, did all this, as I asked him to, and I mean no criticism. On the contrary, with what I now know, if he had not agreed to help me in this way it all might have been simply too much. Even so, my legs still lost their strength; I sat and sobbed and my heart broke just a little bit more. Selfish, I know, since she is no doubt joyful amidst that endless garden that was always her idea of heaven; but there it is.

And then the funniest thing happened. Years ago, I had had an awful attack of hiccups, one I could not stop. But Amelia did: she told me that, oh by the way, I had a fender-bender yesterday and there's a long dent in the front right fender; did you notice it when you got in? This procedure worked very well, thank you, startling me enough to stop the hiccups. She did it again on New Year's, and of this I have no doubt: in the midst of all these feelings I remembered my cell phone, which probably had stayed in the airport limo while I got out. The shock of this realization stopped the sobs as, with tears still drying on my cheeks, I got about this bit of urgent business. Satisfied of the phone's whereabouts, I realized what had happened, the similarity with that other long-ago event, and I knew Amelia thought I had grieved long enough for New Year's day and it was time to get on to something constructive.

So I did. That night I picked up the violin for the first time in half a year and played some scales, testing how stiff the fingers might be. Then I called a friend who is in the local symphony and left a message, asking his help in getting into the group myself. Finally exhausted, I went to bed early.

The next day I got the phone, then went down the road to a health club and signed up. They kept asking me what my goals were, and it wasn't until today that I realized what it really is: to be able to lift a person, 150 pounds if need be, and get them into a bed. No, this isn't a vaguely forlorn preparation for future seduction, though I thought that might be my (female) trainer's thought (which it apparently was); it was because there were days when I would so dearly have loved to be able to lift a sleeping Amelia off the couch and carry her to her warm bed, and was ashamed I could not do so.

Then I went to a nearby store and got two lamps for the new bed and nightstands that are scheduled to arrive on Tuesday. That's the reason for the unusual picture that accompanies this little story: it's a model of a new House of Worship the Baha'is are going to build in Chile, and it's going to be made of Italian alabaster so the light can shine in during the day and out into the velvety-dark countryside at night; and I got a bargain on two small lamps of white alabaster that shine translucently when their lights are on.

Today I went in to the health club for my first visit: my heart is still beating as of this writing--a good sign! The lamps look very nice, and I got some soft new sheets and a new down comforter for that bed. Since I can't go home, can't go back to the way things were, the only way is forward, I think, building something new. There will be some things borrowed from the past--the lessons learned were hard to come by, and Amelia and I both worked for them--but there will be a lot that is new. Like those great alabaster lamps, for instance.