Month: August 2009

Dave Beck Living

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When his wife of 35 years succumbed at last to cancer, Dave Beck began to purge their possessions.

Dave is now my mother’s husband, my second stepfather. But before he met my mother, Dave had determined that he would be a lonely widower for the rest of his days. He began to eliminate. He decided it was foolish to have more than one cup, one plate, one bowl. No Martha Stewart enhancements for him; if Dave couldn’t use it on a daily basis, off it went.

We’ve been living with just a few things this past week. My mom came up mid-week and packed up the remaining books and all of the kitchen. Except for those dishes we needed to live on for the week. We wash those few dishes frequently and it’s just fine. They’re our most favorite dishes and utensils, so it doesn’t feel like a hardship.

In fact, it feels liberating.

I can see the sense in Dave Beck living. The simplicity. The aescetics of it.

Purging is a kind of catharsis. A release of all the power that objects hold. It can be saddening, to rid oneself of possessions, remembering how it came to you, what it meant. But in releasing it, you also liberate those things.

Perhaps then they float back again. Unencumbered.

TGIWhat?

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At the post office today, the woman next to me was asked how she was and she responded, “Great — it’s Friday!”

And I realized that it meant nothing to me. At least for right now.

I mean, I knew it was Friday. Mainly because we had an appointment to sign our closing papers this morning. And to take the Jeep in to have the brake rotors replaced. And because Karen and Bob were arriving in the afternoon to load the motorcycle and outdoor furniture into their horse trailer, to haul to Santa Fe for us.

Nothing party about that, so much. At least, not the day-specific kind.

When my mom went to India, she mentioned that, that every day blended into the next. There were no rush hours, no Monday mornings, no early Sunday stillness. No TGIF. Someone else remarked that that kind of timelessness is an earmark of an ancient culture. Certainly their culture transcends — or eludes — the typical Western rhythm of business.

My timelessness is more at the other end of the scale. My busyness emerges from a cycle of work that is no longer limited to particular days and hours. I work as much as I can at my career-job: I put in 40 hours this week by Thursday morning. In the evenings I pack until I can’t stay awake. This last month has been such a cycle of travel — twice for work, one of which included some vacation, once for a writing conference, which is like work, only funner, and once for house-hunting, which was kind of like a vacation that involved a lot of work.

I’ve been, literally, about 1,000 emails behind since July 2.

I haven’t written a word all month, besides this blog.

I went an entire week without putting on makeup. I know this because when I went to put some on today for our closing papers appointment, I had to unpack my cosmetics from the Tennessee trip.

Friday? Not so much.

But that this whole ”season” of my life, the big move, is almost over? Oh yes!

TGTIAM!

Discrimination

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I’ve mentioned before, my life lately is all about the cutting away.

I spent the weekend getting rid of stuff. If you haven’t been following along, we have to clear out the house by August 13. Next Thursday, for the calendar-challenged among you. Yes, we have time. But I can tell you, this particular stone has accumulated a serious amount of moss over the past 21 years. In an arid climate, too.

My moves before this were either as a young woman who owned practically nothing (18-22) or within the same small town over a few blocks. I’ve lived a lot of places within Laramie, but only two in the last 16 years.

When David and I moved out of the (much smaller) house we’d shared for 11 years, it went okay until we hit the basement. Time slowed as we dug out the sedimentary layers of toys and obsolete computer parts. Things we’d moved into the house and never used were in the far back corners, whispering quietly to themselves in the dank dark.

In this house, it’s the attic.

My (wonderful) Aunt Karen drove up from Montrose, Colo. (read: a long way) to help for two days and drive home again. She felt like she didn’t make much of a dent, but she helped me clear the attic spaces. Even though she had to ask for a flashlight to get back into the dark, “scary parts.” Dark, scary parts filled with decades of obnoxious roofing dust from when they ripped off the roof last fall to replace it. Second only in sinus-yuck factor to coal dust from when David and I remodeled the old coal bin in the previous house. Blew black snot for days. Looking into the blackened tissues, I thought of my Kennedy grandfather who died of black lung.

The attic is now clear. I rid myself of a thirty-year collection of fabric. I know. It’s a disease. I even had fabric I took from my other aunt when she had to build a separate shed to house HER fabric collection. You’d think it would have been a cautionary tale. No no no.

But I’m free now.

Gone is the sewing machine and all the fabric. No more quilting until I’m making a living as a writer. Tobiah’s baby quilt was the last, which is somehow fitting.

Gone are the Breyer model horses I’ve saved from childhood. Into the arms of a little girl in a sparkly purple body suit, who spun around and carried the box back to her mother’s Suburban, where her brothers impatiently waited.

I’m good with that. Gone also are the old bean bag chairs, the boom box with tape-to-tape record, the four-drawer filing cabinet and the boxes of overhead transparencies. All via Freecycle. I love Freecycle. You send an email to the loop with an offer and people respond. They come and take it away with happy smiles.

One of my friends who left Laramie a year ago asked how I’m managing the good-byes, since we completely blew having a going-away party. She did it well, arranging carefully sequenced farewell drinks and meals.

No such grace from me.

I’m using the serendipity method. Which is a nice way of saying I’m not arranging it at all. People have stopped by, knowing we’re packing. With all the fraught-ness that word entails. Ann offered to bring us sandwiches, which was one of the nicest things anyone could offer.

And I’m meeting the new arrivals in Laramie. The ones who are moving in for the new semester and love to have our ratty old sunroom couch. The girls from Texas, filling up their five-room house in Tie Siding with Freecycle finds while their boyfriends go to school at Wyo Tech. After that, they’ll go back to Texas, they assure us. We don’t know what they’ll do with all the stuff. And the mother of the little girl in the sparkly purple top, who asked me where to buy plants that would thrive so well in Laramie.

Blessings and good fortune in this little town to them all.

Ode

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There go the tornado sirens. 10 am on the first day of the month. A regular forlorn hooting that has informed my life these past 252 months, that I’ll likely never hear again.

Twenty-one years ago this month I moved to Laramie, full of loneliness and ambition. I’d left my college friends behind, a network so intimate and involved that they still feel like family. I came to Laramie for graduate school. The starkness of those early days is still vivid. Living in my little apartment with my cats. My desk in the lab with my manic/depressive Hungarian (is that redundant?) PhD advisor, the air filled with his cigarrette smoke. All the friends who’ve come and gone over the years: grad students, professors, Silver Sagers.

This morning, David and I went for a walk around Washington Park. Then went for Saturday morning Starbucks (I get to have a peppermint mocha twist on Saturdays! Sugar-free the rest of the week) and Daylight donuts (the other special Saturday treat). We drove past our old house, the one we bought in ’93 and sold five years ago. The aspen tree we planted for Father’s Day that first summer stands taller than the apartment building next door. All around it cluster smaller aspen, the ones David and Mike illegally salvaged from the dump, when Walmart discarded them after a hailstorm.

We saw two friends at the donut shop. The writer Mark Jenkins, who’s off to Tibet next week for National Geographic and taking his fabulous wife, Sue along, and one of David’s Game & Fish cronies.

I think this is how it will be — the gradual good-byes. We ran out of time for a party. But this works. Saying good-bye to each thing in the course of errands. To each person as I gather, pack and redistribute around town.

To the vultures who circle above the skylights in my writing studio, sweeping out to the valley, following the cycle of their days.