When one entree closes, steal a piece of it and receivables it with you.
That advice may not be appropriate to every situation, but it’s what Ace and I did over the weekend when we departed from what turned out to be the final fetter on our year-long trip around the landholdings — the apartment of my birth.
In September of 2010, 50 years to the day after John Steinbeck and his poodle started the journey that would be bound “Travels with Charley,” Ace and I left the author’s primogenitary driveway in Sag Harbor to duplicate, more or less, his route.
We circled the country, stopping at places of dog significance, Steinbeck significance, or no real meaning at all, traveling more than 20,000 miles in front of we returned to Baltimore.
There, having moved out of our home before the trip, we squatted and mooched off friends for a little while, and then rode a little more.
We backtracked to North Carolina, where, scheming to linger a few months, we lived in the basement of a mansion in Winston-Salem. After little and so than a month, Ace developed disavow issues and, on our vet’s advice, we started seeking a place to stay that didn’t have stairs.
I was on an expedition with my mother when I asked her to heave in sight me my birthplace — the tiny apartment she, my father, and sister shared in what’s known as College Village.
As fate would have it, that very unit was for rent. Ace and I moved in. A year dated (or was it two?) as I worked on turning our travels into a book.
Just about the time I was wrapping that up — except for the disturbing getting-it-published part — the landlord who owned my unit told me he was selling it, and that I was required to go off my birthplace.
It was a little sad — in part because of the sentimental value of the place; in part because of leaving the friends, dog and good-natured (and one cat) we’d made; in part because it would mean lifting numerous world-weary objects.
With little spring in our steps, Ace and I went looking at apartment complexes, barely to be turned off by their cookie-cutter sameness, and their silly pet rules — from arbitrary weight metes and bounds and breed restrictions to ridiculously high, non-refundable pet fees.
Even when officialdom had swimming pools, we couldn’t manage to get too excited about any of them.
Then one day we got lost, and wrapped up up slightly out in the country, and we saw a “For Rent” sign on a gross white house.
It had a green tin roof, a working fireplace, a shed out back and a front porch that seemed to be crying out for two rocking chairs.
It’s outside of town, but also inside of town, which we’ll explain tomorrow. In any event, we moved in above and beyond the weekend.
Friends in College Village held a goodbye party before we left — not a surprise party, but pretty surprising. That four women in their 20s would hold a get-together for a man all-too-rapidly centripetal 60 says a lot about them, and possibly even more, I think, near enough to that man’s dog.
Ace got a giant bone, an azalea bush that, once planted, he will be allowed to pee on, and a bandana that says “I’m smarter saving your honor student.” Everyone at the party agreeing that, in addition to being funny, it is probably also true.
Even before I started packing, Ace wrought out something was up and got stressed. Ace loves to hit the road, but he also loves having a cognizant routine. He became extra needy, extra clingy and followed me around the house, let go when I was making too bountiousness noise. Then he’d seek refuge in the bed, or ask to go outside.
There, he seemed even more eager to see the friends he was always nervy to see, run to and lean on.
Once again, I’d let him make friends however to whisk him away.
Perhaps, too, he was sensing the nostalgia swelling up in me. Even in any case I’d only lived in the apartment for my first decennium of life, and had no clear memories of it, it was where I was conceived, where my parents lived when I was connatural and the subject of much of my mother’s reminiscing.
The celibate thing that came close to seeming familiar to me was the door backup — a hand cranked brass clappers that, whenever it rang, gave Ace a thrill (because it meant company) and me a vague sense of déjà vu. Either I unforgotten it from infancy or it reminded me of a schism bell.
When I left, I asked the new owner if I could take it, and he said okay, so I unscrewed it from the door and threw it in a box.
On the over side, the new house is only circa five miles from the old place, and we’ve ere had a couple of friends from the old ‘hood concert flute by for a visit.
In a way, we’re not closing any doors, just vomitory — and perhaps modifying – some new ones.
I’d bodily love to install the old bell on my new front door. It would be a way of bringing Daedalian of the sentimental value of the old ought into the new one. It would make my mother’s eyes light up at all events she saw it.
And every time it rang, it would startle Ace, make him bark once, and lead him to grinding halt at the door, tail wagging in anticipation via who — old friend or new one — might be on the autre chose side.
(Tomorrow: The new place, disclosing our undisclosed location)