by Nils Peterson
To 3 Quark Daily Readers:
I write to you as an ambassador from the Kingdom of Old Age. It a country near to some of you and far, far away for others. It is a good country to be able to visit. I hope you can come, but don’t hurry. It will be there when you have time.
On Houses and Towers
Living in a house/ we live in/ the body of our lives…. “House,” Robert Hass
Packing up to leave the house I’ve lived in for 50 years, deciding what books to take and what to leave behind to create their own fate, I came across Hass’s Field Guide. It won for him the Yale Younger Poets Prize. I’d already packed his collected poems so I thought to leave it behind with a couple a hundred other poetry books finding their own fates, but I leafed through and eye caught the words above. They seemed so true, I tucked it in the bag I was taking with me in my drive north with my younger daughter and my dog.
For fifty years the house I’m leaving made up the body of my life and the life of my wife and daughters. My daughters tell me they think of it as “Home,” even though neither one has lived in it for 30 years and more.
Mostly it was a good body, though like even in the best of bodies, there were aches and pains in it and us. The new owners will have to exercise it some to renew its elegance but it has, as is sometimes said of a face that looks good no matter what its age, good bones.
I found this this morning in The London Review of Books, “There is a fine Scots word for the sale of a house, farm or factory: a displenishment.” Well yes, that’s exactly what the emptying of my house felt like, a displenishment, the “plenish” of 50 years is gone, and one heads towards a minimalist world. Haven’t gotten there yet. Dragged a lot of stuff with me. Daughters not yet off the hook.
Illness and aging have made this move necessary.
2. Well, we’re here in Seattle in our nice apartment, still trying to settle in and find out how to live. Unfortunately our apartment overlooks the street and it’s a busy street night and day. We are trying white noise and likely noise-reducing curtains. I didn’t sleep much the first few nights at least partly from that. It’s getting better though.
I wish Seattle car thieves would be more efficient. The other night one thief set off a loud car alarm 3 times at 20 minute intervals before he was able to make off with the car. Hard to sleep. (I assume he finally got the car because my daughter told me she found broken glass on the street in the morning but that could have just been a passing beer bottle.) Actually, Judith and I have grown accustomed to the street noise and are now sleeping quite well.
If I were making crayons for Crayola to describe Seattle, I would make at least 4 shades of gray. There would be Glum Gray, Ominous Gray, Introvert Gray, and Luminous Gray. I’m sure other shades will come my way.
The morning poop promenade can be cold and rainy here. Neither dog nor walker is used to that. It was so yesterday and the dog went about his business as fast as he could and then headed back to the door. It was so dark, I really needed a flashlight to find his leavings, but eventually I was able to distinguish poop from leaf. I planned to carry a flashlight today, but got up later instead. I have to carry him in a basket on top of my walker making it a kind of a walker-perambulator. He is afraid the elevator.
3. “This is no country for young men,” Yeats might have written had he ended up in a senior citizen residence. Better, “This is no country for the young.” And it is true that there are none here save for the staff. Of course back in California, I had many friends my age and we all marched along together through the years. But I had many younger friends too, twenty, thirty years younger. When we were together, I felt as if I were their age. (I hope they didn’t feel they were being pulled into mine.) As we go to dinner, there are almost as many walkers as people. I have used one for years, but I have not been surrounded by people using them. Back there, I was an oddity. Now I’m just one of the usual folk. Here, the one-caned walker is queen or king, so said Nils Kipling
Jung built his tower stone by stone, a palpable archetype, and Yeats had his great tower at where he would go up the winding stair to brood and write his poems looking about him at what he could see, what he could see, remember, feel, about the whole of his life. Up in the tower his memory seemed to quicken and energize his awareness of self. But the real tower, the tower that we are all building, is the tower of age from which we look back and down at things, remembering, recreating, and, indeed, sometimes making up things that we think we’re remembering.
4. Time flies by so fast. A year ago we signed up to move, but had to wait until our new apartment was redone. We moved in early October. It seems a long time ago now, our 50 odd years in Campbell almost a dream, a dream we can’t go back to now that our old house is remodeled and resold. I wonder for how much. In 1968 we moved into the biggest house we could afford because we had been living cramped up in small spaces for years. It was the first neighborhood in Campbell to be developed from farmland after World War II, modest homes for working people. Our new next door neighbor had worked as a lineman for the telephone company and he designed his house and helped build it. It was a little strange, but lovely. After he died, his wife lived on in it until her 90’s when she could no longer manage alone. Then someone bought it, tore it down, and built what I’ll call a Sunset magazine house. Now it is a neighborhood that you have to be rich to move into. The wealthy by a modest house on a big lot, tear it down and, well, you get my drift. And it’s happened to my old house which indeed we had remodeled and fixed up until it fit us perfectly – until….. And I miss the old idea of neighborhood where lineman and fireman and professor could live comfortably on the same street. Having said that, it is the upscale sale of our house that enables us to live in this expensive if not fancy housing. Well, a tiny bit on the fancy side.
P.S. I recently looked at the opening pages of Bob’s book and found, “For Nils, who keeps teaching me that poetry is music, Gratefully, Bob,” and I am grateful that my fingers opened to “House” and my eyes caught his words as I was making my despairing choices. And yes, “poetry is music.” but a house has its music. So I seek for the music of the new house, flat, rather. I prefer flat to apartment. Don’t ask me why.