Homework
Somewhat a continuation from last week, which is what you get when you have work and homework (which is what is below).
California is to the word home, as the sun is to heliotropes. Being from a place with gold flecks rushing through rivers and tangerine sunsets has tricked me into thinking I have a midas touch way of life. Perhaps more correctly it is about hedonistic tendencies, shaky ground, dry gusts, and answering questions, “No, yeah” in agreement or “Yeah, no” in disagreement.
Home looked like waiting for my Dad to come home from work, the back seat of my Mother’s stationwagon, and dinner every night around the monkey wood table. Memories of my childhood revere certain totems. Before the three Sycamores got cut–breaking one of my sister’s bedroom windows teaching me about double paned glass–my Dad would rake mountains of orange crunchy leaves for Nick to do flips into and for me to make angels with my arms and legs. Home was playing hide and seek during an earthquake, DVDs getting stuck and rewatching Gilligan’s Island or Blazing Saddles. Home was watching my older siblings do the things I was impatient for, like sitting in the passenger seat or going to prom. Home was a twin bed with my teddy bear and Barbies in the toybox. Home was dancing to The Ramones with my Mother and listening to The Doors with my Father. It was the smell of the hardware store, the harbor, the beach, and threats to go to bed hungry if I did not like what my Mother made for dinner.
Somehow 18 years of age rolls around and I found it amusing to be called a Senior. Soon after the last high school summer was when home became 17 Rue Saint Dominique. A Parisian apartment shared with four other 18 year old girls taught me that other people’s dishes will not clean themselves, Vogue Slims are the only cigarettes worth killing yourself for, and the best way to fall in love is face first into a city. The distance between 18 year old me in Paris and 24 year old me in San Francisco is hard to measure. Time has passed, sure, but the quantifiable distance between here and then is 5,560 miles and my waist line. I was really good at saying “Je prends un jambon fromage” and even better at eating it along the Seine. Food was essential at this home. Carly was the girl I shared my room with. One morning we woke up before the sun and made tuna sandwiches. The sandwiches were wrapped in foil and rode on the metro with us to Sacre Coeur. We sat on the steps taking sleepy bites of tuna, while a love drunk couple surrounded by empty bottles laughed and leaned on each other. I learned to move throughout a city, drink on a crowded metro, and how saying yes can lead you to befriend bartenders who will close a bar for everyone except you because you are a girl. My home in Paris became the result of hearing basilica bells ring, my roommate cutting my hair, going to the Picasso museum neurotically, nights rolling into mornings. I grew up and found sensibilities as much as an 18 year old girl is capable of.
Paris got traded for Los Angeles and four roommates became one, Carly. Los Angeles was hot and dry. The palm trees were sunburnt, but I was 19 and thought living in Paris for a year would impress boys and girls as much as it impressed myself. Los Angeles was nothing like Paris, but then again nothing really is. My days were filled with classes and evenings were about plotting drinking plans, watching movies that made me think, and wondering about a boy or two. One Los Angeles night in particular began at an art gallery, moved to a now defunct dive bar, and ended at a show in a warehouse. It was courtesy of an older brother and such a good night that even at 19 I had to catalog it.
“The Greatest Night I have had possibly ever, or in while. This past Saturday re-ignited my love for this city. Bright lights, a starless sky, and a grimy sidewalk are the best combination. Late Saturday afternoon I get a phone call from my brother, he just got my named tattooed on his shoulder and he asked me to meet him at his friend’s art show… I remember my cloudy drunk brain gazing at the skyline on the way home. I ate tortilla chips like a fool and stumbled to bed.”
19 came and went just in time to be 20 in love in Los Angeles for the first time. Hot air possibilities felt real, but mirages in deserts are natural. The guy was blonde, mustached, and made music. I got to listen to songs about me and imagine trading Lavayen for Getz. I remember my toothbrush I kept at his place and leaving my pillow there. I would turn on the fan, turn off the lights, and then we would take off each other’s clothes. The evening air was on pause, until it was not. Santa Anas kicked up dust and nerves. I remember wanting to hike to the Hollywood sign, but his pug got too tired. We only got halfway to Hollywood, the perfect souvenir of that relationship. Close, but no cigar and still undone.
As the years keep coming and going, home is now a small room in San Francisco. With walls decorated by old advertisements, dried up chamomile flowers, polaroids of a pig from a good friend. There are drawings of my own, and a headline I love, “How ‘Big Bastard’ Killed a Woman.” Big Bastard was a bear who stalked and killed a woman living in Sierra County sometime this past spring. I sleep with the same one eyed teddy bear named Teddy. The apartment is small and shared with Chloe. All our furniture is of the 20th century: the 1940s steamer trunk, the samsonite folding chairs, the formica dining table purchased from a man in San Jose that told me “It was from my Mother’s estate.” He sold it to me for $80 and when I drove it back to the city that December day, Chloe fell asleep in the passenger seat while we passed by the It’s It factory. I thought about the past because a table that is older than me sat in the backseat and I wondered if the words, “It was from my Mother’s estate” will ever apply to me. San Francisco feels the furthest away from where I have been and the closest thing to tomorrow. Breathing, walking, and crying here has a different resonance. A place that becomes familiar as it gets furnished by my own experience.
Maybe it is because I lack a crystal ball or maybe it is a symptom of being in my twenties, but the plan for the ‘future home’, the forever kind, is non-existent to the best of my knowledge. Although, I have this vision of a sun drenched kitchen and a wooden fruit bowl–there is this one my dad made when he was in high school, that was when High Schools taught you how cars worked and how to carve wood and curfews weren’t negotiated, just broken because you never had a ride in the first place. Anyways, this bowl my Dad made I would love to have, but it would also be such a perfect salad bowl to plop in the middle of my kitchen table when I have people come over for dinner and we drink wine–one of those nights where someone grabs the bottle and starts to pour themselves a glass and there is only a sip so they pull the bottle away from their face and hold it ever so slightly up to the light and go, “We just killed another” and then it is my line “Oh! Grab another from the fridge, there is also lambrusco or bubbles if you want, and Steve brought a white” We would watch the sunset and then build a fire on the sand and dance to Herb Alpert and it would be a balmy night and everyone has linen clothes on, but that is besides the point.
My kitchen will have western facing windows so I get the afternoon light and the Catalina Silhouette and my bedroom is eastern facing for the morning sun. My kitchen will have curtains instead of a cupboard under the sink for too long of a time just because. There will be really nice candles and skylights. I will have one of those antique vanities with a huge circular mirror. This is where I’ll give my niece her first lipgloss (an old Chanel or Dior, I’ll let her choose). Evenings in the kitchen end with decaf coffee or cognac to cap the night and talk about frivolous things like love and loss and not remembering the last time we went to the movie theater.
Home is a place where I am, where I was from, and will be. A place to return to, get locked out of, clog a toilet, and eat takeout on the ground because there was no place to sit to begin with. It was a terrazzo hallway, a wool carpeted bedroom, someone else’s bed with my own pillow, and there was the one with creaky floors, an elevator that spoke French, and a view of Notre Dame burning. It now sits across from The Panhandle where church bells toll at nine in the morning and parrots occasionally squawk. It is, was, and will be real,imaginary, heartbreaking and shatterproof. However, most definitely gilded.
