Home is Where the ♥ Was: Homeward bound happiness in half-finished flat enamel (but alas, no flat screen TV)

"I’d like to buy a vowel, Pat”: The Return of the Penates (or, a welcome mat of obscure observations at the HomeGoods with my honey)

Summer Session I: Solstice/June/Freedom and Promise in Certain Numerical Protection Factors


“Look!” he said from across the aisle. He came running toward me almost like a child, and I laughed and put down the "salad spinner". In his upturned hand he held a small, shiny, red cast iron owl. I think to myself a pepper mill? He’s freaking over a pepper mill??, but I come to see that it is, simply, wonderfully a

“penates!” And I’m thinking we could use one right about now. No doubt we’re about to rehash our former convo about the movement and distinction between Gods and Goods, as we are most certainly products of not only the Great Vowel Shift, but seemingly the EVS, or Extra Vowel Shift, where all hinged and turned to and on a word and we followed suit: Goods are God. Just add an “o” and see . . .

See the young girl! She’s doing that little girl dance by the stack of pillows wrapped in clear plastic. You can tell she wants to squeeze them all, and she begins to start the squeeze fest; the joy of soft and squeezy stuff gets a hold of her; she begins to dance again. She dances and then, I suppose, realizes she has lost her primary audience.

“Mom? Maaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa? Mom?! Look!” she grabs a Queen Euro Sized Pillow and starts her twirl. The plastic sheeting begins to tear and it seems as if the Euro is falling apart. Her mother is nearby, along the wall where the gaudy, tasseled towels that never dry your hands properly beg for relocation.

“Loooook!” she’s slightly stomping and now twirling the pillow above her head; certainly, she’s revving up her performance to get Maaaaaaa to see; to look. She let’s go and continues the spin and with my now ignored Penates in hand I mouth “Look ma! No hands!” and my honey catches it (the Penates, that is. . . before it crashes to the floor; I’m slightly absent-minded). She’s spinning hands-free, and I’m entranced. You know by now she’s drugged by the dance and loving it; the top of the pink spray of glitter-plastic flower on her bobby pin catches on the plastic, and she gets stuck but laughs and spins and

“Alyssa, stoooooooop....” says the backside of her mother to the back of a set of curtain hooks. She’s not looking. We know this; you know this. Children dance and play in wonderment of all things, and we have grown and grown tired of looking. This is not judgment. I am no better than Maaaaaaa. I have done and do the same. Often. And no doubt, you have, too. This is not judgment; this is life after the Great Extra Vowel Shift. We are all caught up in those shiny curtain hooks.

“Born down in a dead man’s town": Jersey Soundtracks for the Bastard Bennies Blues

The aforementioned HomeGoods sojourn is the result not only the residue of EVS, but mostly because I am in the middle-nearing-end of my summer-wondering inspired, full-on Apartment Revitalization Plan: Phase 2. It is the summer. It is, then, of course, time to wander. To wander and wonder and somehow—well, I can’t seem to wander (psychically, if not physically) beyond the implication of these walls, this space. An academic year’s worth of neglect and negligence called out to me somewhere around May when I decided I wouldn’t move to Central Jersey (. . .just yet). Yes, I was “this!” close to finally making my move to the other side of the Raritan which cuts this oddly capped fellow of a state in half; ah, the Raritan River. Ah, the as of yet still standing Driscoll Bridge. Ah. Ok. So I've admittedly made a Persephone joke or two, but that’s just the stooopid Nawth Joisey snob in me (which, isn't saying much nor saying it well, apparently).

I work in and for Monmouth County which is right smack dab in the middle of the state. It’s odd, that county-- odd in the contradictory detritus of McMansion aluminum siding commingled with historic shore line sea shells and bungalow sideboard. Neither North nor South, it is caught almost without an identity in the standard Nawth/South Jersey Family Drama. It is, however, somehow so very “Jersey,” even though it’s not the venerable Sopranosesque that the world beyond EWR and the highway sound walls wish to project (besides, those would be the Bennies, anyway). It’s “perfect” in the slightly-creepy way former Governor Tom Kean used to enunciate, “puuurfect together,” when he’d advert for the “New Jersey & You” tourism campaign. Puuurfect. I mean, hey! It has to be. It is the county where the epitome of “Jersey Pride” reside: Jon Bon Jovi and da Boss fa cryin' out loud! And well, isn’t “Bruuuuuce!” enough evidence people? And, of course, commuting 80 miles a day, four times a week for the past seven years on the GSP can take its toll, even with EZpass (aye. . .cheap. . . sorry). Despite my subtitilo soundtrack snark, many of my most cherished peeps and places reside in said space, so move I was! Yes! Move it! New address! New me! Yes, this was supposed to be my “Summer of Change” accompanied by my “Indie S.O.C” inspirational, motivational playlist of travelin’ tunes on my busted wheel o’ iPod; I was going to move. I was going to do it. But, somehow, well. . . Enter “Phase 2.”

As a consequence, now, a few of those precious summer months later, after having returning from a week-long Monmouth Co. dog and house sitting expedition which was immediately followed by an almost month-long trip to that (according to my mother) other home known as and in Miami, I am once again in the midst of my Apartment Revitalization Plan. And now, once again, I am facing certain half-finished re-zoning projects scattered throughout the premises. Certain pieces of furniture and knick knack sorry ass bric-a-brac that have seemed to cement themselves to their choice locations with dust I seldom, well, dust, have succumb to the smaller-scale version of Apartment Living Eminent Domain and have been displaced, only to find themselves in recycle or garbage bins (or stuffed into the dark, seedy corners of basement and closet).

It all began with the initial Solstice Plan. Once Apartment-white walls would soon be bursting with Wonka-vision kaleidoscope color: a candied-orange hallway, French’s Mustard yellow kitchen, Pistachio/Chocolate Chip Mint Ice-cream bathroom, (a soon to be transformed) lollipop purple-blue "grape" dining room with an “asparagus” green living room and a Lemon-ice bedroom; but the Collard Green Office will have to wait for Winter Break, I think (hmmmnn... the foodie in me wonders about my comfort-color choices). Yes, this apartment; this pad; this place, this. . . “home”?

“Yankee, oh Yankee go home” (Home: love it and leave it and wait for the refrain to return once again)


Sometime in Solstice, Continued. . .

I had just returned from the Home Depot with two gallons of that mustard yellow I thought matched a snap shot I took during a long ago summer Stand Issue 20-Something Backpackin’ Euro-wander; it’s a fuzzy, off-centered pre-Photoshop shot of yellow sun-baked walls of a Venetian home which now has prime wall space in the kitchen. I knew the paint would be perfect, but it was time to clean before the storm of paint and uber urban kitchen renewal. And then:

“They don’t live the way we do. . . . They don’t do things the way we do. . . . They don’t sit home and watch TV; they hang out in the streets and talk. . .”.


Preparing for the eventual kitchen makeover, I was mopping the kitchen floor when that statement came through my tinny radio speakers.

I stopped mopping.

Standing akimbo, with Swiffer Wet-Jet poised for eternal battle with the disposable nature of my kitchen’s cleanliness, I wondered at the words and the implications of the speaker’s construction of “We”. Us and Them. These and those. Those and We. We. “We” the People! . . . We . . . sit home and watch TV. And. . . Those, the Not-Us/Not-We-People, well, they are taking over! They’re OUTSIDE! VISIBLE! And worse!!! AUDIBLE! Talking to one another! In their godforsaken forked tongues of . . . . Spanglish! Oh! How awful. How icky. How . . . un-American!

Maybe, I thought, maybe this explains my TV-free existence. When my stunned and dumbfounded students discover and ask me why in the world of High Def and Dish I don’t own a freakin' TV, clearly, I can now point to my First-and-a-half-Generation-Un-American-Values! Yeah. . . And I figured, well, perfect! This makes perfect sense, to me, of course. Because as a First and a Half Generation American, I have sometimes felt somehow stuck in the middle somewhere, not like my Cuban-born but "naturalized" American mom, and not like

“the White kids”. Weird, but that's how it sometimes figured in my brain as a kid. Not at first, of course. Who thinks that way “at first”? Do I trace it to being put in the “Spanish” afternoon Kindergarten class until they realized I actually spoke (and read; and wrote) in English? No. I don’t remember that; but my mom sure does. I really don’t know when that became a phrase, a way of saying and seeing self and other, but eventually, alas. There are things one actually learns at school, apparently. And it's odd how it's stuck; and yet, it’s odd how I’m stuck. I was never part of the Identity Reclamation Crew, with “Proud 2 B . . .” fill-in-the-blank ethnicity License plate or bumper sticker. Despite my disdain for identity parade and charade, I have still on occasion found myself on the other side of the Pronoun Divide: “those [insert brackets] [insert 'white'] people”. But to my differently race-d "white" [Cuban] family living in Miami, when they talk about “those” people—the very same people I'd be bracket-snarking, of course—they say, “Americanos,” or if they want to be really cutting,

“Yankees.” (Juh-ahn-Keys; that’s right).

I got me some super strange stares once when I used the phrase “racism” in reference to an incident my cousin had with a racist (to this Yankee) client at her hair salon. After a few blinks and stares, I realized that “my people" see themselves as white and can’t figure out what their Yankee "Gersey" cousin could possibly mean by suggesting the primary difference between my bottle blond cousin and her bottle blond client would be constructed on race. To them—on the surface-- it isn’t about “color”. It’s the passé irrationality of nationality. But I am sure, like me, they have discovered and learned that to despite their seeming shared space on the Revlon color wheel of synthetic hair samples, the chain links that both hold and separate these false strands change and make us in very real ways.

In so many ways, we're still dealing with the interesting synaptic phenomena of how things kinda look different when you're not in Kansas anymore. The funny thing, of course, is that residing in ethnic liminality as I so often do, I'm not sure what I face when folks attempt read my face and match it to my name. I can't tell you how many times I have been regaled with

"Cuban? You don't look Cuban."

Shit; I suppose I missed out on that episode of "Extreme Ethnic Makeover". But I may live differently than most; I'm a Super Creepy Weirdo, recall.

I don't even own a freakin’ TV.

I don't own a freakin’ TV, but I have the average myTube brain (despite my super creepy cred). I know the scoop on all "the shows". I’ve got screens, if not tubes. Yeah, I’ve got screens, and I know the scene, new school and old. But I guess I’m old enough to vibe nostalgic in a generational “tube” sense. Like so many of us who have been raised 'neath antennae and behind tubes and screens, I've got that other Modern Man disease otherwise know as the Life as Mixtape--er--Soundtrack--er--Playlist-anitus ringin' in my now 33 year old brain. Oh, I have a perma-soundtrack running through my click-wheel meets vinyl 45s adapter wheel of a brain for many and most a scenario; it can include anything from walking into a messy room and suddenly hearing old "Mr. Clean" jingles to much, much worse. . . .

I can sing the entire "Golden Girls" theme song. I can name that theme song in one note. . . ;-) It's just amazing what noise will fuse and frame a synaptic fragment of self, isn't it? Yeesh. But hey, Sophia kicked ass, yo.

“They don’t live the way we do. . . . They don’t do things the way we do. . . . They don’t sit home and watch TV; they hang out in the streets and talk. . .”.

Yep; that’s what he said, and it's stuck here, as I am, and as a consequence, you are as well, dear reader, with the above poorly portrayed Passport ID head trip 'round my as-of-yet only partially painted pad sometime earlier this summer (and this 'sentence').

Our immigration debate is implicitly framed by the larger, “global” problematic of home and nation, of white picket fence-dreams that make good neighbors and 12 feet deep concrete walls that make good nightmares. I teach contemporary World Literature at my College, and it happens to be one of my favorite courses to teach. Themed around the very premise of this particular dialectic dance--between the premise of the “Global” and the presence of the “National”--it attempts to interrogate through language this bizarre, seemingly unidentifiable liminal space we seem to be stuck in currently. Our world, with it’s ever-present and projected Extreme Global Makeover in a Big Box to Go (careful: contents are extremely warming), is now more than ever most obviously holding on with bleeding, torn finger nail desperation to the fabric of flags. Never mind the insidious discursive shift from "International" to "Global"; we’re keeping it real in our hood, and freakin’ out about

“leaking borders!”

Apparently, we have been told that we want flexible, “temporary” workers. We want flexible people-er-"guest workers", to pick our fruit, and well, clean things up around the place, mow lawns and paint walls, ya know; but shhhhhhhhh. Yes, fluid, flexible people! Acrobatic, invisible “Guests”! Yes, flexible and fluid peeps. But we want

“tighter” abs and borders! Tighten those abs and borders, now! C’mon! How oh how can we figure out what it means to be “American” if “those” people can just waltz right in to our family room whenever they choose? I mean, really. And I was right in the middle of watching “24”.

I listened to disembodied voices debate the demise of the Mom and Pop Shop. I contemplated the purple plastic of the mop. Yes. I thought. We want flexible workers for our flexible and fluid and lovingly disposable "global" community. Because, as I've recently noticed, my newly acquired parting gift of a "Miami" refrigerator magnet has a tiny "Made in China" circular sticker on its backside, right behind the clear plastic line of genuine "Miami" sand held affixed within said magnet. I'm assuming I'm safe from potential lead paint hazards, anyway. Between the words "Miami" and "China," there is a shifting line drawn in occluding sand. It suggests something other and even more sticky and seemingly permanent than the terms temporary, flexible, or even "global." It points to these words we exchange and have become since 20^th century post war reconversion efforts turned tanks into refrigerators you purchase at your “local shopping center” and Main Street into a place you visit at Walt Disney World.

(co)dependence Days: July, July!
Summer Session II: “Little pink houses for you and me. . .”

Last year, when my mom first moved to Miami, I had constructed a hybrid tableau Miami to which she would soon reside. Part Golden Girls, part Vice, part Crayola Havana of my mind, having never been there, I could only imagine it into being through the busted Viewfinder Archive of Miami Stereotypical Images I inherited thanks to my youthful love affair with TV. Ideally, she would reside in an Art Decco complex with groovy guys in Havana Shirts, sipping Café Cubano and playing dominos; my nightmare scenario? Not necessarily where she'd live, but who'd she'd become in and thanks to proximity. I was happy with my Ethnically Challenged and challenging mom who cooked canned beans and never made a cake that didn't have the Crocker seal of hapless baking approval. She seemed eons away from my Cuban-American friends' moms, but also light years away from my White-Ethnic friends' moms. She was this weirdo puzzle of influence and identity crisis with a piece of the Citadel de Havana and a corner piece of Plaza de Madrid and a whole slew of pieces suggesting north Jersey factory towns forced into relation.

Funny, but my mom wouldn’t do well piecing a literal puzzle together; it’s her hands. Three days into her New American Life my mom found herself sobbing on a public bench near a compassionate soul who didn’t understand a word of Spanish but apparently understood humanity and introduced her to the front gate and foreman of a factory where she would begin her American Working Life on said day three. Her first “Made in the USA” job title was as a welder; she would fuse filaments for the picture tubes in those old school television sets at the RCA factory in Harrison. I was there, too. Working through her pregnancy, I have “baby shower” pictures of my mom’s shy smile next to four other women in 70s pastel and plaid, posing with her boxes of baby things set in front of fence and brick face. She occasionally blames the arthritis on those initial 6 years of exposed joints in freezer-cold warehouse climate, and for some odd reason in my odd head, I am reminded of this as we pass yet another construction site marked off by temporary fencing on our drive over to purchase her glucosamine at The Vitamin Shoppe in one of her many strip mall shopping stops on the stretch of 88^th which runs through the suburb of Kendall, Miami; her new home.

Frankly, when I initially thought about my mom’s move, I was afraid I'd visit the New and Improved Born Again Hyper-Cuban Mom. And, indeed, like the myriad lives and residences she's inhabited, she has seen the light and is baptized anew in "La Llave" Cafe for certain. She says things like, “Up there in Jersey” which makes me feel like I’m apparently chillaxin’ at the barbarous North Pole on occasion. She’s gained a new accent and is dismayed to report having “lost” her “English” (apparently leaving it “up there”). But as many know, the life and flickering avatars of the Exile are never as singular and stable as the ironic solidity of the term itself would suggest. Up here in Jersey, she was sometimes too “Hispanic” to be comprehensible to the “Accent = Listening in Stereo” Types. I’d watch her ritual of frustration as she’d carefully construct sentences that had only a prepositional slip and fall here and there and then watch the shut down faces of the Anti-Accent Automatons waiting for the apparent Babble-Woman to stop and loudly retort, “Whaa? I don’t undahstand you; I don’t speak Spanish.”

But there in Kendall, I know she still feels like a stranger in a strange land. I’ve heard her say things like, “Here, in this country” in reference to Miami itself (as if Miami were not just a new city in a new state but a whole new nation of peeps, so to speak). And, of course, there’s the problematic one-two punch of consumption and identity in relation to time and place: “They called me ‘Yankee’ the other day” my mother dramatically laments in reference to the response to her order of salmon and asparagus rather than cerviche and arroz con pollo at the restaurant. And I've noticed the ever-present reality and shadow of the refugee-exile in her as well. She still can't sleep in a bed. I woke the first morning of my stay to find her downstairs, snoring away on her recliner. For the first time in the her American Life, she has her own "upstairs" bedroom (something I still long for), and she can't be comfortable in a bed. Unlike most parents who don’t sleep together, I knew my mom’s late night sneaking off into the living room to chair-sleep was in part due to the fact that she’d spent most of her initial years in the States with a rocking chair for a bed/room. And it stuck.

"It's good here," she sleepily retorted when I yelled at her to "go to bed".

"It's good; I like it better. Por favor: leave alone!" She replied, and noisily turned away on the faux leather “bed” as I walked over to the kitchen to prepare to brew the "American" coffee. I scooped the Starbucks out of the new bag of beans we just purchased at the Publix, which, she proudly informed before we began our grocery jaunt, is just a “short drive away.”

Miami's suburban sprawl is evident in every inch and yard of terra cotta Olive Garden. These developments of houses and condos seem only linked by the color if not quality of roofing material and the surety of a Publix grocery store only a car drive away. Everything is only a car drive away. And what, pray tell, is "everything"? "We have everything here," my mom gleams and gloats with consumer pride. "Targeh, Bar-nes y Noble, el Publix, el Winn Dixie, Kmar, Walmar (pronounced sans "t" so why not honor phonetic identities?)

Time Travelin' Tourist!: a brief rest stop of a return to sometime in solstice before we U-turn back to July

“So what does it mean to you? 'Home'?”

It was late, and I needed to start to get ready to head back up north to that 'home' I was working on. It was a conversation I found myself striking up with everyone I could. "Home?" What does it mean? Is it a place? Space? Ideological construct? Sense? Feeling? What? I was now asking one of my closest friends who lives far too far away from me in that county I have yet to fully call my own. We’ve had lots of deep convo on that couch in that living room. I guess it was right about the time I had decided I wasn’t going to move just yet. I guess it was the HGTV coming through the white wicker entertainment center; she loves that channel (and I love her effin’ furniture).

It appears that this beloved friend with the sweet furniture watches HGTV to assess the market and value of the homes featured there (and as a consequence, be aware of her own). She hits realtor.com like our students hit MySpace. Spaces and estates, real or otherwise, seem to be on everyone’s mind, if not screens. My cousin-in-law’s latest identity is sub-prime mortgage lender: "Best rates; no credit, no problem" he smiles and winks and cracks open a Presidente. In Cuba, he was a high ranking and trained para-military officer. Here, he's just another Cuban/American trying to find steady work to keep his family under mortgaged terra cotta rooftop: satellite dish installer; contractor/house painter; and now: “loan officer”.

A few weeks ago, when a group of us came back to my cousin’s home from a day at the zoo, we found my cousin-in-law and uncle huddled around his laptop, oohing and aahing over a house they were checking out on no other than realtor.com. It's a newer ranch down by the end of 104th Street, where the "developed" suburbs of this end of Miami end, and all that remains beyond is yet to be. . ."developed". “Oh… look at the ‘game room’…” mused my Uncle as the jumpy video panned a large, empty room furnished nothing save for billiard and ping pong tables. Those tables looked untouched; the green too pristine, like the infamous dining room where no one ever dines, this game room seemed like a display area rather than a place of play. Somehow, Kendall seems the end of the line; so much is new, so much on display and being built before my eyes, and each visit brings with it a new erection of Chain Store Nirvana. Soon, my mom will have her Panera Bread to go along with her beloved Barnes y Noble.

”Oh, look!” said my mom, turning to my cousin in the back seat. I was tired of seeing only the suburban outskirts of this city and I wanted my mom’s radius of being to expand beyond the boundaries of Publix and future Panera parking lots. We were off to Vizcaya; I needed me a fix of some sweet old school estate architectural brilliance. On the way, however, it seemed my mom was more excited about the newer evidence of, um, “architecture”. “How nice!” my mom comments, pointing to a new, huge, looming box of a public storage warehouse. “This is so much bigger than the one I used, Mari” my mom protests to my cousin. “It’s so . . . big!”

Something you might notice, should you care to look, would be the homeless working and wandering along 88th Street. As you head further north, closer toward older Metro Miami, you'll see men carrying cardboard blessing you for food or donation, and other men in yellow tee-shirts working against the apathy and protection of driver side windows and door locks in order to solicit donations. Miami, in so many ways, is a city bursting to the brim with the subtleties and explicit nature of homelessness. Whether sheltered in condo development, Miami McMansion or bus stop, there are storied seekers all around you. You just have to look. And listen.

Before I leave for "Gersey" this time around, I sit out back with my aunt and uncle and listen to new stories. Like the one about the soon-to-be exile women who'd hide their jewels in lipstick cases and hair buns. How the woman who invented the secret chamber hair bun idea actually lives in Miami, and is rich and famous for her hair products. I love hearing stories about Havana! This time around they tell me about the houses with the "false" walls. Behind these walls were hid all the goods the initial and second round of refugees left behind, believing they'd eventually come back to reclaim their properties. My uncle tried to convey the images of all these abandoned mansions, these huge homes with everything still inside, everything except for homeowners.

"When they redistributed and others took over the houses, they'd knock down walls just to see; so many walls to break down, you know?" I think of all that's been tumbled down in my family's life. How walls and doors and floors have been trampled and disrupted. How, in Cuba, after having her front door busted down, sending a plume of dust and sunlight across that black and white marble tile she always described with awe, and after her cupboards, dressers, and essentially every piece of my grandfather-carpenter’s handmade furniture was shredded, she somehow still managed the courage to offer a cup of coffee to a machine gun with a man behind it. They didn’t find what they were looking for. If they did, well, I guess it would be safe to say you wouldn’t be reading this. And this is one of the many miracles and testaments of faith she attributes to her multitude of saints, like, St. Anthony, for example, the patron Saint of Lost Things. And she believes. And in my way, I do too. While I was in Miami, I kept thinking about these unfinished walls yet to be painted here, “up” in “Jersey”; how summer is actually almost over now, even though just a blink and a few paragraphs ago it had just begun, and how despite the fact that all I kept thinking about was getting home, I found it there, in moments.

AUGUST (and back again)

Summer Session III: "Someday we'll meet beyond the land that you call miles away"

So, I am apparently home again.

Ah, home. I'd been texting and messaging peeps about the intense longing for this space--this half-assed, unfinished space that I don't even own. But will this paint really make a difference? Beyond the aesthetic coat, what changes? The odd thing is that it might be nothing at all. But how to tell? How do I, um, "assess" the Change? How do I measure the "outcome" of my Apartment Revitalization Project? Forgive the snark slippage, folks, but it seems that while I'd like to believe that "home" is a process rather than place, I am somehow bound and pulled by the idea that it is more idea than anything else, tangible or otherwise. Process? Place? Lately, it seems we’ve pawned it for and as an elusive obsession, as a quest to consume and consequently display "happiness" or, even worse, how the calculated notions of our “achieved" and “maximized” consumer happiness and satisfaction is now and forever being re-assessed and measured despite the fact that it isn’t and cannot be attained nor achieved in these numbers, flow charts or those damn paint samples. ;-)

Recently, I was myself similarly obsessed with reading this pretty rad book that traces the trajectory of the "development" of consumer culture; I finished it on the plane ride home (not really a huge fan of "Mr. Bean" re-runs, sorry). And as I peeked over my neighbor's tray table full of suduko and mini pretzels to spy me some glorious Exit Row View of what will always be the most nostalgic view of all, I came to an odd conclusion. It all came together for me on that flight home, as things often seem to make the most sense to me in transit. You see, I don't find it at all a coincidence that, at the mid-point of the 20^th century, when post-war America was figuring out what to do with all these peeps and space, with the then and now disquieting proximity of race and place, of class mobility and the purple heart of front lawn mowed grass; when America was “developing” itself: building and building and buying and buying until somewhere along the way our Hero "Man Consuming" was consequently consumed by the term and will from now on be played by “Consumer,” well, I don’t find it at all a coincidence that the birth of the 'Burbs also coincided with the birth of the survey. The development of the Modern Home Owner is the development of the newly Measured Customer. It makes sense. I see it. We see it. We live it and in it each and every day.

If you would recall, I began with an apologia; this isn't nor could ever be "judgement"; this is pathetic little pixel of an attempt to link to the beautiful-sad contradiction of Life after the EVS. I shop at HomeGoods. I like to do it. I guess I do. Well, it’s what we do. In fact, I shop in various places and spaces, am accosted by more muzac and more plastic packaging I can’t make heads or tails out of opening than plastic arts I can make heads or tails out of apprehending; I consume goods more than I consume art, despite the fact that I live in a less than 15 mile radius (measured in driving OR public transport distance) to dozens upon dozens of the worlds best art houses, gardens, museums. . . but, see? See Saturday afternoon and see the mad rush of me and my neighbors: we are mowing and moving bright red plastic shopping carts along aisles of prints to hang on walls painted (or otherwise). Sorry, but that new collection of urns can wait; I've got my prescription to pick up at Walgreens, see? No time. No time, sorry! Who has the time, or desire for something else? Or, as Hugh Wolfe suggests, “sommat" more? ;-)

. . .

I walk into a pile of torn-up catalogs that were smartly recycled as make-shift drop cloths and smile, give in to the almost slip and fall. My honey painted my bedroom for me while I was away. I now have a bright, lemon yellow bedroom. "Lemon Cake," I mused but then thought the better of it and went with, "Lemon Ice!" mmmmmmm....

On the phone he described it as "happy," and it sure is. While I was away I sure did miss these walls, but there are others--some I have only witnessed in the puzzling pieces of my imagination fueled by stories my mom and aunt and uncle and cousins have and will tell--that I seem to somehow miss more.

“El Patio de mi casa es particular: se llueve; se moja, como los demás”— lyrics from a (very familiar) lullaby

I can’t do it. I can’t buy the owl. I don’t know why. It’s not like I haven’t bought numerous other things, things that I haven’t even imbued with such significance as this. But for some reason, I can’t do it. Walking over to the rugs, I skip over to the middle of the aisle where a “Welcome Friends!” mat in bright greens and reds signals entrance to nowhere but the center of the aisle. I find this kinda snarky. At that moment I hear the familiar “door bell” sound of an in-coming text message and I scoop inside my over-sized “it” bag to see what’s the good word:

“Pita; estoy counting los dias hasta cuando tu vienes para tras a tu casa en Miami. Ya compre tu chair para el desk en su cuarto, y un lamp para leer en la noche. Todo esta esperando aqui. It is raining, so I finish Norah Roberts today. Love y besos, Mom”

Like Dorothy, I make for the mat and click my heels to speed the way.