Finding Myself

Summer, '05

I recently purchased the house that I have been living in, the house my parents had bought once the three children were grown. It’s a bungalow on a quiet street across from “the bog,” a small area of city-owned conservation land. In the back yard is a swimming pool, installed to appease my mother when my father decided to sell the cottage on the Cape.

The house had been an elegant little showpiece back in the seventies, but hadn’t been updated since. Each time I removed a piece of artwork from a wall, its former position was marked by a bright spot against the dingy wallpaper. The formal draperies had nicotine streaks in the folds and creases. The mustard-colored, sculptured wall-to-wall carpeting hid an imbedded layer of ash that no vacuum cleaner could reach. Each crystal bauble on the gaudy dining room chandelier was smudged with yellow-brown residue.

It all had to go. The kitchen and bathroom got new floors and fresh coats of paint. Throughout, the yellowed colonial wallpaper came off, replaced by Benjamin Moore Navajo white and fiddlehead green. Removing the carpeting was a tedious job, especially locating and removing hundreds of staples that had held the pad in place; but underneath was a white oak floor that, sanded and varnished, gleamed with a warm, soft radiance.

I have just finished the last room, the room in which I keep my computer and write my essays. It is accented with some of my collection of marine artifacts--a carved wood duck, a ceramic fish, a Nantucket whirl-a-gig, a large ship’s wheel. In the process, I have been moving things from the cellar to the curb: old framed prints, tarnished lamps, rickety furnishings. Most of it disappears before the collection truck comes on Wednesday mornings.

In this process of domestic renewal, I have made some discoveries. My high school yearbook was in the cellar, with the enigmatic “quite the playboy” slogan under my picture. There were report cards and test reports (my siblings got better grades, but I had higher test scores). My father had framed a copy of a newspaper feature story I’d had published in the eighties.

The real surprise, though, was an envelope containing two things I’d written in seventh grade. One was a report on World War II (the whole war in five pages!). I don’t remember writing it, but it is unmistakably my handwriting; it obviously had struck a chord with my father, a veteran of that conflict. The other is a poem I’d written and had been forced to read, agonizingly, at a school assembly. That I remember.

The poem is called “Waves”, and it goes like this--

The waves maintain a steady march
Upon the beckoning beach
They form a line and keep in time,
For each its goal shall reach.

A wave can neither see nor hear;
Nor touch, nor smell, nor taste
Yet every wave shall reach the shore
With dignity and grace.

Ah, to be so young, so innocent, and so incontrovertibly iambic.