Ghosts
January 15, 1995 • (0) Comments
On a wall in my new house hangs an equestrian print entitled “Depart au Gallop,” a phrase that sums neatly our recent evacuation here from New York. The packing and transfer of our household effects, which at one time appeared so difficult to imagine as to cause tears, took just two weeks to complete, proceeding at a full gallop that cannot now be recalled in substantial detail.
I do know that those days passed in a welter of boxes, blankets, and labels, bubblewrap, some newsprint, much tape and sore muscles; in rapid order, choices were made, discards jettisoned, and goodbyes hastily arranged. And when moving day abruptly arrived and the shipper’s Bill of Lading presented for scrutiny, I know that we slowed only to empty bank accounts and acknowledge toll booths.
But this account neglects to weigh my other pause, the one that occurred when I lingered momentarily before closing the door that last time on our city rooms. After all, these were rooms into which I brought my new bride, a first son, many friends, and five Christmas trees. They overlooked a neighborhood that was home to our grocer, a good barber, familiar taverns, and habitual figures such as the unkempt wretch who sang “Extra nickels, extra quarters?” at passersby each evening for as long as we’d lived there, or the jovial counterman—a Pakistani—who held forth each time he saw me on the improving prospects of the New York Mets, ignoring pointedly that I was and always will be a Yankees man.
Empty, these rooms were still part of an urban grid connecting us to jobs and friends, each momentarily accessible by cab, bus, on foot or underground, as if proximity itself were a feature of our lease like the heat or hot water. In five and a half years, their now-bare walls had witnessed our happiest transformations, first as we became a young couple in a city of single people, and then as proud parents, essaying from them to push our boy in an endless tour of streets that seemed made for his perambulation.
In these same rooms, Ginger turned thirty and, more recently, I become Forty, joined in celebration by friends whose presence among them was as natural as the sunbeams that washed us briefly on Moving Day. That these walls had witnessed our discomfort as good work yielded to disappointment, financial confidence to uncertainty, and optimism to tears only seemed to balance the ledger now that we were leaving for new jobs and a fresh start across the river. Pulling the door closed, my backward glance bore no melancholy.
And we’re all just ghosts there, now.