(Above: The red ladder that belonged to my Mississippi grandparents. Top, my cousin Mike, age 7. Bottom, my brother Kim, age 2. In the middle: Me, age 4.)
I have not written a column in the last couple of weeks - maybe longer - because I have been in the process not only of changing my life but also, and more deeply, how I look upon life itself. So I want to say I am sorry. And I want to describe a bit of what I’ve been going through.
I decided a few months ago that I wanted to live in London for half the year because one can do that without needing a visa. This coincided with my economic need to live more cheaply. How to accomplish both? First of all, I decided to take such a need and to transform the definition of it into a grand adventure and then go further and strip the grandness from it and make it a cultural and spiritual pilgrimage.
One of the things I have loved about my time in London is that I have one room and a bed. That’s it. I would go from the 2000 square feet of my loft in Hudson, New York, which was the entire top floor of building on Warren Street to a bedroom that is maybe 50 square feet if the person describing it is prone to exaggeration. I also split the use of a bathroom alas. Honestly, I don’t particularly like such an arrangement with another tenant in the home where I stay. But I have found a way to stagger my use of it so even that has become a lesson in sharing and humility. The other tenant is from Cyprus and his name is Pan. He is quite dear. Finding dearness in a bathroom mate is also something I thought I’d never be able to accomplish but I have here in London where I have even redefined what accomplishments have come to mean to me.
So it is not only the access to culture that I love here, but also how simply I live. I sleep. I wake. I write. I imbibe in opera and theatre and ballet - many times with press seats. I don’t have to worry about bills other than my Airbnb monthly payment which is half of what my rent was for my loft. But paying to store all my art and furniture wouldn’t make sense if I were trying to economize if I made the move to London - or London, etc., as I’ve come to call where I will be living in the next few years as London becomes my home base but home itself will be what I carry inside me as I travel month to month the rest of the year. Therefore, I made an even bigger decision to re-home my cats (I broke my own heart doing that as you’ve read in an earlier column) and to donate my library and to sell all my art and furniture. I decided to get rid of all that I owned in order to discover all that I am.
The process, however, was more emotional than I ever thought it would be. More chaotic. (“Panic” derives from Pan I discovered one paragraph up when I did some research on the god for whom my housemate is named.) Indeed, it felt at times like a chrysalis cracking open, especially when I was balled up on my filthy kitchen floor unable to organize the detritus of my life and found myself sobbing the tears I had not shed since I was a child who had first lost my father to a car accident when I was 7 and then my mother to cancer after I turned 8. I think all the tears I’ve ever shed in my life since have been a continuation of those boyhood ones when I felt so crushed, beaten up, downright demolished by the emotional violence of such deaths. The process of selling off all that I owned felt like another death in my life that has been so filled with deaths from my parents to the myriad friends I lost to AIDS to this one, the death of myself defined by objects and the finely honed aesthetic they created around me. I have lived a life, come to think of it, more finely honed to mourn, but the death of that “me” and the emotion that erupted from it stunned me. Was I finally mourning the ever-mourning child within me who was surfacing once more from where I have kept him subsumed all my adult life? Was this radical thing I was doing in my life more than a radical geographic repositioning? Was the spiritual pilgrimage I had planned to set forth on really beginning there where I was balled up on that filthy kitchen floor?
The afternoon I finally left Hudson after that night of sobbing and searching for the reasons I had not been able to extricate myself from the chaos the move had moved into my life for my last few days in the loft, my younger brother sent me the above photo he had discovered in some family slides he had been going through.
He wrote to me when he texted me: “I remember the red ladder. How?”
I texted back: “I do, too. Thank you for this. I have been crying for two days during this move for deep reasons, I guess, that must surface during such times. Thank you for reminding me of that short time I was happy. I tend to forget that boy I was on the ladder subsumed beneath the sadness that subsumed so much of my childhood. He is under all the sadness if I just keep digging. This life I am setting out on is about The Dig. I just realized that.”
This column this first day in London is the first spade I am putting into my soiled self. I am going to find that happy child. I am going to find him. It’s too late to unearth his innocence. But there is a sly slip of happiness in my eyes as I perched there on that ladder when I was four years old. I can see it now. Seeing it is the first step toward finding it again. I had to strip away all the adult odds and sods to see it finally. Now to find a way to feel it once more.
May we all find more than our inner child. May we go deeper and discover the children we once were before they were endangered by the need to be the thing to be discovered. Happiness is not a happenstance; it is our birthright. May it be reclaimed so it can exist - contentedly - side by side with the sadness into which it so often morphs. I like to think of it that way. Happiness and sadness are the opposite sides of the same emotion which reach an equipoise once we find contentment.
I am content in London.
I am more thankful for this, and to you for writing it, than for anything I've read in a long time. Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday, and it's November now. Thank you.
I want the best for you. You are loved.