Getting What You Want

Sometimes it's tough to know which is harder, Bush: getting what you asked for or not getting what you asked for. Not getting what you asked for involves some disappointment, sure, but at least you're left with the status quo, the familiar. There's some reassurance, settling back into that. Getting what you asked for means accepting responsibility for it. Means having to make the changes to adjust to this new possibility in your life--an adjustment that may require great physical, emotional, and intellectual effort. And, yes, even spiritual effort.

I'm talking about this offer I mentioned a couple of days ago, on a new house. Well we got what we asked for. Our offer was accepted. Now we have to live with the consequences and accopanying responsibilities--the first of which is to sell the grand old house which has been our home for nearly thirty-five years. This will be a wrench. Everything that has happened in our lives--nearly half my life, in my case--has happened here. All the joys, and fears, and sadnesses. The earthquakes, literal and metaphorical. All the pain. Our daughter, Sarah, was born here and brought up here. And left here, when it was time to leave home. We must accept the consequence of her anger and her sadness now, for in some ways she has never left. In many ways, it's still home to her. As it is to us.

And now we must take on the practical--and emotional--responsibility for that downsizing we have been talking about so glibly. The new house is much smaller. We will have to clean out the closets, sort out years' worth of books, and magazines, and long-playing records. We'll both have to strip our wardrobes of all those things we haven't worn for years, but hold on to anyway, just in case… I'll have to throw out thirty-five years--and more--of dusty files, old manuscripts, notes, records… whole file cabinets and boxes full of them. I have always been scornful of other writers, who think themselves so important that each draft of every manuscript is preserved for posterity, to be pored over by scholars as they do over Shakespeare or John Keats or James Joyce. Well, look at me, Bush! I have the first draft of poems written fifty years ago!

We've both had something of the pack-rat in us. Something of the collector. We have racks filled with paintings and drawings: even here, we lack the wall space to hang them all. We have shelves full of the pottery we collected at garage sales and swap meets, mostly back in the 1970s when these things were still affordable. What a great treasure hunt that was! We still have every piece of it--except the ones we lost in the 1993 Northridge earthquake: a ripple of it hit our hill with devastating force.

In a word, we have now to contemplate the need to sort out all this clutter from our lives, and make some clear decisions about what is truly important to us, and what we can let go of. The letting go, of course, can involve both pain and great relief. The upside to all this is the thought that the clutter itself is emblematic of the accumulation of unneeded STUFF in our lives, and we now have the rare opportunity to clean up the interior part as well as the exterior. I myself have been aching for this opportunity for quite some time. I think we both have. Now we have to get down to actually doing it. So send some good thoughts our way, Bush, when you have a moment to spare. We're in for quite a ride, in the next couple of months.

Oh, and by the way, the new house is beautiful!