Miles from Nowhere

It's still not yet a month since I left London, which is one of the most surreal realisations I think I've ever had. Because so much. So so much has happened and is happening. I left 22 Campbell Road on the morning of August 25 and took a taxi to Gatwick airport.

Much much more --- after the jump


 I flew to Reykjavik and just before takeoff, through the magic smart phones, discovered that my friend Larissa from Finland was arriving in Reykjavik within half an hour of me - so I waited for her at arrivals

and we trooped into town together, got some dinner, and walked through town.

She gets to stay for a whole year though, doing environmental engineering, while I stayed in a little room near the center of town and headed back to the airport the next morning to continue on to Boston.
In Boston, I got a rental car. I was that pathetic person who is exhaustedly throwing one overweight suitcase at a time onto the shuttle to the rental car center, not making eye contact with anyone because I feel both overwhelmed by my accompanying stuff and embarrassed by it and by what is my certain overwhelming air of dishevelment and desperation. People do help you, like the shuttle driver who put one case on for me while I was workmanlike moving them along. The other end was worse, where I broke one wheel of my heaviest suitcase simply by hoisting it from shuttle to sidewalk and then discovered there were no luggage carts unless you walked down to a rack of pay carts. So I just stumbled through with them, finding a way to carry them all for a few feet, then abandoning them at the head of the line while I waited for the next agent. With the paperwork finished and the keys in hand, I discovered there was a long walk to the car itself, and that tidal wave of disheveled exhaustion must have also awakened the agent's compassion because when I asked about carts, he hesitated then said-- 'I'll help you' -- and walked with me and a suitcase. I then demonstrated my geomenation skills in fitting all that luggage into my "subcompact" rental (to the agent's surprise) and drove straight to tea class in Boston at Glenn sensei's.

Finally that night I got back to my beloved Angell Street and, although I was exhausted, I ended up puttering around late into the night because I was home. An unheimlich home, not only because it was the last week of my home being mine, but also because two years of short term tenants and my mom and dad's moving-preparation visit has left any number of strange little unexpected differences. It was like a poltergeist has been there-- little things moved, stuff taken down, rearranged-- and truthfully, in my overwrought state, that strange feeling of personal space, violate, was kind of upsetting. The renter left a bunch of things, some seemingly intentionally (a stack of books on a shelf, a pair of shorts and tennis shoes on another shelf), some apparently unintentionally (two more books under the couch), and also ruined two wooden kitchen items by letting them mold. Between that, and discovering that the key to the storage unit which we'd just had to pay to replace had disappeared again, sorting and pulling out as much stuff to sell and give away as possible, and seeing friends and colleagues, the week in Providence flew past.

I ate lunch outside the Granoff Center one day...

To be continued...