This is six months ago. I am moving home to Los Angeles after living in London for twenty-five years. I remember most of the times I moved in America; I was usually broke. Friends would come over; you'd have pizza, talk about what you'd keep and what you'd toss, and it felt like fun.
Gloria is crying as I take out pictures and books, and pull the afghan my grandmother knitted off the grey couch where I write.
Since we don't have a washer or dryer, Gloria has been valiantly taking everything to the Laundromat up the street for fifteen years. We still barely speak each other's language -- (she comes from Colombia and I am from California, so we understand each other's land, and therefore, each other.) She has been coming here twice a week for six years. Last weekend we went to see Motorcycle Diaries.
"It's not out in America," I said. "Probably too political."
"No, it is because they make their own big Che Guevara movie I think. Not politics, business."
"What's the matter?" I'm saying now. She's turned away from me.
"This is your place," she wipes her eyes. I hug her.
"I'll make a new place," I say. "You'll see." Furniture's like characters, when you make big changes, they have to think their roles through, settle in.
I take post-its in orange, turquoise, yellow, and pink to mark what's to give away, what no one will want and what is to move. I have big blue bags from the recycle people. We fill twenty.
I can't give up my grandson's story on George Washington, or my first mother-in-law's letter warning me not to divorce my children's father, that if I did, I'd always regret it. "A stepfather will never love them enough!" I've never found a comfortable answer. As I've never found a comfortable answer to living away from my children, and my country.
I shovel at least six shelves of notes about old Hollywood into cartons, and took other boxes with files from my father's days as a mogul to send back to the University of Wisconsin. Someday I will write about him, and about my mother, the painter, "You never call yourself an artist," she said.
And here's Adlai Stevenson's book, What I Think. (If you love Audacity of Hope, find this on Amazon.com.) "If we doubt ourselves we will persuade no one." Just listen, here,
"To view our present and our future with sickly anxiety is to ignore the lessons and achievements of our past; to forget that although America occasionally gags on a gnat, it also has some talent for swallowing tigers whole."
"Our traditional attitude is that criticism is neither a menace nor an aberration. It is an essential principle of social development."
"We recognize that in every human being is implanted reason and the capacity to search for and recognize truth."
I want this upon a banner. I want the power to run along streets waving it high over my head.
"Our political institutions reflect, profoundly and dynamically, the critical view of life," Walter Bageshot said, 'It was government by discussion that broke the bond of ages and set free the originality of mankind.'"
Adlai Stevenson was a brilliant man (who didn't grab the crusty American the way we long for Obama to do.) He also wrote well of change:
"Change is the order of life and difficulties its meat, and all change is the result of a change in the contemporary state of mind. Don't be afraid of being out of tune with your environment, and above all pray God that you are not afraid to live, to live hard and fast. To my way of thinking it is not the years in your life but the life in your years that count in the long run. You'll have more fun, you'll do more and you'll get more, you'll give more satisfaction the more you know, the more you have worked, and the more you have lived."
I remember the excitement of being involved in politics, the passion our democracy gives us permission to maintain. Someone referred to me as an expatriate a few months ago. I was furious, "I'm not; I just live over here." But I am an American. And the more I hated what was happening at home, the more I needed to be there.
As I pack up my papers, pictures of the grandchildren; big skies and trees behind them, I long to go home even more; I dream, every night now, of driving through the canyons. I go through letters written by hand, as engaging as the expression on a face. I've never regretted saving old magazines from the 50's through 70's, the past will explain your feelings about the present.