...where is home?

I grew up five blocks from the Pacific Ocean, on the country’s perimeter, one of its far corners, La Jolla. A place where people can go to get away from people who can’t afford to get away. It was featured in the Beach Boy’s song Surfing U.S.A. and in Tom Wolf’s The Pump House Gang. Lots of rich folks, lots of memories, my home town.

The house on Palomar still remains where we left it, five blocks from the water, but our lives are no longer lived in it now that my parents have sold the house they moved into to accommodate me, their fourth child. All six pounds or so of me were the straw that broke the camel's back -- the critical mass that signaled the need for larger accommodations. I recently came across boxes in a storage area where I live that I filled with their contents on my bedroom floor of that house, like time capsules of a future I never imagined would look like tonight, or even had a color, shape or aroma for that matter. I had never needed to unpack certain boxes like these. I'd open them, but I wouldn't need to put the stuff inside them into drawers per se. I could route them directly to storage. Recently, as recently as last night, I consolidated some of the stuff in a few boxes for no reason in particular, just for something to do.

I removed three photos of my grandmother that had been in a small straw box for almost two decades. They're sitting in front of me: one on top shows my father's mother, my father's father and a dog called Bozo. My grandmother is wearing a Japanese robe of some kind over a dark dress. They're in Japan, I think, by the year penciled on the back, 1926.

Here I am, me, 70 years later, sitting on the Peninsula heating my feet in a room full of Babar paraphernalia, married. One event lead to the next, chained together like dominos following patterns that fit snugly then branched out into sections of living quite different from end to end to end. And so much of it had to do with changing homes and returning to home from far away and not so far away. Moving in, moving out, moving on.

Also in this room and visible from where I sit is my packing blanket folded in its special place. I call it my blue buddy. (It's blue.) This blanket has come with me to four different zip codes, and it's showing a little wear. It isn't an ordinary packing blanket, but I doubt many would be aware -- and some haven't been -- that it would not be a good idea to say throw my blue buddy into the bottom of a U-Haul or drape it around some heavy desk. It has a grease stain from one of those misunderstandings, but it survived.

What's special about this blanket is basically that it has been with me. It's not only that I've carried it around, but that I've also put it to a special kind of use. Once, when it was fairly new and didn't really belong to me (I was cohabiting with a boyfriend for the first time ever), I decided it would make a good yoga mat. The house we were living in had hardwood floors, that not only lived up to their name, but were cold, too. I discovered the blue blanket, which happened to be in a room that was also painted blue, and I tried out a few yoga stretches on it, then did the corpse pose, which is to say, I closed my eyes and meditated while laying down. I think I'd have to say that this secured the relationship: the packing blanket was now mine, and it would remain a packing blanket no longer. The packing blanket and I were then and there intertwined. And now its wear seems linked to mine. Perhaps I should be cremated in it. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

I have not always practiced yoga regularly since that first time I learned what it was and what it could do. I remember yoga at that time as being, at first exposure, a way of filling nights when my boyfriend was working on movie crews and as a thing to do together with my friend who had learned about the center that offered a nice program. I continued, however after she dropped out, but she and I are both at it again in our separate parts of the Bay Area.

Though I am currently practicing more yoga than I have in recent years, now there is carpet in my favorite spot in the house to do yoga in, so I don't always use the blanket since the carpet offers ample padding. However, when I want to meditate, or when I go into the livingroom because this room is taken, I bring out my blue buddy and unfold it on the floor. It's an interesting thing. I have many associations to that blue blanket and feel that it must have power of a kind. I have treated it with a sort of reverence and gratitude over the years.

It's a grown-up's blankie perhaps. Though I no longer suck my thumb, maybe I retreat into its folds the way a child retreats from the strange events it faces that make it seek soft comfort. It is portable the way furniture and lives are, capable of being transplanted from one corner of the globe to another, and so I am convinced that it will be a piece of any place I call home.

Buddy also happens to be what my grandfather
called my grandmother instead of her so-called Christian name.