And a dog is tied to a wagon of rain

The house down by Dekum Street, which I signed away yesterday in a title company office so bland I could not even visualize it on the escalator back down, was a haunted box to which I should never have returned after the divorce.

Tom Waits, in Whistle Down the Wind, sways and gasps through the line, "...and a dog is tied to a wagon of rain." For the remaining balance of my time in that home, I imagined myself to be that dog, coupled to a surreal, sloshing burden that pulled meanly at my shoulders, whichever direction I attempted.

My next ten years there were largely defined by two cohabiting relationships, each of which increased the groaning tonnage of that wagon significantly.

First there was L, who had two children, and smoked. It was only two years, but it was very close on the heels of the cartwheeling flame-out of my divorce, and my month in the booby hatch, so the relationship unfurled like a jumper's air cushion in the ghost-frame of that blank affordance. What color glasses do you wear when you want to filter out the good things, and isolate the negative, to see what was wrong, so you can avoid it the next time? There was her tendency to over-accumulate semi-functional secondhand material, to put it diplomatically. I also found the incoming parenting philosophy to be of the permissive and indulgent variety, which fosters both disrespect, and a yogurt-like resolve that results in endless video game dementia.

There was something chasing that person, and one day I returned home from work — this was during my one-year stint at the marketing agency — to find that their entire physical footprint had somehow been removed from the house. I do not know, but I assume it must have taken an anxious army of helpers and the largest U-Haul on the lot, all praying I would not be opting for a sandwich at home. Of course, I had my hand in that undetected denouement, and I have evaluated that under separate cover.

On the bright side, it was good to get away from all that smoking.

Then there was MLM, whose mighty tendency to over-accumulate probably-someday-repairable secondhand material equaled the one which had so recently parted. She never moved in all the way — keeping her constipated fire hazard of an apartment across town — but her things did. Was my home just an overflow facility for her stacks of scrapbooking supplies, cheap furniture, cases of outgrown clothing, and "things for the garage sale"? Was I just another semi-functional bauble who no longer brought joy? In retrospect it is clear she was emulating not just the aching mediocrity of her parents' lives, but the living void of whatever kept them together. I remember a father who woke up at 4am every day to start watching television (loudly, because he didn't like his hearing aids), and whose presence at the dinner table was a tense and demanding silence. The lonely and financially dependent mother would gripe impotently about him after he had inhaled — animated by nasal whistling and forehead wrinkling — seven pounds of unseasoned carbohydrates and returned to his television.

The final straw in that one was when she declared to me that the worst thing my father had ever done to me was tell me I had the capacity to be a writer. (My father is a lovely and caring man who understands his children well.) She wanted me to take a nine-to-five grocery store job that would teach me I was no better than anyone else...just like her parents.

One day, when it had all become too much, I found myself unwilling to attend couples' therapy, and waited at home for the firing squad. Like many self-imprisoned men, I did not perish in a hail of lead, but instead emerged into the daylight of freedom, blinking and of bounding heart. Oh, it was lovely to feel those walls melt so rapidly in the warmth of liberation.

A few years later a flood of sunshine and accumulated karma brought Lauren, with her Davy lamp and level head, and she got me out of there. Now we live together in a big, airy, sunny fixer-upper that we make better every day, not worse. (Today, for example, I'm removing the guest bathroom's old linoleum floor, which we recently discovered had salvageable hardwoods beneath it.)  

Last night I had a dream that I was at the Dekum house, and there had been a storm. I looked beneath the deck, where I had apparently been storing large cardboard boxes of Achewood merchandise: T-shirts, hoodies, posters, and the rare first-edition self-published books from twenty years ago. In my negligence, they had all become rain-soaked, moldy, warped, discolored, and unsellable. In the dream I experienced the sensation of instantly consigning them to the trash, with minimal guilt, forgiving myself the great cost of their ruin. In the dream I knew I would create more and much better versions of these things, and take care of them this time, and that helped me to let go.