MEDITATIONS ON HOME
Don
Lee
Transit
Eighteen years
ago, my father retired from the State Department. Pretty much his
entire career,
he had been posted overseas, more often than not dragging his family—my
mother,
older sister, and me—along with him to live in and on embassy
compounds, Army
bases, rental apartments, military transit billets, and hotels. At
intermittent
times we had a house in the States, but the only one in which I lived
with any
sense of ownership was in Falls Church, Virginia, when I was thirteen
years
old.
It was a
three-bedroom brick ranch house on a half-acre lot, and we moved into
it in the
thick of an unbearably humid summer. We had virtually no furniture.
Heretofore,
everywhere we’d resided came pre-furnished with government-issue
appurtenances.
So we went to stores and bought sofas, beds, tables, and dressers. We
thought
this would be our home for at least five years, when my sister would
graduate
from high school. Almost immediately, though, my father was assigned
TDY—temporary duty—to various places overseas. He was away for a total
of nine
months that year, and then one night he told us we had been given
ninety days’
notice to move to Tokyo, back to an embassy compound, back to
government
furniture.
To be honest, I
was happy, and relieved. I had hated the banality of going to the
middle school
in Falls Church, the ordinariness of bourgeois life in America, and I
looked
forward to the adventure and distinction of being a diplomat’s kid
again. We
were supposed to be in Tokyo for only a year, then go to Paris—our
dream
posting. That never happened, and I ended up attending the American
School in
Japan until I went to UCLA.
Fourteen years
later, my father, upon his retirement, stood in a warehouse in
California,
opening up crates that had been hermetically sealed and kept in
climate-controlled storage on the East Coast for almost two decades.
Inside the
wooden crates was the furniture we’d bought for the Falls Church house,
used
for less than a year and then never put into service again. Chief among
the
accouterments were a couch and a matching love seat—conspicuous because
of
their lime-green color. They were acutely of a piece with the era in
which they
had been purchased, the seventies. Curved, upholstered with some sort
of
luminous faux suede, the couch and love seat were hopelessly, laughably
outdated, unimaginable in a modern house, useless. My father decided to
donate
the sofas, along with most of the other furniture, to Goodwill
(although it was
questionable whether they would be willing to take them), and to start
over.
I was living in
Cambridge at the time, my sister in Seattle, and my father would soon
move to
Honolulu, into his new wife’s house. My mother was dead.
For some reason, I
wish I had been at the warehouse to see the lime-green sofas as they
were being
tugged out of the crates, freed from the plastic that had encased them
for so
long, finally seeing the light of day—if only for a few minutes, before
they
were abandoned for good.
Don
Lee
is the author of Wrack and Ruin, Country
of Origin, and Yellow. He teaches at Temple
University.