I’m back in Chicago now. I’ve been home since Wednesday night, but it took going through the stacks of mail and all the other crap that accumulated over the past few weeks to feel like I was really home home, and not just shuffling through a familiar landscape of laundry piles and receipts and business cards (am I the only person who doesn’t know what to do with other people’s cards? Where do I put them? Should I put them in a bowl and have a monthly drawing and send the winner a nice gift certificate to Sizzler? I deliberated this as I went through the cards and about five hundred thousand other pieces of paper today.). But now everything is in its place and so am I.
I stayed in four different hotels on this last trip. I have a recurring bad dream about missing the check-out time. I collected all the complimentary shower caps from the bathrooms. I don’t know why. I have this idea I can use them like these things, which I would never buy. That’s how homesickness makes you weird, I guess: I began to imagine this domestic existence covering big bowls of homemade salads, even though I’ve spent the past three months or subsisting on handfuls of dry cereal and frozen burritos from Trader Joes. But it looks like I’ll be home long enough this time that it might be possible to have a legitimately kitchenlike experience in my own kitchen. Theoretically, at least.
I updated the book site. Go there! Be informed! Wisconsin is next.
My grandmother, who lived from 1898 till 1997, went through that inevitable period in life where she was divesting herself of all her worldy goods in order to move to smaller and smaller homes. She did this, of course, by cajoling her only daughter and her three grandkids into adopting many of those possessions into their own lives. We mostly didn’t have the heart to turn her down, since she had lovingly saved many of these things for decades.
So one day I’m in her two bedroom retirement apartment when she pulls out, with some fanfare, a small stash she started saving back in the 1960’s (I am not kidding). It was a collection of shower caps, all saved from the various motels she had visited over the years. This amounted to a grand total of maybe twelve shower caps, because my grandmother would rarely afford herself a motel room. She insisted I take them so that I could use them to cover salad bowls and the like.
Sadly, when I got them home, I found that age had glued them all together, so that they were not so much twelve shower caps as one surreally crenellated shower cap, and all the elastic was shot.
But I’m just saying. It’s not that far-fetched an idea — I’m quite sure those bowl cover things actually ARE shower caps.