Closing doors, opening doors

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 30/06/2023 (1069 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

It’s fitting that it will come with the slow close of a garage door, an evenly paced closing seen only by me. Also, seen only through the rearview mirror, the white rectangular panels juddering down, the lines between each thinning every time like lips drawn taut with anger.

Behind that door is a garage I knew well, and beyond it a yard, and beyond it, a house.

A home.

A place full of memories — a place that made me think, as many places do, about the questions of what is this all for. What is the purpose of all this experience and knowledge and joy and sometimes keening pain?

What is the why?

I am sitting and writing this on the front step, where I used to sit in a chair until an already tired and sweating mover grabbed that exact chair this very afternoon, pumping it up and down over his head, over and over again, as if he was exercising, like calisthenics, as if he was trying to prove he wasn’t tired at all.

We were all tired by then.

The measure of true movers is in the last third of their day, not the first, when everyone can have energy.

The last third is where you offer up what you don’t have any longer, wrapping furniture in quilted pads, forcing yourself to stay thorough.

The last third of all jobs is my refuge and the absolute home of my satisfaction.

The house is empty now and full of echoes: the cat is confused but also alert, as we’ve moved before too recently for her to have forgotten everything about the exercise. It’s a big expanse of shiny floors and oddly large spaces, sounds that no longer sound right.

All of the punctuation has already happened: the commas of fruitless delay, the colons of wished-for second chances or choices, the small round periods of the full stop. Irrevocable.

You get to a point where you can’t turn things around if you want to — you’re heading for Winnipeg, regardless.

Not that you don’t want to go to Winnipeg — just that, you don’t want to go.

The house sparrows will stay chatting in the cedar tree out in front of our former house long after we’re gone, and the nests they are building inside and under the neighbour’s roof flashing will pump out this year’s next generation of sparrowdom. They won’t know I am on the Yellowhead Highway, cruise-controlled, heading southeast with a car full of plants and bottles full of the liquids movers won’t ship, a cargo of laptops, gas station beef jerky and hard thoughts.

The sparrows, always ready to talk about everybody else’s business, won’t care, either. A tan-and-white stumpy little bulldog lifts his leg and pisses on the flowers in our garden.

In front of me on the street, my familiar street for two years now, a leather-vested biker trundles by, folk music pulsing oddly from his speakers. A brain-bucket helmet, bright-white arms like he’s spent too many hours in the dim light of a bar, and yet … mandolins?

And two years feels strangely harder than when I moved from somewhere where I spent plenty more than 20: the short, short time feels almost interrupted, like our life here started to grow, but never really got the chance it deserved. Like a hiccup, an aberration, a wrong turn.

I would hate to believe it was a wrong turn. I don’t want to believe it.

But still, it nags at me: do the things that happened inside these walls, as important as they seemed at the time, count for nothing?

Will I one day be a ghost, a whisper of lives lived in this house and in all the houses I have lived in? What will happen to all that information, that knowledge, that experience, the memories I can conjure up, friends toppling sideways on that rust-red living room couch, collapsed and folded-over by laughter?

I happen to think that everything matters.

I’m not a believer in circumstance or coincidence.

And yet.

And yet, I can’t help but feel sometimes like I careen through the world, as directionless and uncontrolled as a shiny steel pinball in someone else’s pinball machine.

By the time you read this, the garage door will already have closed behind me with its regular and familiar rattling finality, while my eyes have turned to look ahead through the windshield.

I will not only be driving, but will have driven.

To a new place.

To here.

I will meet my wife at the James Richardson airport. We will walk through the front door of our new house together.

I will be measurably older. Wiser.

Somehow, sadder, too.

Hope may be a wonder.

But sadness?

Sadness, well…

Sadness is a vintage.

Russell Wangersky is the Comment Editor at the Free Press.