Katie Bowler

It’s that simple: Paradise.

I wandered around for a few minutes after the house fell quiet, suddenly restless. I sat down on the sofa and put my eyeglasses on the nearest cardboard box. Time to fall asleep. The girls are in my bed since I packed their bedding tonight and the movers arrive early Wednesday and — well, once I thought all of that, I realized again that tomorrow is my last day at Tulane.

I’ve been at Tulane nearly six years. A lot has happened in these six years. All of Audrey’s life thus far, and most of Sophie’s. The losses of the last few years, the last three in particular, are too many to describe. Once, after a very hard year in which her dear old boyfriend died, she quit her job, broke up with her long-term girlfriend, and so on and so on, A.H. said to me, “I couldn’t have lost anything more this year,” then thought about it some more and added, “except maybe an arm.”

It’s true that the losses of the past three years have been startling. They are huge, like a city, and they are small, like a burned book. They are close to heart, like a husband, and they are distant, like the vague silhouette of my pigeon man, who has been missing from his spot on my commute since the storm. Losses: what writers I like like to write about. What I like to write about. And which I wish I had less of to write about. Although today, when my office held a going-away lunch for me and I received a Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans? gift, I said, “Oh, it IS sad to miss New Orleans.” Then added, But HA!! Now I have another loss to write about! Oh, happy happy poet with new source of inspiration!

It’s also true that I have gained a lot in the past six years, and I count six although I might have counted three since the Storm or eight since I returned to New Orleans or, well, any other number between one and thirty-three, but instead I choose six, because six is the number I finish when I close the door to my Tulane office tomorrow. There’s the obvious and the most important gain in the past six years: motherhood, which is, for all practical purposes, the most important part of existence. And not just mine. Yours too. 

Then there’s other stuff: jobs, projects, publications, awards, a degree, and some old poem about some old street. People came into my life: my best friend Leslie, my other best friend Donn, my buddy Allison, and some of my muses, like Josef Koudelka and Larry Levis and Czeslaw Milosz. I learned to play soccer — sort of — and spent about two hours a couple years ago with Alice Notley. In early 2005, someone sent a piano to my house, and after the storm when there was little else to make sense of, I learned to play it. I introduced my daughters to the library, and not just any library, but the one I grew up loving to go to. For years, I pulled them in their red wagon every Saturday morning so we could go to the library. They thought it smelled funny too, and they too liked the smell. Oh, I could also make a long list of the wonderful new writers in my life, most of them on account of Warren Wilson, and mostly I am thankful for their friendship. I was very lucky to find a new group of talented, intelligent, thoughtful, and committed friends right when I really needed them — you know, right about the time all that loss started. And I’m very happy that when car is packed and headed down the street, we will drive 862 miles to arrive in a town with a handful of those friends waiting. 

And, wait, the most obvious gain of all — and the impetus for the need to write this entry about my last day at Tulane tomorrow — I have a NEW JOB! 

And when the moving truck has gone, an interview has been complete, and friends have been dined with, I will return to my empty home on Wednesday to open the celebratory bottle of champagne from A.D. It came with a note:

Congratulations, Katie, and good luck in the of competence, functionality, and clean, well-lighted, free public schools!

K is unloading the last closet to be unloaded.

M is putting unloaded items in boxes.

M: I am going to miss you.

K: I am going to miss you too. You’re the best part of living here.

M: And you’re why I moved back.

+ + + +

K and M pick up Chinese to-go food. K and M sit on the floor in the sunroom eating with chopsticks. K and M are almost done.

M: Pick your fortune.

K: (opens it and reads) I think I got yours.

M: Should I read mine first?

K: Sure.

M: You will receive unexpected support over the next week. Accept it graciously.

K: Yep, you got mine. I got yours.

M: Then what does *mine* say?

K: It says — An alien of some sort will be appearing to you shortly!

+ + + +

(K is not an alien.)

+ + + +

Packing a box of binders. The box is getting heavy.

K: You think this is too heavy?

M: Too heavy? I think it’s just fine. Remember, you’ll have two men and a dolly.

+ + + +

FACT: I still have my tax forms from 1998.

+ + + +

And in 2001, most vendors included full credit card numbers on receipts.

+ + + +

Oops. Make that: I still have my 1997 tax forms.

+ + + +

ANOTHER FACT: Katie Bowler is a woman with a pretty serious toolbox.

+ + + +

Hours later:

My sister has left for the evening. She’ll come back in the late morning, after we’ve both separately showered, slept, and had coffee. Now I’m facing the boxes alone. Too many of the lights are on in the house, but they need to be. I’m moving from room to room too swiftly, and I circle a room in a direction I’ve never walked, because furniture has always been in the path I’m taking now. It’s weird, how we pass houses on from one to another. When my sister and I left briefly to pick up dinner, we returned to find an unfamiliar Lexus in the driveway. An agent, obviously. The woman viewing the house stayed a long time, and we stayed a block away, nibbling on an egg roll and waiting. Eventually, the woman and her agent left, and they drove past us, the woman in the passenger’s seat, her agent in the driver’s seat as I put the car in first gear and moved toward my house. It’s only my house for another week, and the woman will find herself a new house, whether or not it’s mine, and she’ll put her own glasses and silverware in a new drawer, just like I’m moving mine out to put them in another drawer and cabinet 862 miles away.

This thoughtfulness is what happens when my sister leaves and my children are spending the evening with their dad and my boyfriend is in New York and the music is on the iPod and I’m alone in the house I’ve lived in for six years and the house is becoming more house than home.

+ + + +

Now, where the heck did I put that broom?

My 6 a.m. writing timeslot has been encroached upon for too many months now. First, by spending mornings writing cover letters and packing my c.v. and portfolio, and now by packing boxes and ensuring that checklists are complete. And now, when I give up on packing for a morning, I am instead writing about it.

The *lasts* began about two weeks ago; this is the last time I will see you for a while, the last time I will do this for a while, etc. Every once in a while, a last is suprisingly sad — or not. Lunch with C.S. at our favorite divey little Mediterranean spot where the food is good and the service is slow, I realized with a thud at the end of our meal that I might not see him for a long time, and that once upon a time, I saw him nearly every day, and that was before the storm, when he worked thirteen floors beneath me, before his department was cut and thus he was laid off, and now he is doing much more interesting work but I do not see him nearly enough and when I do, it is over a plate of dolmas and hummus halfway between his museum and my office. And now, hugging him, I am sorry that I cannot even guess the next time I will see him.

On the other hand, there’s the sushi place, where I have gone for six years, most often with my daughters on Friday nights, and for a year or two, with my sister and my daughters on a Friday night. I know the menu, the staff, and the regulars. As much as I like going, it *is* true that it’s merely the closest sushi place, and the next closest, which is only two minutes past it, is not nearly as good. The place lacks character though, and why would anybody put video poker machines in a sushi place? Ching, ching, ching, I guess. That happened around Year Five, around the time my favorite waitress Katie left. I was sitting there with Y – who had driven in from Baton Rouge to help me organize and make sense of a shed in lightning-fast lickity splickity mode after I’d spent weeks opening the shed door, standing there, and asking myself what to do about this mess – now where was I? Ah, sitting at the table in the sushi place with my daughters, Y, and X. We were having a great time. Lots of laughing and interesting conversation. And then, little thud, I realized it might be my last dinner there for a long time. Which was just fine. 

In between packing boxes and finding childcare and new local doctors and establishing a local bank account and wrapping up matters here and hiring my replacement at Tulane and running news searches to familiarize myself with the faculty and projects at UNC, well, in between all of that plus painting and cleaning and emptying sheds and attics, there are moments plagued by the Empty Closet Syndrome. It is one thing to suffer the Syndrome yourself, it is another to suffer it for three.

The syndrome might be better were the closets fully empty, but they are not. Their contents have been decreased by about 90%, leaving only the items that I either don’t have the right box for or don’t know what to do with. And the Empty Closet Syndrome might be believed to be the result of an actually empty closet, but researchers ought have named it the Emptying Closet Syndrome, for the process of emptying is the underlying cause. Who knows how much the syndrome progresses once the closet is actually empty?

I, for one, have never moved across the country so deliberately. Any move prior to this one has involved a U-Haul hastily packed by a few friends re-payed with sushi, or the move involved even less than that, say, a car called the Potato who drove around North America for a year before settling on a destination. Or, the move involved my mother and I packing a borrowed van to drive me to college. Sure enough, none of these moves involved packing me and my daughters so that strangers can come into the house in a mere two weeks and pick up those boxes, put them in an 18-wheeler, and leave me standing with my two girls in an empty house until we get into our own car and drive across the country to meet our boxes on the other end of their trip, maybe even giving us time to stand in a new empty house, waiting. The Empty Closet Syndrome involves the moment the truck is gone and the only items left in the house are the few I never figured out how to pack or get rid of. Which must translate into: Didn’t Want.

When one empties the closets to pack boxes, one inventories her life. Why, for instance, am I continuing to save the charred pages that remain of my treasured Great Gatsby? Why is ”the book” sitting alone on an empty bookcase, evidence I have yet to figure out how to pack it? Surely the move will turn the pages to dust. What to do with my mother’s few dresses that I would never wear, but don’t want to part with? What’s my obsession with giving my daughters finger puppets? And other people’s too?

Each time a linen closet or kitchen cabinet is fully emptied, I look into the space and recall that I haven’t seen such a space since I moved in, and what a difference there has been in my life, and in the lives of my children, since then. This, I guess, is ultimately the Empty Closet Syndrome. When one faces the emtpy closet and the closet looks back.

The closet says, “So long now, Katie. And good luck.”

The closet says, “What did you think I was? I’m just an old closet. You still have your things and you will meet them on the other end. Now, go on. Get out of here.”

The closet says, “You knew you wouldn’t live here forever.”

The closet says, “People leave me all the time. I’m used to this. Why are you still standing there?” 

The closet doesn’t have much heart, does it?

I tell the bedroom closet I knew I wouldn’t live here forever, that he didn’t get enough light that I could find my shoes, that he didn’t have enough space for two. I tell the linen closet that, once, I accidentally put a book of Blake’s poetry in a stack of towels. That was during a hard time, I tell the closet, a few months after the storm, when the only thing I could control was the cleanliness of the sunroom floor and the organization of the linen closet. It is funny how, looking back at times of disaster in my life, I see myself organizing and mopping, or other people organizing and mopping, how once, right before we broke up, I caught X.Q. organizing and labeling the containers in a kitchen cabinet. X.Q. labeling! For real!

I remind the closet of a house I saw shortly after the storm, and how the exterior wall had been ripped off by the wind. All that remained looked like a set: a living room intact, the son’s bedroom upstairs with the bed still made and his towel hanging on a hook on the back of the door. Even the remote control was in the middle of the bed. The storm didn’t destroy as much as it exposed.

The closet says, “What are you telling me that for?”

I shake my head. I am not sure, Closet, why I am telling you that. You, closet, seem to understand what comes and goes. It’s the rest of us who are still toting our treasured objects in boxes to the next house.

I close the closet’s door. Stand with my back to the door.

Look, there’s another room that still needs to be packed. That’s only mostly empty.

This little house has had its share of good times and its share of scars. I carry the good times with me and tell those stories over and over, to elicit young laughter. I carry the scars too, keep them closer to heart, or perhaps only in my poetry and fiction, or else I tell them to no one. The wall has been repainted. A hole has been repaired. These are just walls that hold stories that for six years I lived.

When someone arrived recently to carry away my younger daughter’s old Radio Flyer trike — she has a big girl’s bike now — the girls stood at the front door. They said in unison, “Goodbye, little bike.”

(It’s true: They talk to bikes like I talk to closets.)

Then, when the door was closed and their backs were to it, Sophie said, “The bike is gone. But it will always be in our hearts. Right, Mom?”