Don't Look Back

Years ago I had the opportunity as chair of a department to arrange a kind of bogus academic appointment of five months duration for a charming and marvelously talented Italian woman whom I wanted to stay in the USA as more than a tourist.  A school teacher in Italy, she deserved an extended break, and I wanted my family to get to know her as I had while traveling abroad.  We all enjoyed her stay, even the night she tried cooking dinner for us adults and the kids--weirdest Italian I ever knew, she could scarcely boil water.  A special treat for her was that another member of my department was married to an Italian who made her welcome in her own language.  They were with us the day we took her to the airport to say farewell, and it was this Italian fellow who marveled angrily at how we Americans could turn away from the goodbye kiss and pick up emotionally where we were before she arrived.  "We don't look back, Peppe," I told him, "this is too large a country and we move too frequently."  I thought of that today as we signed the Purchase and Sale Agreement, and someone asked me if I were alright leaving my extraordinarily large and beautiful garden.  "Think of all the years you put into building that," she exclaimed.  "That  was then and this is now," I replied more intent upon the details of the moving van, my husband's drive to Florida, my airline tickets to the same destination.  It was like leaving that marvelous house in Cambridge after thirty years, that  grand and spacious Edwardian--I almost want to say mansion--in Brookline where I had lived the last years of my married life as a father as well as chief cook and bottle washer.  My daughter and I went back to the next door neighbor when she sat shiva for her husband and I looked out the window at what I only dimly recognized as the place where we had lived.  I have never since been by the house in Cambridge.  When I used to lecture at Stanford after I had left the university, I sometimes went by the old house, just to verify that it was as wonderful a knock off of Mies as I always said it was, but I could not really empathize with the guy who once lived there.  That was then and then wasn't now.  I once walked through Harvard yard with a former colleague from Stanford who had gone through Harvard from freshman year to PhD to a minor post in the decanal office until he went on to teach on the west coast.  "I don't know how you can live so close to this place and walk through here where we are now," he observed with what I realized was a catch in his voice.  I looked around me, and, yes, to be sure, it was the fabled Harvard Yard. We mounted the steps to enter Widener Library a place I visited almost every day, as an author and scholar.  And I had to confess that until my friend brought it all up, I just didn't make the connection.  I thought it was just a library.