Re-Entry

Science fiction stories featuring that transition from inky, mute space and back onto sunny, tumultuous planet Earth usually make the passage through the atmosphere seem fiery and dangerous. It’s the tricky part. You need to somehow shield your craft - or at least, yourself - from being singed, scorched or worse. 

Re-entry into American life is nowhere near this abrupt. It’s full of a lot of queuing, form-filling, patience-draining and name-signing. It’s toggling between all of your usernames and passwords, which you misremember and have to change and hope you remember to document before having to use them all over again. It’s memorizing strings of numbers, repeating them, and explaining that you don’t yet have all the information that people behind counters and desks and in front of monitors require. It’s butting your head against the bureaucratic wall, over and over again, and wondering how, even though you voted by mail in every election and carried an American passport and driver’s license and received packages and mail at a (technically) American address, you also more or less disappeared for six years. 

And yet, to a tiny audience, you are mostly who they know, wherever they happen to be.

You learn that there are still a lot of entities who want a personal check instead of a card with sixteen numbers and a microchip. They don’t respond to emails. They make and take phone calls only. You thought the cash-only local economy of your European dream was pretty analog, and it turns out that you were kidding yourself. Now, you can’t find your checkbook because no one has wanted your checks in six years. Oh, and movers packed up all of your belongings 6 weeks ago, and you don't know when you'll see them. With the shipping nightmare that is the lingering pandemic-laced world, it's a toss-up.

So many things about this photo say 'Italian' to me, but in fact, it was shot in Atlanta, GA. 

You vaguely wonder how people who don’t have a physical address - by choice or by misfortune - manage to have bank accounts and credit cards, because those entities don’t want to cooperate with you until you do. Two-factor authentication for some reason rigidly insists on texts sent to phones (how do people who don’t have them literally FUNCTION IN THIS WORLD?), often gives no option for another means of conveying the damned code, and keeps a death grip on your old phone number. 

So, change the number, a reader might offer. 

That is a lot harder than you think. Oh, you can adopt a new number, but who will readily adopt it as yours? That’s the troublesome piece. 

American customer service has devolved into chirpy bots (designed to stall your progress while providing the illusion of caring about what you need or feel, more than anything else) and FAQs and ‘forgot-your-password-username-etc.?’ meandering loops with no success.  Go ahead, try to find means for communicating with a real person on that website. Hint: you’ll find it when you resort to using a plain old search engine, because other people have had enough with the fruitless search, and they’re freely sharing those toll-free numbers you can almost never locate on the company website. And when you do reach a human being in written form, it becomes quickly apparent that that person is a) also pre-programmed, potentially so well that they cannot effectively read the words you have written, and b) immensely obtuse. It is as if they have taken instruction on how to NOT answer your questions.  

Frustrated? Don’t tell anyone, most especially the person who faces the public, the one who is supposed to handle questions or problems or people who have needs. 

Why? Their new tactics for handling questions or problems or needs involve categorizing everything that the customer expresses in the way of dissatisfaction or frustration or even the repetition of a question (because they’ve thus far successfully dodged answering it) - however calmly, however seriously or honestly - as yelling or being rude or somehow inappropriate. Alongside those classes on how to not answer questions, there has been additional training in hyper-defensive posturing. 

Meowmy, that is your stern voice.

Re-entry into America reminds you that you spent six years NOT behind the steering wheel, and that even your thigh muscles enable you to repeatedly press the gas and brake pedals, through endless stoplights. 

When preparing to move this from my childhood home, my friend P struggled with starting it (as had everyone except its dearly departed owner), and she called upward: Dale, help me start this truck! 

Of course, it started. 

This '93 edition Ford has now gone into the capable hands of the across-the-street neighbor (with a newly licensed teenage daughter) who installs car batteries for a living. I guess that Dad can still keep an eye on his house now.

Re-entry into America comes with free refills, a lot of salt and sugar, and the frighteningly false end of a pandemic. 

Re-entry into America’s soundtrack includes incessant pharmaceutical commercials, extreme political partisanship at the expense of legitimate representative governing, and more Spanish, which I need to get busy learning. 

Re-entry into America looks and feels so very, very strange, as the family photograph now only features you. It is so reassuring to have a life estate holder lock you out of your family home less than 6 months after your last living parent died. She routinely asserted that she would never prevent his daughter’s access, until she changed her mind. When confronted by the idea that the true owner of the house didn’t cotton too highly to finding her family’s remaining possessions shuttled to the basement within mere weeks of the death, she changed the locks and played little passive aggressive games, refusing to communicate directly, but making sure her umbrage was communicated via others. 

But she’s in mourning, it could be explained.

I guess that she left his ashes on the basement floor because she misses him so much. 

Re-entry into America comes with the loss of two parents, two cats, a profession that has undergone an alarming amount of change, and affordable costs of living. 

Re-entry into America came with a couple of crazy moving days, when our household goods finally arrived after being adrift for 3 months. We locked the cats in the bathroom and dutifully, even cheerfully, tried to work with the movers who declared: we will bring furniture first, and then, the boxes. 

‘Cause y’all got a lotta boxes. 

OK, we brightly said. We knew we were going to have to compress the contents of the Rome apartment (far larger than we had a right to) into a smaller space and deaccession a number of things. At least *I* was braced for this reality. 

Anyone without an interior design degree do this? While waiting to move into our loft, I drew a not-to-scale floorplan from memory and then cut out little miniatures of our furniture to move around. I didn't feel like mastering software. I felt like manipulating things by hand. This will *not* be the outcome of our living space, however. Something The Spouse said about not placing wine racks without a wall behind them...

And then in came the stream of movers with…boxes. 

Boxes and boxes of….books, clothing, kitchen goods. Everything, it seemed, that could fit into a box was boxed...even the things that didn't necessarily require boxing.

Oh, plus the occasional piece of a bed frame, or a bookcase shelf, or some other item that had been wrapped like a Christo and rendered anonymous. 

Um, what happened to ‘we’ll bring all the furniture first’? We had no time to ask this in the 4 hour onslaught because we were supposed to be checking numbered boxes off on a list amidst one question after another, from one huffing mover after another: ‘where do you want this to go?’ 

And while we spent six years in Italy and knew some Italian, that did not prepare us for interpreting it from hastily scribbled labels on these packages. 

We had deflated the air mattress we were sleeping on - too eagerly, obviously - because we were told that the rule of thumb in moves like this involved bringing the bed in first. It was one of the last things to go from Rome, so it seemed…reasonable....to expect to see it first. Alas. No.  

As we re-inflated the mattress, the cats emerged from the bathroom with wide eyes. And The Spouse looked like he’d been terrorized for the last several hours. 

Day 1, before the onslaught began.

Day 1's near end...

We worked like fiends after the movers left on Day 1, unpacking and consolidating and making several donations...so this was the beginning of Day 2.

Also...why would the movers insist on placing a rug that everyone and their brother would walk over, thereby necessitating that it be vacuumed before arranging the furniture to go over and around it? 

And this was the end of Day 2.

We couldn’t assemble anything that had been expertly broken down into separate parts because nothing was completely present. That wouldn’t happen until Day 2. We would guess at the meaning of the Italian label for a box and repeatedly discover we were wrong. 

The Spouse called it Bad Christmas. 

In fact, by the end of Day 2 we had to ask the movers to accompany us to a storage space we’d secured because we reached over-capacity in our living space. It was only then that the guys produced a translated list of box labels, and they didn’t let us keep it. 

Our storage space, initially. Lest you think we bought all of Italy and shipped it to ourselves, I'll post another entry on Italian packing and packaging. But first, I need to sleep for a few days. 

Oh wait...I can't.

By the time I had to board a plane for Rome to teach for the Fall term, we had unloaded over 100 books, a dining table and 6 chairs, a side table and a mid-century cookie jar (hey, it was a big cookie jar!). We donated piles of clothing, shoes, small appliances and anything for which we had a duplicate. We moved the contents of my entire Roman studio (including a small printing press, easels, an old, metal, mid-century teacher’s desk, an equally old teacher’s wheeled audio/visual cart, a fireproof cabinet, etc, etc.) into a rented studio space. We’re still looking for a home for a coffee table and a partial barrister bookcase. I’ve left The Spouse to search in the storage unit for a stool, book shelves, an ottoman, a ceramic bread cloche (the box we’d saved for this undertaking came home, but the packers didn’t use it to pack the item for which it was intended...maybe, I think in retrospect, because it is French? We all know how the Italians feel about the French) and various and sundry other items. 

Coffee table, anyone? 

Just one of the many stacks of books to leave our library...

But the the most important piece of furniture is assembled and the cat TV is UH-mazing, so really, what is the problem? 

These guys are GLUED to the outside scene. Dogs and squirrels and little geckos. Just, WOW.

SUCH an improvement over the Roman pigeons and occasional seagull.

I'm including this because I mention (below) having to get another storage space, and on a day when I could sell a piece of my father's gardening equipment from said storage space, I got to meet the buyer's best buddy, Festus. In a previous life, Festus took a bullet during a domestic violence episode. His nightmares are dissipating, thanks to love and peace in a second life, riding around in an air conditioned truck with his new dad. 

Festus (and his dad) are my heroes.

Upon vaguely tallying (because a literal list would be horrifying) the costs of lodging in an extended stay hotel for almost three months (in part because the house we originally thought we were going to rent was quickly discovered to be unlivable), a rental car for several weeks (because our car was floating on a boat across the Atlantic), Camp Kitty lodging for the four-footed Italian immigrants, my flight and drives home to deal with my father’s estate matters (which entailed hiring a lawyer, an appraiser, movers and renting a storage unit too!), buying a car so we could hand in the rental, paying ‘cleaners’ to only pretend to clean our loft once the tenant moved out, buying a new air mattress when the borrowed one gave out after a faltering 5 day run, obtaining a storage unit and a studio rental, and slowly putting our lives into some semblance of order in our new/old place…here’s what I ultimately think about re-entry into America:

It’s expensive. I don't care what all my traveling American friends have to say about this, when they claim that traveling to Europe is expensive.

'Home' is damned expensive. Re-entry has indeed left our wallets in smoking ruins.