loss

... doing our final walk-through of the house and the basement, to see what the movers might possibly have left behind, the answer was - one book.   And out of all the books that might appositely have fallen off the shelves in 113 ("where did you get all these books"? "have you read them all?"), what would be better than David Eng and David Kazanjian's edited volume Loss: The Politics of Mourning? (duly rescued, and squeezed somewhere into the bulging interstices of the car).

For even if I'm excited to be heading west, there is something sad about leaving - about saying goodbyes this morning in Murray Hall; about leaving the house (in a hurry, and with a cleaner coming in through the front door), and even about pulling out of Highland Park for the last time - it only really hit home that it was the last time as we drove away (I have an almost bottomless capacity for denial and repression when it comes to uneasy and unsettling feelings, but the bottom was pretty much scraped up today).

That being said - our fingers are firmly crossed that at 3 p.m. tomorrow, give or take, we'll hear that we don't have to worry about the creaking, leaking problems of 113 again...