When I was young and starting out in life, the idea of ever having to start over never occurred to me.
The concept seemed improbable to someone who loathes change and would prefer to live and grow fully but deeply rooted in one place, rather like a wide-branching tree.
Naturally the gods tend to make sport of someone like me. Subsequently I have lived under many roofs, most of which I have left behind as casually as a motel stop on a cross-continental tour.
There is, however, one oasis where I easily could have spent the rest of my days.
Torn from it by uncontrollable circumstances, I, like E.T., long to go “home” to that place again, but until time travel machines become a reality, it is impossible.
To complicate things, unlike E.T., I often feel more of an alien in my country of origin than in the place where I lightly touched down for a time.
During a 10-year chunk of my life in the 1960s, I lived in Mexico. While I am loyal to my native U.S., the time I spent in that country as a student and young married woman was like a wild, all-consuming love affair where you are so in the moment, you take no thought for the future.
Like one’s first true love, one’s first true home cannot be forgotten. And like true love, finding it cannot be forced; it has to come to us.
So it was with this. An apartment, heretofore unseen, fell to us serendipitously as my young husband, not long out of school and a stint with the Rockefeller Foundation and the Alliance for Progress, began working for Latin America’s largest poultry-producing firm as a nutritionist.
He had done such a good job for their ranches in the remote northern state of Sonora, he was transferred to Mexico City.
Arriving directly from the train station, we moved into the furnished, rent-free company apartment.
It was a cool, early September morning when the taxicab pulled up and deposited us in front of an elegant apartment house in Colonia Polanco, a posh residential neighborhood.
Seven stories high, it had been built in an early International Style with touches of Old World grace, probably in the post-Revolution 1930s, when Mexico City was expanding.
Welcome home
Ours was the apartment nearest the heavy glass and steel door opening onto the street. Just a few steps across a marble-floored foyer and we were inside.
I looked around, saw sunlight streaming through the windows and felt wrapped in welcome like a warm coat. This would be home for a little more than two years to my husband and myself, our 3-year-old daughter and my husband’s high-strung but devoted standard French poodle, Bonita.
The apartment immediately put me in touch with my Inner Sophisticate, whom I hardly knew existed until then.
Colonia Polanco was fashionable, home to many foreign embassies and consulates and their diplomatic corps.
In the heart of a metropolis then considered the Paris of Latin America, the architecture in Polanco was stunning. We had our choice of gourmet restaurants, busy cafes, elegant art galleries.
Our apartment was just a short walk to the Paseo de la Reforma, the Champs d’Elysee of Mexico City. There I could flag down a taxi to go wherever I wanted — to Chapultepec Park, or the new Museum of Anthropology, or in the other direction to the Bazar Sabado, the Saturday arts and crafts market where I loved to hang out.
After three years in rural towns, I was delighted at the feeling of electrical excitement of daily life in the capital. You felt almost anything could happen, and over the next two years, a lot did — all of it radiating from that apartment.
I never tired of coming home to its quiet elegance.
Entering the apartment, one passed through a long marble-floored hallway. At the end on the left-hand side was a doorway into the well-appointed modern galley kitchen.
On the other side of the hallway, separated by graceful plaster archways, were a living room and dining room. Both were lined end to end with casement windows. They could swing out like French doors, though mostly, we kept them locked for safety’s sake. But through them I could look across the street at the comings and goings at a chic restaurant where, working as a freelance writer, I often treated myself to a cappuccino to celebrate the sale of a story.
Those casement windows lining every room that faced outward were one of the apartment’s most distinctive features.
I was quite fond of gazing out those casement windows, framed by floor-length lace curtains.
The `blue hour’
The most romantic moment for me was the approach of what I called the `blue hour,’ when the (then) transparent air of a city seated at 8,000 feet, in a ring of volcanoes, slowly turned azure, as if an inky dye had slowly seeped in. That was just before night dropped like a black velvet curtain.
From those windows, I was fascinated by the rain that began like a dumped bucket at the same time on late summer afternoons, and then stopped just as abruptly, leaving behind a chalky clean smell to the streets, like a freshly washed blackboard.
In the evenings, my daughter would stand on the sofa beneath the living-room casement windows and watch for her daddy to return home.
Beyond the physical appointments, there was a psychic magic to this apartment. By simply moving into it, we were transformed from an educated but penniless young couple to respectable citizens.
The apartment for us became like a doting godmother. Our lives took off as if sprinkled with a golden dust. We were both productive and successful in our respective professions. He was supportive, proudly showing his work buddies my name on the cover of a local magazine at the rack in Sanborn’s drug store.
We now had the money to dine out, go to the theater often, and spend weekends in resort hotels in Cuernavaca. Socially, I hobnobbed with famous artists, writers and craftspeople, native and expatriate.
The apartment wrapped its arms around us in an embrace of security, stability and prosperity. We had arrived and our future appeared secure.
It was not to last.
A sad end
In a swift few months, my husband found swollen lymph nodes under one arm and died of melanotic pneumonia, melanoma being an aggressive skin cancer.
After the funeral, I had to sell nearly all my possessions in order to pay for our return to the U.S.
The morning I packed suitcases for the plane was wrenching. I can remember every tear-filled, terror-stricken moment. As I shut the door of the apartment behind me for the last time, I closed it on a way of life as well. But I had no choice.
Faced with earning a living for two of us, I returned to Chicago and moved in with my parents.
During my marriage, they had purchased the house of their dreams — a large, comfortable new house, also on the corner of a park, this one an open ball park.
It was a very nice house, but it was not mine. It was my mother’s house, as it should have been, and I was careful to respect that. I cleaned it for her, shopped for it, ran errands for it. I made the best of it, but I was aware it was her home.
Lessons learned
It was also my beloved father’s. A retired entrepreneur, he was still marching to business hours. He would get up early and occupy the single bathroom for a long time, smoking and reading, while I fumed, wanting to get my child off to school and myself off to work at the Tribune. But the earlier I arose, the earlier he did. Sometimes he would ask me to make him a pot of morning coffee, which I would do out of love and gratitude, though it made me miss my train. I learned generosity.
And humility. Goodbye to sovereignty over what to eat for dinner. Sometimes, to keep from hurting the feelings of my mother, who had cooked, I had to eat two dinners, because I had already eaten out before coming home.
The furnishings in my parents’ house were contemporary — nice, good things, but conventional. I had no furniture of my own, and I had only a few small items I had brought with me from Mexico.
Most of all, farewell to any sense of living an artistic life, and hello middle-class America, where creatives were suspect and told to seek “a real job.”
Though my mother’s house was good-sized, it was difficult to find privacy in which to write. So I cleaned out a corner of my father’s garage and put my typewriter on a small metal table there.
In the summers, I got up early and sat there with the side door open for air and wrote my first book, “Morris the Cat, An Intimate Biography.” The neighbors thought it quite unconventional.
And then, the time finally came for me to leave my parents’ house to live on my own in a small older house. It is unremarkable, but it does have casement windows that I refuse to modernize, even if it means air conditioning in the summer is a problem.
Reverse culture shock continues to affect me and I don’t know if I will ever entirely be rid of it.
One thing it has done is make me very sensitive to the immigrants who come here to start over, leaving behind parents, extended families and memories in order to adopt a new homeland. I observe how they keep one foot in each culture, hopping sometimes from one to the other, flying two flags as it were, to survive psychologically.
Silently, in my heart, I try to do the same. Perhaps, as with people we love who pass from our lives, the home we loved may still exist in another dimension. If visiting it in our memory is not as good as having known it first-hand, certainly it is the next best thing.
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Starting over. We do it not just when we move from youth to adulthood, but on and on throughout our lives — when we wed or become parents, when we find ourselves uncoupled or married to a new place in the world, when we open our eyes and see another new day but as we’ve never seen it before. Whatever the changes we experience, often they spill onto the walls we wrap ourselves in. In the next year, we’ll be reporting on people who have started over in one form or another and on how their life changes have altered the places they call home.
