Last week I finished teaching a workshop at the New York Public Library, based on my recent publication, Object Essays. It was wonderful meeting new participants and greeting old friends. Above all, it was lovely, simply having fun talking about objects and how to write about them.
The following is an object essay I began at the start of the new year:
Someone once said, “Transitions are hard.” And the end-of-travel transition? The worst.
I spent the last morning of 2023 working on a novella in the back seat of a rental car home from Virginia. I was, on the one hand, feeling quite productive, and on the other, getting sleepier by the minute. I slipped my Rose, a compact gold Apple MacBook Air I’ve owned since 2018, into its black nylon case and placed it at my feet. After a nap I listened to a podcast, then I indulged in a movie on my phone, reasoning that this was a good way to kill the last two hours of a drive by bare trees and endless grey skies.
Rose and I have become quite close. It has been my trusted friend and daily confidant throughout sleepless nights, and productive days. Rose and I have paid bills, corresponded with corporations, managed family affairs, organized a whole world of post-modern communications, as well as catalogued my writing: articles, novels, short stories, and poems. Feeling that things had gotten a little out of control more recently, I decided it was time to clean the yard and start pruning away, deleting old files and saying goodbye to the clutter I no longer needed.
The end of any trip is the longing, the please-just-get-me-home transition of the plane landing but it’s another ten minutes before you can even get up, or the unloading of the car and the endless trips back for more luggage, or in our case food. Because after the “holiday extravaganza”, as a friend refers to it, or the “Christmas madness”, as I call it, there is always more food. And such food needs to be not only unloaded but immediately refrigerated. At the end of this trip, I found myself in the kitchen, making sure I got everything unpacked before it spoiled, which was perhaps the reason I did not go back for one more luggage-toting trip.
I needed to get outside and walk, so I ran some errands, feeling good about the coming new year, the fresh start, the wondering-if-I-could-do-anything-differently musings of a late day December walk. When I got home, my husband had already left, driving the rental car back to J.F.K. I ran a bath, climbing in with my new stack of Christmas books, thinking that life was, indeed, quite sweet. It was only when I got out and thought about working on a submission that was due on the third of the month, that I felt something was missing.
Rose’s power chord lay on my bed, looking lost and confused, wondering where its mate was. Surely it was nearby, ready to work, helping me finish a piece about the ubiquitous New York chestnut stand of yesteryear. I looked around at piled luggage, and strewn coats. I lifted cushions and investigated the hallway. And then it dawned on me: I hadn’t seen Rose since this morning, when I tucked it in at my feet before that nice long nap. Convinced that I was mistaken and that I’d surely find it within minutes, I consulted my husband, and spoke to my daughter, but multiple searches confirmed my new reality: Rose was gone. This, it seemed, was turning into my Hemingway moment.
The rest of the evening was a swirl of calls to National Car Rental, filing lost property reports, constantly checking such report status, battling my increasing anxiety, and the inevitable catastrophizing questions that come with it. Where was it, who had it, what files had been opened, what was on it, was there financial information, and the inevitable ask from my husband: “It’s locked, isn’t it?”
No, it wasn’t.
Yes, I had gotten a little cavalier about my tech tools. I’d never lost a phone and knew Rose’s whereabouts at all times. Yet recently my husband had reminded me to lock my phone, that my I’ll-never-lose-it-attitude was a dangerous game I was playing that I would eventually pay the price for. And here I was, knowing exactly where my phone was while feeling like I’d lost an arm without Rose. “It wasn’t locked?” my daughter asked.
Shutting down, I also tried to tell myself I had to be resilient, that on the one hand I didn’t know that anyone had gotten their hands on it, and on the other that it might be gone and that I would simply have to deal. What a test of the Buddhist idea on non-attachment this one was going to be. We watched hours of television to take my mind off, then, predictably, I slept terribly, waking every few hours to the nagging thoughts of my own stupidity, lack of awareness, and downright naivete: this kind of thing happened to other people. I was together, I didn’t lose things, I was always checking for my belongings.
But was I? What about the time I left a 35-millimeter Nikon FM on an airplane as a teenager, never to see it again? Or the multiple ten-speeds I’d parted with over the years, or the pockets I’d had picked in the bad old days in New York and on a Paris Metro in the ‘80s? Stop, I demanded of myself. It just happened, I argued. The Buddhists would say the problem is not the loss, but my attitude. That I was attached to my own anxiety instead of the reality that an object had simply gone missing.
Inevitably each recent project started haunting me; did I back everything up? What about all my bookmarked articles on writing, especially my favorite ones, like the piece about Graham Greene’s daily writing practice: 500 words each morning in a black leather notebook, written with a fountain pen, beforecoffee. Or the article that breaks down how The Wall Street Journal does their man-in-the street human interest features. What about all the travel articles, as well as the ones on film, and my short cuts to my own published pieces? It was a little world Rose and I had created, one where I knew the location of all my teammates, ready to comfort me and serve me both at night and during the day. I had even grown accustomed to how dinged up Rose, previously pristine, had become when dropped in the backyard last summer while chasing an errant dog, another test of my ability to accept imperfection. And no comfort was derived from the back-up laptop I received at the end of a recent teaching job. The keyboard was wonky, there was nothing on the desktop and it felt like a blank canvas while I had no idea what to put on it. It was no Rose.
After four hours of sleep, I gave up and went downstairs, making coffee at the ridiculous hour of 5 AM and thinking I would get some writing done. Only I couldn’t. Now the feelings of loss started to flood in; for the past 12 years, I’d had one laptop, then another, my Rose, with her smooth sleek metallic feel, that travelled all over the house with me, always at my side when I couldn’t sleep, helping me find solace in a way-too-early cup of coffee and an hour of writing before heading back to bed.
As I stared into the abyss of my coffee cup, wondering why, on this of all mornings, it wasn’t working its magic, I patiently waited for my husband to get up, so that he could accompany me to National Car Rental. This was not the way to start the new year, I thought, huddled on an A train bound for J.F.K. without any luggage.
I sat on the subway, trying to console myself. Rose was either there or it wasn’t. There was nothing I could do about it. I had done everything I could. When we switched to the AirTrain and pulled into the station, I was greeted by a sea of rental cars below. All I could think was that maybe, just maybe, my little Rose, slumbering away in its black case, was patiently waiting for me to find it and take it home so we could make more words together. On the other hand, what were the odds?
The place was busy. Lots of New Years’ travelers. We finally made it to the agent, and I explained my dilemma. She looked in the lost-and-found system, but no one had turned in a laptop. Beyond that, the issue came down to this: was our rental now rented out to someone else? In which case, there was no hope. The agent looked up our car, and it was miraculously on the lot. Pushing the envelope, something my husband is very good at doing, he kindly asked if someone could check the back of the car to see if the laptop was still there. The agent said she would try.
We sat. We waited. We watched lots of tourists come and go. Forty-five long tick-tock minutes went by. And then, a uniformed National Car Rental attendant approached the agent, carrying Rose, like a tray, just the way I had left it, in its black nylon case.
Back home, I lovingly connected Rose with its mate, the aforesaid power chord, and as it purred back to 100% battery capacity, I gave it a sigh. Relief didn’t cut it, although happiness came quite close. Dozens of thoughts flooded my brain, but the main one, a second chance, said it all.
Never again would I be so careless, so cavalier, and above all else, I would always check for my belongings.