Here is the plan. I live 5 to 7 miles away from the Strip. I get into my Honda with Jane and for lunch we go to the Vegas branch of the Stage delicatessen for pastrami on rye, Dr. Brown’s Cel-Ray, sour pickles and tomatoes, a round potato knish — we split that; deli french fries, crinkled on their sides and end up with pastry and tea; after that we stroll the shopping areas in the hotels — Lalique, et al. Or one evening we just walk the Strip itself, splashed by neon. I was at Vegas about 2 or 3 years ago and at night it is almost day, just like Broadway and 42nd Street at midnight which Jane and I experienced in 2007 on our way back from Spain.
Everything is now contingent on a house inspection which is at 1A.M. on May 11. If it passes or if what has to be remedied is minor, the house is ours, for many, many details have been attended to or will be attended to before we leave in mid June. I reflect upon how many apartments, condos, homes I have had in my lifetime and being morose I wonder where these old Hebraic bones will find their rest — who knew Nevada for a boy from Brooklyn? When I was a little boy which is what most men are even in their seventies — that is all right; it doesn’t make you a bad person — I fell in geographic love with Cheyenne, Wyoming. I guess I was doing a product map, those cliched learning experiences in which you put salt or pepper, spices, et al into jelled capsules and glued them onto a map. In any case i received brochures from the chamber of commerce in Wyoming and was intrigued by the horses, country and rodeos. My son has visited Wyoming for a job and he thought it was spectacularly grand. So I may very likely be interred out west where Levi jeans cover the asses of those who dislike Jews, how fitting.
The whole concept of settling down for this wandering Jew is peculiar. How does one settle down? How many cartons have to be sealed and unpacked and distributed throughout the house before one settles down? Do I feel settled down with a driver’s license from Nevada, when my first mortgage bills are addressed properly to my home, when the cable is in and we are billed? Is it the first shopping at a Safeway? Or does settling down take the course of time, perhaps six months or a year. What can settle me down in Nevada? I imagine it comes after the first dust storm of getting all the services working, all the painting and hardwood laid, when the electrician installs our fixtures, when the new carpet from India is put down, or Jane’s piano is refinished, or my books are in book cases and my desk has order to it. All this non-Thoreauvian crap has to be seen to, we urban movers with comet tails of junk and jewelry, watches and computers, the Twitter and Facebook of cyber crap.
Perhaps we arrive at a kind of inner peace when we realize that life itself, the flow we wade through every single moment, does not exist, for to have inner peace may be a kind of inner rot or decay; how does one manage, if that is the word, continual change, string theory wrapping each of us up into balls of thread? So because of my own needs I push myself into the river of change and I course forward to Nevada with all kinds of good feelings and uneasy trepidations but there is an excitement for the new, hopefully the settled down feeling of the regular and normal, as I age, as I see the end and determine to tap dance upon the devil’s head as he pitchforks into the grave night.
Leave a Reply