Object Permanence

Yesterday, in yet another incident that marks the oddity of our virtual ways of being, I visited my father's new home from the comfort of my own. He offered up the grand tour via Skype, moving from room to room with his laptop out in front like a sort of ill balanced waiter. Peekaboo being one of my daughter's favorite games of late, she giggled every time his face would bounce back onto the computer screen as he repeatedly leaned in to make sure the camera was angled correctly and asked over and over, “Are you seeing this?” in a kind of prediction of what will undoubtedly be Verizon's next advertising campaign.

He has moved a total of five times since I have been on the planet, for all the usual reasons both personal and financial -- career, divorce, remarriage, the dream of having property in the country with horses, a romance with the coast. Perhaps because my husband's parents still live in the same house and once a year, at least, we return to the scene of his childhood in our adult skin, or more pressingly now because we have our own child; each time my father moves, I have come to wonder what happens to the evidence of the life we lived together, and what proof of it will be left for me to show my daughter.

There is nothing like having a child of your own that makes you long for the bedroom you grew up in, if only to sit in it for just a moment and remember what the world smelled like when you were their age. (Of course, it should be said that all this nostalgia is hitting me at a time when it seems as though more American's are loosing their homes than will remain in them, so I should be thankful that there is even a tour for me to take.)

During each return visit to the house my husband grew up in, a story from his childhood inevitably slips out, a window of memory opens, and we leave feeling that much closer to each other, as if the story shared lessens the time we've spent on this earth without each other.

My father's new home is as nice as it is foreign. He catalogs the contents of each room with a kind of obsessive fervor -- the elegance of a hutch, a gold-plated tea set sitting artfully on a low table in the front entrance. He keeps asking me if I recognize this furniture, but they are pieces from his most recent house that I only ever visited twice. Yet, I nod and smile, even though the camera is facing the other way and he can't see me. Is parental acquiescence ever something we out grow?

When nearly seven minutes have passed, which on a virtual tour is like an eternity, and I'm struggling to keep my daughter from pressing buttons on the keyboard and likely disconnect our call, I want to ask him if he's showing off because he's been taking some interior design course I don't know about or if like an Egyptian prince, these objects have taken on such a supreme level of importance that he wishes to be mummified with them.

Then, he rounds a corner, and there it is, the painting of President Kennedy that used to hang on the wall in his study of the farm house in Maine, the most recent of the houses we shared as a family. My father is probably standing there smelling the brackish water moving off the bay he lives next to now in Panama City, Florida, but suddenly the sharp, dry smell of pine logs burning in a wood stove is just beyond the reach of my senses. My brother and I are sitting on the floor, listening to Eddie Vedder sing about seeing a woman he recognizes from his childhood behind the counter at a country store, only he can't remember her name and is too shy to ask her and thus share the memory. It is the last winter that we will live in the same house, before my brother is old enough to move out, and he is asking me if, at the ripe old age of thirteen, I know what this song means. Life times are catching up with me.

My father's tour has suddenly become more interesting and I lean forward on the edge of my seat, watching for familiar objects as they bob in and out from view -- the dining room table where my grandmother officiated my at-home bat mitzvah sits on a porch now overlooking the ocean, a prisma drawing by my stepmother winks from a wall in a bedroom when I remember it guiding a path up the stairs. There are even artifacts from my parent's original marriage, although they've been divorced now longer than they were ever married in the first place.

In another three years, I, too, will have lived on my own longer than I lived with my parents. And yet, there is relief in this unexpected brush with these relics. I know now, with a kind of certainty, that objects, even out of place, can afford a means to visit this history, even after its been long outgrown.

This is, after all, the reason for my daughter's delight when her grandfather finally reappears at the tour's inevitable conclusion. Peak-a-boo, a kind of proof that we seek objects-- for good reason -- long after they've disappeared from view.