When we were fortunate enough to be able to buy our own home we bought a lot of furniture, too. Granted, any sense of permanence is an illusion, but it’s just a relief to have something in your life that didn’t come from IKEA with the tacit consolation that, sure, it’s not quite as nice a thing as you’d like but why spend hundreds of dollars on something that might not go with whatever place you’re living in eighteen months from now?
So we bought a bed. It’s a nice bed, fabric-covered, with an integrated headboard and the frame lifts up on spring-loaded arms so you can store things underneath, and it’s the first real bed I’ve called my own since I moved out of my parents’ and stopped sleeping on the bed they got for me when I was six; ’til now I’ve always just had a mattress on a box spring and called it good.
We have a sheet and a blanket on our bed, as you’d be within your rights to assume, and because my wife is prone to being cold at night, we have more like two or three blankets on at any given time. The one that usually goes on top is funny, it conflicts with the new-bed philosophy described above, because it is an ancient somewhat-fluffy gold thing whose ends are fraying apart, but it is warm and comfy, so it gets the position of honour.
That old battered thing, incongruous in a place where we spend so much time and money and effort expressing that this is a new part of our lives, that we’re striding ever forward—being pulled, really, not that one likes to admit it—but there’s a utility in that old blanket, something stalwart and supportive like the arms of a parent, a feeling that a word like “utility” is really not well-suited to capture.
My parents had a cross-stitch, or whatever it’s called, something like that, on the wall of their bedroom when I was a kid. It’s on the wall of the bedroom in their new house, too, I was just there. It was a poem that for some reason has always been lodged in some dusty footlocker of my memory, like so:
Let me grow lovely growing old
So many old things do
Laces and ivory and gold
Fine silks need not be new
And there is healing in old trees
Old streets a glamour hold
So why not I as well as they
Grow lovely, growing old
And I remember being a kid and that seemed like a funny sentiment. Somehow made sense for my mom to have it up there; she’d be an old lady one day, right? But it always seemed like something other people would relate to, not me. And yet, unbidden, those lines are still there, in my head. I roll with Heraclitus, baby: life is a river. And a lot of the time, that’s a comforting thought, it helps me resist attachment (in the Buddhist sense of the word). But some things last. Does a blanket, though, really? Is that old thing going to still be wrapped around welcoming human bodies long after I’m in the ground? But there’s something there, a connection, to the same sort of forces I can feel when I’m up in the mountains, or walking through the desert, or staring into the sky—there’s more to the universe than just me, and thank god.