Max Ernst: The Elephant Celebes (1921)
"A point comes within every transformation …"

Two and a half weeks out, The Muse and I finally find a date certain for our departure, BoxingIn any possible escape. Procrastination no longer spins comforting yarns. With a suspected Monster snowstorm creeping in upon us, outside preparations should have already been completed and inside work might face a final bout of cabin fever before we can break camp and head into the sunset like they did in cowboy movies. My tendency to circle several times before boxing something can no longer sustain itself. I'm cornered and I can't deny what comes next. Where we formerly lived out of boxes, we're facing living within them, our lives suspended until after the move, and very likely for several weeks after we arrive.

Old Status Quos tend to hang onto themselves until just after the final responsible moment. They then have to overcome the guilt only unseemly delay ever induces. Had we planned better, the story will certainly go, we might have avoided some of the messier portions of this relocation, but we were mere children then, dabbling toward our future, not adults crafting it. We were first cavalier and only later sober. We knew what was coming, that we'd bitten off more than we'd recently swallowed, but we behaved as if we'd only nibbled, now we're choking down the result. It was not wrong for us to try to preserve what we knew could not last, but once our departure became a certainty, remaining fantasies began falling apart. I'm back to stuffing boxes again, finally understanding that I hold no alternative occupation. Our house of cards is finally collapsing back into its packaging again.

I suspect that I fear unboxing more than I dread this BoxingIn, for that effort will require me to find new homes for my long-static possessions. They comforted me with their almost unseen presence. They were tacitly reliable, right there in the unlikely event that I should ever need them, a library filled with reassuring references I rarely referenced. I sense each item's location more than I actually remember it, but one navigates largely by dead reckoning regardless of what the charts suggest. Even my reliable old dead reckoning sense seems threatened with BoxingIn. I might have to revert to using a map before this adventure ends.

The Muse has been fussing about the cats, which I admit have not yet proven themselves paragons of adaptability. We've been trying to train them, likely starting months too late by leaving their treats inside their soon-to-be travel cages. It's subterfuge most foul and they both sense it, their favored food suspiciously served now as a test. Max wants nothing to do with any of this. They both hold their routine sacred above everything, even suppertime. They still want whatever they want at the very moment they want it, but boxed into a car and even expected to use a litter box in there remains an unlikely if inevitable result. They mirror us with allegorical precision. We're all feeling the encroaching constraints, camel riders approaching the dreaded eye of the needle part of the passage. We might have long ached to be HeadingHomeward, but none of us wished for the BoxingIn, though we rightly should have anticipated its arriving. I'd prefer a magic genie to appear to fill in all the remaining annoying picky details. A point comes within every transformation when even the most intrepid knight errant might choose a nap over further adventuring, but this storybook's not nearly finished and dreaming seems forbidden until the reader's done reading the chapter where the hero overcomes his own BoxingIn monsters.

©2021 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: #HeadingHomeward, #PureSchmaltz