Eugène Delacroix: Standing Lion (1833)

" … lest I become a traitor to my home."

I continued my Discrediting efforts for the duration of our Exile. I wanted to avoid becoming 'of' Colorado, for that would violate my relationship with my true home, the one from which The Muse and I were then Exiled. I tolerated no mixed emotions; even when I found some aspect of our temporary home endearing, I'd find some reason to characterize it as one down from my "real" home. Denver was remarkably easy to characterize so, for it was always a curious major city. It didn't look the least bit pretty, though the views could be fantastic. It grew according to nobody's master plan, being one of those railroad towns that got out of hand. It grew by booms and busts, upward and outward when the times were good, and then down and out when the booms went bust. All the booms eventually went bust except for the population one. A confusion of brick buildings were torn down in the fifties and sixties in the unlikely belief that skyscrapers would replace the resulting naked parcels. The naked parcels remain today and serve as eyesores and parking lots, some with unlikely single-story suburban buildings littering urban views.

Had the place been Vienna or Rome, I would have extended the same treatment, for I was in the business of ego defense. I was justifying more than categorizing. I secretly feared that I might find someplace so far superior to my home country that I might seriously consider permanently extending the Exile and never returning, like a latter-day Stanley on an infinite expedition. There was plenty to justify considering abandoning my quest. Our neighborhood there was comfortable. It was in close enough proximity to give access to a much wider variety of choices than we'd enjoyed in either Maryland or back home. If our heads could have been turned by shopping, Colorado offered infinitely more variety, but I chose to characterize those options as sprawl rather than progress. I never considered The Rockies to be a real baseball team, either. Not when I compared them to my beloved Nats, who, by the way, won the national championship while we were Exiled in Colorado.

I resigned myself to living a self-insisted second-class existence for the duration of The Exile, even though the local libraries were far superior to anything I could access back home. Even though I knew I wouldn't be able to find a decent breakfast burrito in hundreds of miles from home. Even though, in Colorado, I had easy access to the very best produce stand ever imagined, which was just down the road from the very finest butcher ever imagined, too. In several ways, our lives were superior to what they could ever be once we returned from Exile. Our Exile home was at least seventy years younger than the original Villa Vatta and much smaller. The effort required to keep that Exile home in shape was minuscule compared to the maintenance load exerted by the mere presence of our century-old place, and we had amazing views. We might actually retire in leisure there. Returning from Exile would sentence us to lives of eternal maintenance and remodel.

I would remain essentially invisible for most of our tenure in Colorado. I joined no organizations and nurtured no affiliations. I checked out books from the local libraries, and I wrote. I'd often drive down into Golden to write at Pangea Coffee, a tiny cinder block place near The School of Mines. The owner agreed to specially roast my coffee: Italian Roast Decaf, a practice we've continued since I returned from exile. He ships in five-pound bags, ground Turkish. I failed to find a local roaster capable of producing his quality. In this way, as with others, I brought my Exile back home when we were finally repatriated. I confess to missing some of the conveniences we enjoyed there, though I had found ways to successfully denigrate them throughout our tenure. Let the record show that I remained loyal to my home through twelve years gone, though I couldn't help but track some trail mud on the carpet when I arrived back home. While gone, I scrupulously maintained my ElbowRoom lest I become a traitor to my home.

©2024 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: #Exiled, #PureSchmaltz