Constant Troyon:
Vache qui se gratte [Scratching Cow] (1858)

"I knew most people only in passing."

Eventually, that second Exile settled into the very soul of domestic tranquility. The Muse's early struggles to adapt to her job's politics settled into her widely acknowledged mastery of that context. She held a job that made a difference and was held in high esteem by her colleagues. I, too, had found a level. The yard in Willow Street offered me opportunities to tend a garden and mow a lawn. That house could have been more reliable. The HVAC repair man and I were on a first-name basis. He confided that the owner had installed the air conditioners upside down and backward. The house was so big, and the climate was so fierce that two air conditioning systems were stacked into the attic. The heating system, too, exhibited problems. We returned from a visit home to learn that the young woman we'd hired to tend cats and plants hadn't noticed that the furnace had failed. We lost about half the house plants, and the basement filled with millipedes. Millions of them. That took some serious cleaning up.

That landlord had hired a management company to watch over his home while it was rented out. The assigned manager was a real weasel. I'm sure he had a stool pigeon somewhere in the neighborhood, for he was forever trying to schedule an emergency inspection, inevitably after the weather had prevented me from pruning or mowing. He always found the house in pristine shape, though, and eventually stopped acting so suspicious of me. He was a little embarrassed that I kept calling him for some trouble with the air conditioning, heating, or plumbing. A plumber had to cut into a pipe in the basement to recover a bath toy one of the landlord's little boys had left behind, preventing the downstairs shower from draining. Those interruptions aside, our life on Willow assumed a placid rhythm.

The Muse insisted on maintaining what she called An Owner's Mindset, even though we'd been reduced to the role of renters. A Renter's Mindset remains dependent upon the landlord to do what's beyond any landlord's responsibility. In this way, the renter remains a dependent, thereby inhibiting their own maturity. An owner is not merely free to do whatever they want to do with a place. An owner must steward instead. This means that they take initiatives. They weed the gardens without being asked because they see when the gardens need weeding. They inform the management company when they break something rather than trying to keep shortcomings hidden. They engage as a fully empowered partner with the landlord, employing their good judgment to sometimes even second-guess the actual owner. The Owner's Mindset gave us the latitude to act as if we were home even though we were still far away and roaming.

After six years in Exile, we knew our way around. Those first few years were ones of almost constant discovery. The last few in Takoma Park were where we harvested what we'd earlier invested ourselves in. The Muse had her doctor and dentist, though, curiously, I never found either for myself. I still felt embarrassed that I'd lost the ones I had back home. The Muse would occasionally nag me about finding a doctor or a dentist, but I'd conveniently lose her request. She once, frustrated, took me to her dentist, having negotiated an appointment from his busy schedule. She took me into the office and then left to head to work. Once she'd gone, the secretary handed me a large pile of forms, instructing me to fill them in. I carried that sorry pile back to a chair and was quickly overwhelmed. I couldn't answer the first five questions with the information I had on me. I excused myself and then drove back home, thinking I might find the necessary information in The Muse's meticulously maintained files. I couldn't.

A few hours later, The Muse called to ask what was happening. The dentist's office called her to report that I'd gone missing. I recounted what had happened. She said the dentist's secretary had told her they would have accepted incomplete forms, something I hadn't considered. I never went back to that place, either. The whole doctor/dentist dance wouldn't fully resolve until after we returned from Exile. I had an emergency tooth removal during the Colorado visit when we were between the Sherman and Willow houses. Still, it wouldn't be until our third Exile before I found a doctor, again, at The Muse's insistence.

In Takoma Park, I never lost the sense that I didn't belong there, though I was no longer merely a visitor. I hesitated to set down roots. I knew few people, but then my orbit of acquaintances has always been minuscule. I remained a stranger to most of my neighbors. I might have remained a stranger to myself there, too, for I had no genuinely legitimate anything to do. I appeared to be a hanger-on, one of those increasingly familiar middle-aged males who lacked any apparent means of support. I didn't seem to have a job. I knew most people only in passing, still largely an Invisible Husband. We could have continued this life far into even the unforeseeable future, except The Muse chose to take a step closer toward home. Our third exile, this one self-inflicted, will be the focus of this series' second half.

©2024 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: #Exiled, #PureSchmaltz