Uproot/Downsize 2009

Late in May 2008 I made a decision to clear out of Swarthmore and move to New York. It was a momentous decision. But it came about quite unexpectedly and quickly. Three years later, I know without doubt that it was a wise decision.

Since my retirement from the college in June 2001, I have kept a pied-à-terre in the city, first subletting a studio apartment from a friend and then renting my own from January 2004. So, I had been maintaining a dual residence for seven years and I enjoyed weekly train commutes back and forth. As I stepped in the house back from New York, I always felt how nice it was to be back home. But I also felt the sense of coming home when I walked in the apartment returning from Swarthmore. I was content. I had the best of the two worlds: idyllic country living and the vibrant city life.

Still, I knew that at some point I’d have to make a decision, whether to move wholesale to the city or give up New York and return to the house in Swarthmore, or else retire into a retirement village. But it was a thought I packed away in the back of my mind in order to procrastinate the necessary decision. A friend visiting me from Boston posed me the question and urged me to think about it seriously now, not waiting until I was 80 as I proposed. She wisely warned me that if I waited until I started to be aware of the need to make the decision it would be too late because clearing the house and moving would then be too hard psychologically no less than physically. She went home and for three days I was hardly able to sleep.

Then, I decided, and my Project Uproot was launched. I looked for a one-bedroom apartment in the same neighborhood and found one in a few days that suited me in location, size, layout, and price. It was going to be available in a few weeks; and I moved in on 16 June. The idea was to insure that I stick to my commitment, to enable me to estimate how much (or little) of the stuff from the house I could pack in the apartment, and to allow myself a year to clean up the house of the stuff to be disposed of and also get myself comfortable in the new apartment.

I lived in Swarthmore since 1966 when I got the teaching position at the college. I bought the three-bedroom house in 1980 and in the summer of 1989 I had the garage remodeled into a study/library with a bay window. We -- my partner and I --worked hard on the garden and made it our own and, in our opinion at least, the most beautiful on the block with changing blossoms from season to season. It was the place where I had lived continuously the longest time in my life; and it was a happy home. I had a deep root in the house and the town. But like a taproot it was not hard to pull out. My partner passed away in 1995, and I retired from teaching in 2001. The idea of spending what remained of my life simply, unburdened by the house and the huge possessions in it, and the car, was definitely appealing; and, having grown up in Tokyo as a child, I was strongly drawn to a life in a metropolis. So, once the decision had been made I felt comfortable about the drastic move and making the NY apartment my real home. It was fortunate to have had a friend’s sublet for two and a half years to test the waters -- to see how comfortable living in the city was -- and try it out for seven years. I found the urban pace, cacophony, and chaos, not to speak of the cultural amenities the great city offered, truly exhilarating; I was a fish in the water. It did not take a month to accept the rightness of my Project Uproot.

Planning and implementing the move was, however, entirely another matter -- not so much the Move itself but the process of reducing the possessions accumulated in the three-bedroom house house to fit the one-bedroom urban apartment -- what I called my Project Downsize. It was daunting, well nigh traumatic, a nightmare.

The new apartment was already adequately furnished from the earlier studio apartment. So I was prepared to forgo most of the furniture in the house, nothing of special value. The kitchen needed no more than the most basic items I already had. I drew the plan of the apartment to scale and had quite an accurate idea as to what and how much I could bring in. The huge part of my possessions were books, works of art, and the wardrobe, in that order. I had 33 full-size bookcases and several smaller ones, holding over 8000 volumes of books and journals, scholarly and literary, plus videocassettes taking up three bookcases, some 1000 CDs, 15 linear feet of vinyl LPs, five full-size cabinets of papers, and color slides galore, and then cartons of diaries, family albums, personal memorabilia, All the walls in the house, upstairs and downstairs, were covered with pictures and hangings; and clothing and accessories packed tight the two walk-in closets and two regular-size closets. I had to reduce the library to a third at maximum, the wardrobe to a fifth, and the collection of art to even less, given the available wall space in the apartment and the storage space next to none.

I drew up the plan of the apartment to scale and knew that, aside from two chairs, one side table to serve as a desk, and the stereo system with two large Polk speakers, exactly 11 tall bookcases and four short ones, all matching, and one file cabinet would fit, and I knew, too, exactly where they would be positioned. I planned on filling some shelves with smaller books in two ranks, front and rear. But I soon learned that the real pang of downsizing is not the reduction per se but the formidable task of sorting out what to keep and what to forgo. The process was like chipping away a solid wall with a chisel and a hammer to break open a crawl passage. As for the books I sold or gave away the bulk of titles in art, art history, and architecture; I decided early on to keep one monograph on each of the major artists I like. I kept all the poetry books, the collection of James Joyce studies, books on Duchamp, John Cage, and Merce Cunningham, all of the plays and theater studies, some writings in criticism and art theory, most of the film studies (only because I had no time to sort them but not the running issues of a dozen film journals that I was sad to abandon), fashion books, and a half of the large collection of books in Japanese. It was a hard decision to have had to choose between books I owned and intended to read but hadn’t and still wanted to, on the one hand, and, on the other, the books I had read and felt attached to and found hard to part with. In the end I was eclectic but erred and had regrets; I had to buy back some titles later from second-hand bookstores on line. I kept all the CDs, a third of the LP’s, and all the videocassettes (which preempted a good many books that I should have kept). The mover’s van delivered the goods on 16 April: 15 bookcases, 106 cartons of books, three clothing cartons, and three dish packs. I had no room by and large for tools, appliances, tableware, and linens. By then, I had already transported on my weekly train trip from Swarthmore to New York, carrying as much as I could manage in two shopping bags filled with fragile and valuable possessions -- ceramics, works of art, jewelry, and a few kitchen appliances I decided not to do without. Once a friend visiting me from New York was driving back and I rode with him having packed up the car with items too large to carry by hand. Then, my son Giulio helped me move in his van the stereo system, heavy ceramics, some chairs, a side table, and large paintings -- items I didn’t want to trust the mover with. Then, there were family heirlooms -- my father’s architectural sketches and drawings and old albums -- that I sent back to my sister in Japan.

Of what remained in the house, I sold many items on line, shredded or recycled papers, carried bundles of clothing to the Goodwill -- 26 evening dresses, over a hundred day dresses, 67 skirts from maxi to micro mini, no pants (I don’t wear pants), and shoes and sandals and coats and blouses, bag after bag of them. Selling items I didn’t need was a drudgery, slow and often unrewarding. Finding homes for donations was even more tedious. I had three cartons of books in Japanese that my father authored on traditional Japanese architecture. Most university libraries already had most of them; they finally settled in the library of Philadelphia Museum of Art. Many works of art were sold off for pittance in the hands of the estate sales people who came and emptied the house mercilessly as was the Volvo in the few days left before abandoning the house. The good fortune I had of getting a buyer of the house in April, only a little over a month after getting it listed, a good fortune in view of the slow market at the time, was also a huge burden as, having promised to vacate the house by the end of June, I had two month to do a huge amount of work left to do under tremendous pressure. One year I allowed for clearing the house; the pressure grew in slow increment and then steadily in acceleration.

In the process of downsizing, I learned that accumulating goods is so much easier than getting rid of them without resorting to dumping them. Attic and basement are the banes of the house; these are spaces that conveniently serve for storage but, for that reason, become a hoarding place where we pack things we don’t need thinking they might come of use some time in the future which never comes. A few days before leaving the house, I had 16 packages to mail to New York, of which two were lost in transit and I had no idea what they contained. 



But I made it; my Project Downsize was done, and the sale of the house was closed on 30 June. I was relieved and exhausted, and remembering the experience two years later, I am dizzy. I cannot believe that it got done. My friend was right; I’m not sure if I would have made it through the ordeal two years from now, when I’m 80.

08/01/11