Tea

I am a survivalist when it comes to computers, determined to make them work but otherwise unadventurous and unimaginative. I use Outlook. You know, the usual Microsoft e-mail thingy. Those of us who barely get by in the computer department, have no shame in calling a software product a thingy. In any case, I have long accepted the essential fact that this particular thingy only works on my home WiFi network in California. Take a laptop on the road, even over the road to Peet's, Menlo Park, and there's no e-mail. No, that is not entirely correct. There is no sending e-mail. E-mail will, for me, arrive and be displayed in Outlook. But there's no sending. It is easy to remedy this if you are a computer type. A change to a setting in the software menu is all it takes. No big deal. Unless you don't like computers, are middle-aged or have another excuse, and then you are what in the technical world is known as fucked.

I have long come to terms with this, think nothing of it and use a cumbersome webmail alternative provided by my Internet Service Provider, a.k.a., ISP. Just in case you thought I was totally out of it. Hope springs eternal, and it sprung out of my laptop this morning, joined forces with the Home Farm WiFi network and the sprites and spirits of Todenham, Gloucestershire, to make Outlook suddenly and inexplicably work both ways. It sends. It receives. An e-mail sitting in my out basket for two years...yes, that's right, for I've been avoiding Outlook on my laptop for a long time...sent itself to me. The feeling was eerie. But there was, two years late, and better late than never, I always say.

I had fired up Outlook to retrieve a couple of e-mail addresses for use on the webmail front. And damned if the thing didn't start sending and receiving. Outlook was looking out for me. It brightened my outlook, did Outlook.

All of which confirmed a growing sense within me. I noticed this yesterday, this sudden and surprising realization that I didn't want to go home. Not home to California, which is quite pleasant in July. Not to Peet's, center of cogitation and cognition in a caffeine tradition that dates from Addison and Steele, the Tatler being a low-tech predecessor of Outlook. No, Menlo Park is just fine. It's my apartment, more particularly, my bedroom. I don't want to go back and start sleeping there again, because I'm afraid I won't.

I suppose my bedroom is full of memories...most savagely, of Marlou hanging comatose at the edge of death. But I find it more useful to say the room is full of spirits. Demons, actually. It feels that way. Demons, I have decided, have a hard time pursuing their quarry across the water. So if Outlook can come to life, my demons can end theirs. I need an exorcism. Don't try to talk me out of it. I need a ritualistic excising of house demons, bedroom demons, call them what you will. Because they keep calling me. They don't use Outlook. They don't need a calling plan. And I don't need them.

If exorcism sounds a bit desperate, so are my feelings. Is it too impatient to want Marlou's death behind me? It isn't possible, of course, for there is a house full of stuff, Marlou stuff, that needs to be sorted and assigned and dispatched. Maybe this will be the exorcism, the dealing with the contents of her closet, the upstairs apartment full of her life. Maybe the home won't get exercised, just cleaned out. Whatever the process, I dread my return to things as they were, not sleeping, the bitter visions of life's end.

My sister suggests repainting the bedroom, changing the decor. It's a good idea, but probably ineffective for me, such is my natural state of oblivion. It doesn't feel like the visual cues have been getting to me. It's more the room itself. The place as it is, even as it was, having gone through so many color transformations. Meanwhile, what is there to do but brace for the return and fortify oneself with the British essence. Everyone knows that the latter is not absorbed, learned or acquired. It is brewed, diluted with sugar and milk, and inhaled several times per day. Take this day, Monday, but don't take away the tea, even if it is my fifth cup. Some would say I have little to do at Home Farm, Todenham, except drink tea. This may be true, but this may be fortunate. I crossed the North Atlantic with a vast amount of reading matter, New Yorkers, The New York Review of Books. I have not read one of these since departure. Books, yes. E. L. Doctorow, of course. A Scottish novel is next. This is a time for tea and staying 'home', and staying away from my California home. And planning my return.