A Place of My Own Read Free Page B

hadn’t entertained fantasies of escape or, as I preferred to think of it, simplification— of reducing so many daunting new complexities to something as stripped-down and uncomplicated as a hut in the woods. What was surprising, though, and what had no obvious cause or explanation in my life as it had been lived up to then, was a corollary to the dream: I wanted not only a room of my own, but a room of my own making. I wanted to build this place myself.
    To know me even slightly is to know how ill-equipped I was to undertake such an enterprise, and how completely out of character it would be. Like my father—who only very briefly owned a toolbox, and who regarded the ethic of the do-it-yourselfer as about as alien as Zen—I am a radically unhandy man for whom the hanging of a picture or the changing of a washer is a fairly big deal. To Judith, my wife, I am “the Jewish fix-it man”—this being a contradiction in terms, a creature no more plausible than a unicorn. Apart from eating, gardening, short-haul driving, and sex, I generally preferred to delegate my commerce with the physical world to specialists; things seemed to work out better that way. Unnecessary physical tests hold no romance for me, and I am not ordinarily given to Thoreauvian fantasies of self-sufficiency or worries about the fate of manhood in the modern world. I’m a writer and editor by trade, more at home in the country of words than things.
    At home, perhaps, yet not entirely content, and in this dim restlessness may lie a clue to the unexpected emergence of my do-it-yourself self. For if the wish for a room of my own answered to a need I felt for a literal and psychic space, the wish to build it with my own hands, though slower to surface, may have reflected some doubts I was having about the sort of work I do. Work is how we situate ourselves in the world, and like the work of many people nowadays, mine put me in a relationship to the world that often seemed abstract, glancing, secondhand. Or thirdhand, in my case, for I spent much of my day working on other peoples’ words, re writing, re vising, re wording. Oh, it was real work (I guess), but it didn’t always feel that way, possibly because there were whole parts of me it failed to address. (Like my body, with the exception of the carpal tunnel in my wrist.) Nor did what I do seem to add much, if anything, to the stock of reality, and though this might be a dated or romantic notion in an age of information, it seemed to me this was something real work should do. Whenever I heard myself described as an “information-services worker” or a “symbolic analyst,” I wanted to reach for a hammer, or a hoe, and with it make something less virtual than a sentence.
    But the do-it-myself part came later; first came the wish for the space—specifically, for a simple, one-room outbuilding where I could write and read outside the house, at least during the summer months. Even after a substantial renovation, our house is tiny, and as Judith’s due date approached, it seemed to grow tinier still. As our rooms filled up with the bassinet and booster seat, the crib and high chair and changing table, the walker and stroller and bouncer and monitor, a house that had always seemed a distinct reflection of two individuals living a particular life in a particular place began to feel more like some sort of franchise, a generic nonplace furnished in white polyethylene and licensed fictional beings. Whatever the virtues of such an environment for raising a child, it was not one where I could easily imagine reading a book without pictures in it through to the end, much less getting one written.
    Probably this sounds like nothing more than the panic of a new father, and I don’t discount that, but there were other factors at work here too. At roughly the same time, I was preparing to give up my office in the city, where I had a job at a magazine, to begin working out of my house, writing full-time. My office