Self Read Free

something, or even any one particular time, but remember only the repetition, the idea that we did the thing over and over. This is the case with me and the boiling of carrots. I spent entire afternoons watching carrots boil in water. Our rented house in Ottawa was so arranged that, from the chair on which I stood near the stove, I could turn and see my mother working at her desk (or rather, our rented house in Ottawa was so arranged that, from the chair on which she sat at her desk, my mother could turn and see me staring into my pot). When the carrots were terminally mushy, which I would determine with a long fondue fork, I would call out and she would come to the kitchen. She would empty the pot into the sink, fill it with fresh cold water and set it on the stove again. Then she would get back to work, giving me a peck on the cheek on her way. I was old enough and more than careful enough — there were never any accidents — to be left with the thrilling task of selecting from a large plastic bag the hardy specimens, thick and orange, that I would drop into the water so that the spectacle could start again. During those afternoons my imagination boiled and bubbled like that exuberant water. I explored, made deep connections. It was the transformation from hard to soft that fascinated me, my mother said later. Indeed, from my earliest years the idea of transformation has been central to my life. Naturally so, I suppose, being the child of diplomats.I changed schools, languages, countries and continents a number of times during my childhood. At each change I had the opportunity to re-create myself, to present a new façade, to bury past errors and misrepresentations. Once, secretly, I boiled the hammer, wondering if its fundamental nature, its being (her word), could change. When I started to lose my baby teeth and was told that larger, more durable teeth would grow in their stead, I took this as my first tangible proof of human metamorphosis. I had already gathered evidence on the metamorphosis of day and night, of weather, of the seasons, of food and excrement, even of life and death, to name but a few, but these teeth were something closer to home, something clear and incontrovertible. I envisioned life as a series of metamorphic changes, one after another, to no end.
    I abandoned the boiling of carrots when I discovered the washing of laundry. Staring down into the toss and turmoil of clothes being cleaned mechanically is the closest I have come to belonging to a church, and was my introduction to museums. I followed every step of the absolution of laundry, these stations of the cross from filth to salvation, this lineup at the Museum of Modern Art. It would start with my mother fooling the washing machine’s safety stop by jamming a coin at the back of the machine’s lid — the price of admission to the exhibit, the alms dropped into the alms box. I would hurry to my pew atop the dryer. The laundry was pushed into the machine like so many wicked souls into hell. The powder detergent settled like snow, at places as thick as on a plain, at others as sparse as on an escarpment, my first glimpse at landscape painting. The hot water rose slowly, a gentle immersion into grace — something I felt intimately since this was exactly howI took my baths, sitting shivering cold in the empty tub while the hot water crept up, submerging goose-pimple after goose-pimple, the comfort of warmth all the greater for the misery of cold. The water would stop rising, there would be a moment’s pause to collect ourselves, a click, and then high mass would start in earnest. I took an evangelical pleasure in the to-and-fro motion of laundry being sermonized. It was a tempest-tossed sea in which my small ship, my soul, was braving the frothy waves. It was Davy Jones’s locker in which I, a spat-out Jonah, frolicked alongside a school of socks. And then it was a painting — abstract expressionism in its purest, most ephemeral form. For