The Window

I moved away from home for the first time when I enrolled in a PhD program in Boston. My dad made the initial trip out from Colorado with me for an open house in the spring. I was still considering, ostensibly, going somewhere else, to Utah or Indiana, but I knew in my heart before we took off, and then as we pulled up to look at an apartment just outside the city, stepping into a room full of natural light coming in through a large bay window, that Boston would be my new home.

As I look back on it, so many of my memories from those years seem to pass through or somehow anchor themselves to that bay window. A window in time. The apartment was on the first floor of a walk-up building in Brookline. Two or three more buildings just like it were stacked next to each other, their bricks all the same shade of burnt red and brown, white stone accents around each window and arched doorway.

My dad was there helping me move in that summer in the middle of a heat wave, the air heavy with humidity. Our first stop was to purchase a window AC unit. I would sit at my little IKEA table and listen to the angry hum of that thing, looking out the window. Watching the people across the street as they came and went. Watching as the days rushed by, and the maple leaves out front started to turn.

In my mind’s eye I can look out the window and see the patch of pavement where I would jump rope, the path where I would run up the hill to the reservoir, to the park where I would play tennis. I see my neighbor the music teacher parking his car. I see that same spot emptied, my dad having just left in a cab for the airport, and remember the sudden longing and sadness and quiet.

I hear the Tuesday night street cleaning, the Friday night crowds walking to the restaurants and bars on Beacon Street and walking back louder after the last call. I hear the bells, the cheering at the marathon, and remember the eerie feeling when it stopped and turned into sirens the year of the bombing. On happier days, on the happiest night, after catching the last bus back from Cambridge, I can still hear the empty T cars rattling along the tracks from Cleveland Circle toward Fenway, still wide awake in bed as the sun came up.

It all came to an abrupt end. Maybe that’s not surprising. Where, as I search my memory, was all that business about being a PhD student? Of submerging into the abstract world of mathematics, theories and theorems and proofs? But I was in love. I was reading Proust. I was on my own, finally living. Then my dad came back on a freezing weekend in January and I moved back home. The window closed.