Transitional Object

“Those 28 moves have taken me from a subur­ban Californian home surrounded by poppies and bird-of-paradise plants to an apartment in Kolonaki with a Corinthian maid and a view of the Parthenon. Then, along the way, too, there was half a villa in Psychico, a brownstone in Chicago, a couple of one-room Cycladic farmhouses, and a ritzy, scary house with four locks per door and machines to sim­ulate the turning on and off of lights, in Washington, DC.”—Elizabeth Boleman-Herring

By Way of Being

By Elizabeth Boleman-Herring

Author’s Note: The following essay, written in Athens, Greece, and first published in April 1985, is excerpted from my memoir Greek Unorthodox: Bande à Part & A Farewell To Ikaros. My husband and I, who moved from New Jersey to Florida just a year and a half ago, are now preparing to move again—we hope for the last time—to Upstate South Carolina. As I write, we are packing . . . .

PETIT TRIANON Florida—(Weekly Hubris)—7/4/2016—For me, moving is the moral equi­valent of, say, the Plague of Frogs. It is an abomination of the first order. It is not fun city.

As soon as people start tilting fridges and wrapping glasses in old Herald Tribs, I get a sick headache and take to my bed with mois­tened chamomile tea bags over my eyes.

As I was lying there this morning, after yet another late night at the new place with latex paint, mothballs, and logistical nightmares (“Why doesn’t the mini-darkroom fit behind the bedroom door? We measured it, didn’t we?”) interspersed with Cypriot souvlakia and the inevitable Nescafé frappé, I reflected upon just how many times I have moved.

I wanted a good hard number, an integer. When your house is dis­solving around you, and you’ve had to go straight to the bottom of a packed kitchen crate to find the chamomile tea bags, thinking back and counting moves is an exercise in sanity. The past is history, congealed, set, countable. It underscores your status as a survivor, no matter how bat­tered.

So I lay there like a hermit crab remembering the shells of yesteryear, and I came up with the figure 28 . . . 28, not counting annual migrations to and from “the Lake House,” which my parents built themselves on the shores of South Carolina’s Lake Hartwell, and which stands [stood, rather: sold in the mid-aughts; so much for my cherry orchard] at the center of my chaotic life like an edifice out of Chekhov.

Twenty-eight moves in 33 years. Does this explain, per­haps, why I have always slept, and will always sleep, with a 17-by-11-inch, down-filled pillow—what English analyst Donald W. Winnicott has termed a transitional object? Leave it to the shrinks to take the stuffing out of the comforter! (If Elliott Gould can admit to taking a teddy bear to bed, my little pillow can jolly well come out of the closet, too.)

At this point, I could write an ad: Sleep with a . . . transitional ob­ject. In situations like moving, or other equivalent nest emptyings and soul shatterings, it will help keep you yourself from feeling like a transi­tional object. Keep the existential at bay . . . with a Little Pillow.

I remember my first move all too well—though, blessedly, many of those after it have become fuzzy hieroglyphs. (Ralph Waldo Emerson asked: “Why drag about with you this enormous corpse of memory?” Why indeed?!) But firsts, in love, battle, or moving, stay with us.

I was nine years old, and we were leaving Altadena. I sat on the front stoop of 3320-Crestford-Drive-Sycamore-85951, address and phone number drilled into me as though one word in case I ever got lost. I held a half-­grown tortoiseshell kitten named Camouflage in my lap, along with the original transitional object, and cried.

Christa, my best friend, came over to say good-bye. We often wore matching clothes and our families called us Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum. Of course, we’d immediately start fighting about who was to be Dum; I usually won, for what winning’s ever worth. She had brought me a gold locket as a going-away present. Her picture was inside. Whose idea was that, I wonder now. Christa and I never had more than 50 cents between us.

The moving vans came. Christa’s father, Doctor Fin Russell, dropped by to tranquilize Camouflage for the flight to the East Coast. Then: a transcontinental flight, the kitten sticking a groggy head out of the basket on my lap; Camouflage lost in South Carolina at my aunt’s; tears; my mother putting my pillow in the washing machine and it coming out all lumpy and unrecognizable; more tears, though heaven knows, after nine years, that pillow needed washing.

I wish I could tell you it gets easier, but it doesn’t.

I arrived in Greece, at ten, with a lumpy pillow, traded it some­where along the line for a newer model, but kept moving.

Those 28 moves have taken me from a subur­ban Californian home surrounded by poppies and bird-of-paradise plants to an apartment in Kolonaki with a Corinthian maid and a view of the Parthenon. Then, along the way, too, there was half a villa in Psychico, a brownstone in Chicago, a couple of one-room Cycladic farmhouses, and a ritzy, scary house with four locks per door and machines to sim­ulate the turning on and off of lights, in Washington, DC.

There was a penthouse in Paris, briefly, and student apartments and dormitory rooms filled and emptied via the offices of my trusty VW beetle, Ophelia. There was a horrid Pullman-car of a flat borrowed, furnished, for a year in Athens, a mythical Cycladic villa-with-my-own-studio-at-last on Mykonos and then, finally, my Lycabettus ærie which, at the time of writing, looks as disheveled as Athens after Carnival.

Bits of paper litter the floors. Ghostly frames hang on the walls where pictures were. A tea-dipped Easter egg and four sand dollar shells from Ithaca huddle uneasily on a marble tabletop. Too fragile for packing, they’ll go over to the new place in my lap, like Camouflage.

Obviously, if it hurt too much, I’d have found some way to avoid moving at all. I’d be there, in South Carolina, like every last one of my cousins, as tied to their “old home places” as Scarlett O’Hara ever was.

It does hurt, and I do hate it. I look out my study window and wonder how I’ll ever manage without looking up at Lycabettus every morning, just as I thought I’d never manage without Christa.

I got a letter from Christa the other day. Tweedle Dum, or Dee, is now a marine biologist living with her husband in Hawaii [in fact, they’ve moved to Oregon]. And the locket she gave me is in an Atlanta bank vault, safe and sound [nope: I’ve since sent it to Christa’s grown-up daughter]. (I try to travel light.) Which all goes to show, of course, that you really can take whatever you want along with you when you move, and survive, as long as you’ve got your transitional object.

August 2004 PS From Marasli, in Athens, I moved to Munich; and, from Munich, to London; from London, to South Carolina; and, from South Carolina, to New Jersey, one of two places (the other being North Dakota), I said I’d never live. My transitional object has morphed along the way into a rather normal-looking, medium-sized pillow: it says “Adolescent Pillow” on the label, so perhaps I’m making some progress, considering my more diminutive pillows of yore. But the need for comfort and continuity is still there, amplified now by more moves (almost) than I can shake a stick at (as my South Carolinian mother would have phrased it). Still, I shake my pillow at the bogeymen of anxiety that go bump in the night, willing them to be as transitional, as ephemeral, as I am myself—I, who now try to be at home wherever I find myself (though North Dakota would still be a stretch).

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