The Things They Carried

I don't know what words to use.  I'm back in my apartment in Medford.  I would say that I'm back home, but I'm not, really.  I'm four hours from home, in my legal residence.  I called Nora when I arrived, to let her know that I was home.  But I wasn't.  She's home.  I'm here.

The United States Postal Service carried, on average, 45,695,231 pounds of mail per day in the first quarter of this year.  Much of that came to my apartment over the month that I was away.  Mike and Katy kindly put all the incoming material into the back hallway; here's what I found when I sat down with it this evening.

• An envelope with a handmade shawl.
• A huge envelope with six prints by an artist from India. (Yes, Sudeshna, they arrived flat and unbroken.  Thank you.)
• Four boxes from Simon Pearce glass arts.
• Financial statements from my retirement plan, my bank, my health insurance, and my credit card.
• Subscription renewal reminders from The New Yorker, Spin-Off, and Knits.  (Nora... you got some 'splainin' to do...)
• A consulting check from a university client.
• Two issues of The New Yorker, June 27th and July 4th.
• The July 14th issue of The New York Review of Books.
• Horizons magazine from AAA.
• Two belated wedding RSVPs.
  An invitation to a preview of the “American Vision” painting exhibition at the Peabody Essex Museum.  
• And an invitation to join a class action suit against Honda for split sun visors.  Really?  Split sun visors??  Call me when you get around to the sticking-third-gear problem...

That was the real mail.  There were also ads.  Ads for:

• An internet provider.
• Two requests for clothes donations to charity.
• An invitation to attend a Jehovah’s Witnesses lecture.
• Catalogs from Crate & Barrel and Simon Pearce.
• A Valpak coupon set.
• An upgraded Verizon phone plan.
• A credit union membership.
• An invitation to re-subscribe to The Atlantic (a good magazine, once long ago...).
• A Gold’s Gym membership.
• Two Boston Globe weekly catalog packs.
• A magazine for Hallmark Health Service, of which I am not a member.
• A menu from the Oasis Brazilian restaurant
• A request from Save the Children

Tomorrow, I go to work.  I've never met two of my closest colleagues before, two folks new enough that they haven't yet mastered the location of the bathrooms.  And on Thursday and Friday, that team is going to finalize a curriculum four years in the making, after the prior working groups have repeatedly been relieved of duty.

In any normal world, I would say that I've had a four-week vacation, and now I'm back home and about to go back to my familiar job.  But I'm not home, even though I know where everything is, and I'm going into a new work situation even though I've already occupied my office for nearly five years.  I don't know what words to use.