Home as Address
I like to look at my address as a signpost, a signal. It tells me, and other people, where I live, where I am, where I make my home. My address is a kind of bastion, a place where I center my thoughts, where I base my comings and goings, the setting in which I ready myself to go out and engage and understand the world. And it seems that the numbers of my address are not as important as that I have a number, that I have a locale, that I have a starting point, a destiny as well as refuge.
My address sets me apart. No one else has my number, no one else has my home. The loveliness of community notwithstanding, I feel good being my number, my me, my home.
Whenever I am in Los Angeles, where I grew up, where I spent seventeen
years of my life, I try to make time to drive by my childhood home. My childhood address, my long ago space, the structure of number from which I birthed and nourished the activities and questions of my earliest existence. I look at the number—it’s still there, its four digits, 5 and 9 and 3 and 9 still on one of the pillars holding up the front porch—I look at the house. I look at
what it is now, outwardly different yet numbered still, I think about what it had been. Its numbering will probably never change.
I like that. I like my roots of number.
“Look for this number,” I say to someone who is coming to my current home or, “here’s my address.” Decades ago, I had to give this person directions, with added instruction about distinguishing landmarks, a stucco or siding color, a particular bush or tree, some feature that would set my number, my address—my home—apart. No more. Numbering has gone the way of the Dodo, lost in the world of GPS. Sure, people still need a number but, sadly enough, nothing else, no unique points, no colors, rocks, bushes, or trees. The voice tells them exactly where to stop, precisely when to pull to the curb and turn the engine off. My number has become a skeleton, a number untethered, a tapestry unframed, a canvas gone blank. Whatever once highlighted it, whatever once distinguished it, has vanished, gobbled up by the awesome and impressive yet at the same time pernicious and dread GPS.
Nonetheless, our number remains. We may be blinded by our technology, but we are not blind to order. We still like our number.
My address is a sentinel, too. I look for it, it looks out for me. It protects me from postal inundation, keeps me from affairs in which I do not need to be involved. (Although it can occasionally do the opposite, as when an errant package for one of my neighbors lands at my door, telling me, if I care to look, a bit about their interests, disclosing a slice, a very small slice of their lives.
(Or they me. Now my neighbors to my north know I order clothes from Patagonia. It’s fine,really: now I know they order products from Frontgate.)
When I lived in a city, be it a city in the West, South, or East, addresses were easy. Most people knew the streets, most people knew compass points. Living in the country, as I did in East Texas for a few years, surrounded by farmland, fields, and trees, I came to see address very differently. What does “Route 3” tell anyone about where I live? How is a person supposed to find a street without a real name? Even the best maps (like the ones from the Auto Club) don’tprovide enough detail to find every little rural road. Too many times, usually after dark and almost always on the coldest of winter evenings, people whom I had invited to my house wandered, wandered in and out, wandered around and around, tooling across the landscapes of where they thought they were, looking for an address that didn’t exist, a home that, thoughit was there to me, was not there to them: it didn’t have a “real” number.
But it works both ways. Some years later, when I lived outside of Green Bay, Wisconsin, my home a cabin in a copse of trees perched on the cliffs overlooking the bay, I could find other
I like that. I like my roots of number.
“Look for this number,” I say to someone who is coming to my current home or, “here’s my address.” Decades ago, I had to give this person directions, with added instruction about distinguishing landmarks, a stucco or siding color, a particular bush or tree, some feature that would set my number, my address—my home—apart. No more. Numbering has gone the way of the Dodo, lost in the world of GPS. Sure, people still need a number but, sadly enough, nothing else, no unique points, no colors, rocks, bushes, or trees. The voice tells them exactly where to stop, precisely when to pull to the curb and turn the engine off. My number has become a skeleton, a number untethered, a tapestry unframed, a canvas gone blank. Whatever once highlighted it, whatever once distinguished it, has vanished, gobbled up by the awesome and impressive yet at the same time pernicious and dread GPS.
Nonetheless, our number remains. We may be blinded by our technology, but we are not blind to order. We still like our number.
My address is a sentinel, too. I look for it, it looks out for me. It protects me from postal inundation, keeps me from affairs in which I do not need to be involved. (Although it can occasionally do the opposite, as when an errant package for one of my neighbors lands at my door, telling me, if I care to look, a bit about their interests, disclosing a slice, a very small slice of their lives.
(Or they me. Now my neighbors to my north know I order clothes from Patagonia. It’s fine,really: now I know they order products from Frontgate.)
When I lived in a city, be it a city in the West, South, or East, addresses were easy. Most people knew the streets, most people knew compass points. Living in the country, as I did in East Texas for a few years, surrounded by farmland, fields, and trees, I came to see address very differently. What does “Route 3” tell anyone about where I live? How is a person supposed to find a street without a real name? Even the best maps (like the ones from the Auto Club) don’tprovide enough detail to find every little rural road. Too many times, usually after dark and almost always on the coldest of winter evenings, people whom I had invited to my house wandered, wandered in and out, wandered around and around, tooling across the landscapes of where they thought they were, looking for an address that didn’t exist, a home that, thoughit was there to me, was not there to them: it didn’t have a “real” number.
But it works both ways. Some years later, when I lived outside of Green Bay, Wisconsin, my home a cabin in a copse of trees perched on the cliffs overlooking the bay, I could find other
homes only with difficulty. Without a number, without specific direction, I frequently digressed, driving over and over again down the same roads, feeling at times like Mr. Toad at Disneyland, looking for something I assumed was there, but maybe, I occasionally concluded, was in fact not.
But we don’t “live” in an address. We live in a home. We live in the security and sense of place this home gives us. Yet we still live in a number, a number that invites our presence.
On the other hand, when many years ago I traveled across North America, going months without an address, a physical number, a tangible starting and stopping point, I didn’t reallymind. I didn’t mind being a nomad. I didn’t mind not having a number or address. I’d trek through mountains weeks at a time, lost to the world, removed from address, set beyond even a number (this being in the days before wilderness areas required entry permits), absent and vanished from all attempts at list and citation. And I felt very safe, very sure, more sure, perhaps, than I would have felt had I been in a place with a number, a place in which people,good or bad, could come upon me. I didn’t mind being out of the test tube.
Sometimes, it’s better not to have a number, an address. After all, as much as I appreciatehaving an address, I know that it is just a door. What goes on in that number is far more important than the number itself. In fact, sometimes a number gets in the way; it limits and circumscribes our experience of existence. That’s why I knew, even as I wandered, I wasprobably growing more in those weeks than I would have at any address: I was stepping into the heart of number, the beauty of number that, Pythagoras observed, is “the essence of all things.”
I found who I most was.
Of course, I knew that I could stop being a nomad any time. I knew that, unlike a truly homeless person, I could return to a home. I could turn to my number. It might be myparents’, it might be my aunt’s, it might be a friend’s. But I knew it was there. I was never totally alone, nor was I ever altogether forgotten. So I probably cannot fully imagine what it is like to be without any address, without any number, to be wholly deprived of location and place. To be acknowledged and remembered by no one.
Once upon a time, a high school friend of mine had a home, her parents’ home. In it she grew up, in it she lived, in it she lived with her parents, in it she watched her parents die. To it I wrote letters, carefully inscribing the address, the number of a physical location to ensure its arrival. I needed the number if I hoped to keep in touch.
Then one day this friend had to sell the home. She had to let go of what had been. But she bought a new home. And she still had an address.
But we don’t “live” in an address. We live in a home. We live in the security and sense of place this home gives us. Yet we still live in a number, a number that invites our presence.
On the other hand, when many years ago I traveled across North America, going months without an address, a physical number, a tangible starting and stopping point, I didn’t reallymind. I didn’t mind being a nomad. I didn’t mind not having a number or address. I’d trek through mountains weeks at a time, lost to the world, removed from address, set beyond even a number (this being in the days before wilderness areas required entry permits), absent and vanished from all attempts at list and citation. And I felt very safe, very sure, more sure, perhaps, than I would have felt had I been in a place with a number, a place in which people,good or bad, could come upon me. I didn’t mind being out of the test tube.
Sometimes, it’s better not to have a number, an address. After all, as much as I appreciatehaving an address, I know that it is just a door. What goes on in that number is far more important than the number itself. In fact, sometimes a number gets in the way; it limits and circumscribes our experience of existence. That’s why I knew, even as I wandered, I wasprobably growing more in those weeks than I would have at any address: I was stepping into the heart of number, the beauty of number that, Pythagoras observed, is “the essence of all things.”
I found who I most was.
Of course, I knew that I could stop being a nomad any time. I knew that, unlike a truly homeless person, I could return to a home. I could turn to my number. It might be myparents’, it might be my aunt’s, it might be a friend’s. But I knew it was there. I was never totally alone, nor was I ever altogether forgotten. So I probably cannot fully imagine what it is like to be without any address, without any number, to be wholly deprived of location and place. To be acknowledged and remembered by no one.
Once upon a time, a high school friend of mine had a home, her parents’ home. In it she grew up, in it she lived, in it she lived with her parents, in it she watched her parents die. To it I wrote letters, carefully inscribing the address, the number of a physical location to ensure its arrival. I needed the number if I hoped to keep in touch.
Then one day this friend had to sell the home. She had to let go of what had been. But she bought a new home. And she still had an address.
Tragically, several months later, she had to let go of this home, too (overwhelmingly large medical bills). She became homeless. Still is. Where is her home? What is her address?
Many years ago, I saw a movie called “Eyes of Laura Mars.” It starred a very young Faye Dunaway and an even younger Tommy Lee Jones. Jones was a detective assigned to investigate a series of brutal killings in the streets of New York. As a photographer, Dunaway (Laura Mars)was somehow “seeing” the killings in her head. Jones found this odd. Though Mars seemed tohave no physical connection to the crimes, her unusual ability aroused Jones’s suspicion.
But Mars proved elusive. So elusive, in fact, that Jones, against his best professional judgment, fell in love with her.
As the movie draws to a climax, Dunaway and Jones are riding in an elevator, heading up to Dunaway’s apartment whose address, Jones is now convinced, is key to solving the crime. It turned out, however, that the real key was that Mars was a person with multiple personalities, one of whom was the killer. Jones then asked her to shot him dead, which she did.
In the next scene, still in her apartment, still at her address, Mars is talking to a police dispatcher, reporting the deaths. When asked for her name, she said, “Laura Mars.”
But her number never changed. It was still her home.
Rebbe Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the much revered Lubavitcher rabbi whose followers came to believe that he was the Messiah, for years and years worked out of his office at 770 Eastern Parkway in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, New York. Not only was 770 Parkway Avenue his office, it was his home. (And, necessarily, that of all his disciples as well.)
One of the anthems the Lubavitchers liked to sing at 770 Parkway Avenue was called“Uforatsto.” One line of “Uforatsto” reads, “You shall break out from your boundaries and limits.” As it happened, when the rabbis applied the mystical numbering system they called Gematria to “uforatsto,” they found that its numbers equaled to 770. The address of Messiah. The address from which the new dawn would break. The address out of which the Lubavitchers would come forth to call all Jews back to the Lubavitcher community, to summon them to leave the boundaries of the past and step into the limitless world of God’s future for them.
It’s all in the address, it’s all in the number. It’s all in our point. Address as home.
Many years ago, I saw a movie called “Eyes of Laura Mars.” It starred a very young Faye Dunaway and an even younger Tommy Lee Jones. Jones was a detective assigned to investigate a series of brutal killings in the streets of New York. As a photographer, Dunaway (Laura Mars)was somehow “seeing” the killings in her head. Jones found this odd. Though Mars seemed tohave no physical connection to the crimes, her unusual ability aroused Jones’s suspicion.
But Mars proved elusive. So elusive, in fact, that Jones, against his best professional judgment, fell in love with her.
As the movie draws to a climax, Dunaway and Jones are riding in an elevator, heading up to Dunaway’s apartment whose address, Jones is now convinced, is key to solving the crime. It turned out, however, that the real key was that Mars was a person with multiple personalities, one of whom was the killer. Jones then asked her to shot him dead, which she did.
In the next scene, still in her apartment, still at her address, Mars is talking to a police dispatcher, reporting the deaths. When asked for her name, she said, “Laura Mars.”
But her number never changed. It was still her home.
Rebbe Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the much revered Lubavitcher rabbi whose followers came to believe that he was the Messiah, for years and years worked out of his office at 770 Eastern Parkway in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, New York. Not only was 770 Parkway Avenue his office, it was his home. (And, necessarily, that of all his disciples as well.)
One of the anthems the Lubavitchers liked to sing at 770 Parkway Avenue was called“Uforatsto.” One line of “Uforatsto” reads, “You shall break out from your boundaries and limits.” As it happened, when the rabbis applied the mystical numbering system they called Gematria to “uforatsto,” they found that its numbers equaled to 770. The address of Messiah. The address from which the new dawn would break. The address out of which the Lubavitchers would come forth to call all Jews back to the Lubavitcher community, to summon them to leave the boundaries of the past and step into the limitless world of God’s future for them.
It’s all in the address, it’s all in the number. It’s all in our point. Address as home.
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