Goodbye to Small "That"
Now that I live in Texas, where pedestrians are as hard to find as a decent bagel, I have to force a certain whimsicality whenever I cross the street. I place one hand on my hat and the other hand waves in the air and I feel unbelievably and obnoxiously like Anna Karina. So walk around and feel French is exactly what we did today. And since we all know that the French love a good deconstructionist view of narrative, we’ll start with introducing the main characters, following up with giving away the meaning of this post and then move nonchronologically (through thematic chapter titles) detailing our day and the last few weeks.
The characters (besides Doubles & Hats): Jean Luc Godard, Joan Didion (and therefore Robert Graves), and a Dave Eggers cameo.
Today is our last Sunday in the tiny house. We woke up to an unbefitting coastal chill that burned off by noon and left a blue cloudless atmosphere. We headed North to Thunderbird Coffee and got two Thai iced coffees and two Tacodeli breakfast tacos and doodled and wrote for a couple of hours. We walked the Eastside, popping into some local stores that unifyingly featured books, music, and artisan drygoods.
We tromped and bopped around Austin until 2:00pm where we went to a flea market that sat next to the theatre where we had bought tickets to Goodbye to Language at 3:30pm. This was Jean Luc Godard’s latest film Adieu au Language. I won’t go in to too much detail other than saying that the film was full of all that one would expect—rhetorical provocations, pastiche references, literary quotations, and painfully loud classical music. What I didn’t expect was for the true protagonist of the film to be a dog*.
…
It's funny that it was only a few months ago I stood in Washington Square Park in front of Colin Huggins who played his piano on wheels underneath the arch and cried (my only time in public to date) the loss of my beloved New York. I couldn’t leave. I loved New York. I was in love with it. I couldn’t quit it. But I did.
“It is easy to see the beginnings of things, and harder to see the ends. I can remember now, with a clarity that makes the nerves in the back of my neck constrict, when New York began for me, but I cannot lay my finger upon the moment it ended, can never cut through the ambiguities and second starts and broken resolves to the exact place on the page where the heroine is no longer as optimistic as she once was.”
–Joan Didion
To say that the tiny house has been something significant for us would be an understatement. It’s the opposite of New York. It’s the first place we have lived as adults. It’s aesthetic is both pleasing and strange, cozy and crowded, but it will forever mark a certain disposition for our first few weeks saying goodbye to New York, goodbye to childhood, and goodbye to drinking anything but coffee, hard cider, and red wine. It was not conventional—walking through the rain to the bathroom, sharing our kitchen with Indians, Australians, Israelis, and Frenchmen.
We have loved it. But it is time to leave.
So it was time to leave and the Craigslist search began. Most of the affordable ones in prime locations consisted of stained carpets and sad walls or complexes that just felt strange after growing up in homes, then living in New York, and then a tiny house. It was discouraging and we felt bad about being discouraged. We felt guilty to feel sad about living in an apartment complex that was just so “easy and there.”
Then we went to Houston on a Saturday. We went museum hopping and coffee bopping and popped into bookstores and the like.
We drove around the park and headed home just as it got dark. In the passenger seat I scrolled through Craiglist, feeling dumb searching for “tree house” or “cabin” when suddenly I saw a listing that was familiar to me because my mother, helping me on my search, mentioned it a few days before.
Remodeled Airplane Hangar Loft.
I sent the email of interest and two days later we got the call saying “There were others with better credit, but we knew you all would appreciate it. We want whoever to live in there to create.”
So we signed the lease. Sent the deposit. And made the trip to IKEA.
And so here we are enjoying our last Sunday night in the tiny. It’s been such a representation of cozy—of easing into adulthood. It’s not really a house. It’s not really a room. It’s a small thing—a small this or that—that means so much. It’s record player and Woody Allen films and frustration (but the good kind). It’s injustice and calm. It’s popcorn and house slippers that you have to take on and off every time you need to use the restroom. And so words, like they often do, become inadequate for describing what the “Tiny That” is. So, we just call it Tiny.
The vibe of the Hangar is great. It’s a space to create—clean and minimal. We’ve bought the stuff for a darkroom, books on hold for typography, some fresh journals and a typewriter from home on their way down South. We can’t wait for next weekend.
Here's a sneak peak:
So as T.S. Eliot wrote, “To make an end is to make a beginning,” and so in bidding “adieu,” Godard and young Joan Didion and Doubles and Hats have only made another in his long series of reinventions and renewals.
So here is a big montage of Tiny moments:
*To wrap this all up, here’s a story by Dave Eggers. It encapsulates a lot of what’s going on and it makes Godard’s dog, Roxy make sense. You should read it. It is nice.
