Moving Pictures

 

So my plan to post something here every day in November kind of fizzled.  I did end up writing most days, but without time for ideas to simmer and for prose to get edited, quality suffers.  Maybe once a week is a better frequency for me.  Although I reread a few of the things I had written kind of offhandedly, and in retrospect some of them are not too bad. 

For example, from the day after Thanksgiving:

“Everyone sent pictures of food yesterday.  Aerial shots, camera hovering over plates and platters.  I indulge too from time to time, and I suppose it’s relatively harmless.  On one level it’s a simple celebration of a custom, and a way to share the experience, especially poignant this year, with (at least some) people abstaining from family gatherings.  But on another level it’s straight up narcissism: look at me and what I have done.  Not only in the sense of look at the dish I’ve prepared, but look at the status I’ve achieved, and at the comforts I have gathered around me.  Of course one could say the same thing about everything on social media, more or less.

Perhaps I’m just bitter and a little jealous.  Next year if I happen to be in the US for Thanksgiving, surrounded by my broader family, maybe I’ll send pictures around too.”

A handy transition to the news that we are moving to the United States in four days.  I choose my words carefully here: I resist saying “moving back” to the US, even though it is my home country and I spent the first 35+ years of my life there.  Because I’ve been living in another country for the past 13 years, and because meanwhile the US has changed and I’ve changed, I’m under no illusion that this will be anything like settling back into an old, familiar life.  Not to mention that, for my wife and stepson who have never lived there, this move is not “back” anywhere.

There’s also an element of not wanting to admit defeat.  As if by saying moving “back” to the US (or, even worse, “back home”), I would be classifying my time in Switzerland as an aside from the main plot.  There is a strong tendency among my countrymen to do this: to treat any experience outside the US as “an adventure,” fodder for future stories to be told to friends back in the states, delivered with a bemused fascination of the exotic Other and a glib satisfaction of being back in the Land of the Free.  See also “Emily in Paris” (or, rather, don’t, and take my word for it).

Meanwhile, we spend the remaining days of the awful year that was 2020 dealing with visas and pet vaccinations and administrative processes in different countries and finding new homes for appliances that won’t run on 110 volts. 

The other day we had to go to the caisse de chomage, which sits in the office complex on top of the big post office in Montbrillant, which I never knew existed.  The knowledge that we’re going to leave soon made Geneva feel different, as if the city’s existence was starting to cleave away from my own.  The people walking between the buildings in the office complex – a community into which I have been trying to assimilate for the last 13 years – start to become just another group of people in another country, who were here before and who will continue to go about their business when we’re gone. The big Swiss and Geneva canton flags which flank the Mont Blanc bridge were waving, and they will go on waving after we leave.