displacement behavior

Upon graduation from college this May, our youngest child, Yani, will be looking for work in the place on Earth that has been voted most likely to fall into the ocean. This is how I see a move to the Bay Area. She is undaunted. "Everyone tells me you should live in California once in your lifetime," she says. To comfort me, she adds, "I'll be back for grad school or to have babies."

She and Laura are on their way to San Francisco this weekend to check it out. It's best that I stay home. I would be jumping on the sidewalk with all my might in an effort to trigger a tremor just to prove my point. While they are looking for cool aspects of California (there are apparently a few), I would be searching for reasons for her not to move there. Last night we were all on our computers at the kitchen table: Yani was counting Chinatown restaurants that serve soup dumplings, Laura was looking at IKEA cabinets, and I was playing Words With Friends and coming up with things like "WAIL" and "HOME."

It's unusual for Yani and me to be on such different pages, and I'm unhappy about it. I wish either she would change her mind or I would become a more enlightened being. Both seem like such remote possibilities, though.

I busied myself this morning by going to Goodwill and buying a few brightly colored men's cotton shirts. Note: the shirts were brightly colored; not the men. I washed them (again: the shirts, not the men), then cut them into small squares (I will assume you're with me on this being about the cloth for the rest of the story) and put them in my waiting room bathroom so my clients can dry their hands on old shirt pieces instead of paper towels. If I can't be enlightened, at least I can do this small thing for the Earth. 

I can say with some confidence that as the nest truly empties -- of children, aging pets, and my spouse herself -- I'm going to be doing more such projects. I hope I will be inspired to branch out beyond squares of cotton, because already in the past few weeks I've made more handkerchiefs than you can shake a stick at, using a torn shirt of Laura's and discarded pajama pants of Yani's. Alone and left to my own devices, no cotton garment will be safe.