The Second Bag of Oranges
Once, not long after we had moved to Boston, Matt came home from the store and announced, “Today there was a deal on oranges. Buy one bag, get one free.” My husband loves oranges. I looked around. “Where’s the other bag?” I asked. “Amy,” he said, “when you are carrying groceries home on the T, you don’t take the second bag of oranges.”
For a time, we lived in a tiny apartment on the backside of Beacon Hill. The Beacon Hill neighborhood is home of old Boston: the wealthy, the established, the blue-bloods. John Kerry lived around the corner on Louisburg Square. The Alcotts (as in Louisa May) once lived on Mount Vernon Street. Every May there was a Beacon Hill Hidden Garden tour which was a chance to peer into the homes and gardens and lives of this elite world. Residents had dining rooms with dark antique furniture, brocaded wallpaper, cabinets filled with gold-rimmed china and delicate sparkling crystal. There were portraits of ancestors from the Revolutionary War. The ornately patterned sofas and stiff-backed chairs in the sitting rooms looked like they had never been sat on. Sometimes on these tours I would catch a glimpse of the household help back in the butler’s pantry or washing up in the kitchen, the man (or woman) behind the elegant curtain of polish and perfection.
We lived on the servant side of Beacon Hill. I loved every inch of our tiny apartment, even when the apartment was so cold I could scrape my name in the layer of ice on the inside of the windowpanes. Our home was 350 square feet on a good day. Crowded did not even begin to describe it. I hung my clothes on hooks on the walls and doors. My hairbrush and lipsticks shared a shelf with the Ziploc bags, laundry detergent and aluminum foil. Socks and underwear, cotton balls and sunscreen were stored in a hatbox under the bed. Piles of art books were stacked precariously on the back of the piano. Travel books and volumes of poetry lined the windowsills. “You could open a library,” a friend once said, taking in the sheer number of books we owned. We could, but not there. It was minimalist living at its very essence: when something came in, something had to go out.
Trash days were our favorite days: two chances every week to rid our kitchen of the bags that otherwise had no place to go. If we forgot and woke up to the sound of the garbage truck outside our building, we’d bolt out of bed and down the stairs half-dressed, caring more about getting rid of the garbage than our lack of clothing. Sometimes, in desperation, we’d put on hats to cover our faces, sneak garbage bags out of the building, and deposit them in the city trash receptacles on the street, something that was strictly prohibited.
When I am feeling nostalgic, it is easy to romanticize those years of city living. Especially after my last back-breaking month of clearing the yard and pruning the garden and hauling a truckload with 400 pounds of green waste to the city composting center. But honestly, much of our life in Boston was more gritty than romantic. Not having cars meant more than simply using public transportation to get to and from work; it meant using buses and trains to transport stuff. Even something as simple as going to the grocery store meant carrying heavy bags several blocks up to the top of our steep hill, and then up a flight of stairs to our apartment. That’s why you don’t take the second bag of oranges, folks.
The liturgical season of Lent began this week, a time of spiritual austerity, a chance to reset our intentions and to spend the next 40 days in reflection and meditation. A time to consider giving up that second bag of oranges, perhaps both metaphorically and literally. Two months into a year that seems to have gone mad, a chance to start over again is appealing. Because even in small, inconsequential ways, the world feels odd, slightly off. It is as if suddenly we are moving inside a syncopated rhythm, a new way of measuring time and space, the emphasis no longer on the expected downbeat of the measure, the accents in all the wrong places. "Do you think while living in New Mexico we might shed our skins once a year like snakes?" Matt asked one day. I hope so. I like the idea that one morning I may crawl out of bed, leave my skin between the sheets and find myself gloriously transformed. I want to believe that I can still change, that I am not stuck with this load of funny quirks and predictable impulses forever.
While there was no chance ever to take the second bag of oranges, there was a certain charm and quirkiness about our strange, spare existence of those Boston years. One day walking to work I discovered that the Mass Avenue Bridge was measured not in feet or meters but in Smoots: a “Smoot” being the height of a Class of 1962 MIT student named Oliver Smoot, who was 5’7”. The bridge is said to be “364.4 Smoots, plus or minus one ear.”
We had no debt, mortgage or car payment, and few possessions to fuss over. Evenings and weekends were not overtaken with household chores because there were so few: I could clean the entire apartment in fifteen minutes. Aside from those infrequent occasions when we rented a car and headed out of the city, our entire world was limited to where we could go on public transportation. When someone invited us to a party or a concert in a distant part of the city, it was not a real option; the mental anguish over deciding whether or not we had the time or the desire to attend was simply not an issue.
Once on my way to a rehearsal, I spontaneously bought two bookcases from a second-hand store in Cambridge without giving any thought to how I was going to get these pieces of furniture home. The next day found me hauling the smaller of the two bookshelves across the Mass Ave bridge on my back (20 Smoots. 160 Smoots. 240 Smoots...). On one hand, the bookcase wasn’t that big. On the other hand, I was carrying it on my back across a bridge measured in Smoots.
No time did this truth of our minimalist existence and limited resources become more apparent than around the holidays. We quite literally had no room for Christmas. We had no room for a tree. We had no room for the gifts we might receive from well-meaning choir members or piano students. In the weeks before the semester ended every December, my office at school would be overflowing with Christmas presents that students had brought. There were gift bags piled up in the corner, under the piano, on top of my desk. I had to dig through cards and envelopes to find attendance sheets and pencils. I had to shove aside boxes and bows to locate my music. One year a sweet child gave me a decorative reindeer that would have looked great in a grand hallway of a colonial home in Concord, where she lived. I received a set of candlesticks ready to grace a dining room table (I didn’t have a dining room table. Heck, I didn’t have a dining room.). There was the gift of a carved wooden angel taller than I was. She belonged next to a stately front door hung with an evergreen wreath sporting a big red bow. The front door of our apartment building was broken. The door hadn’t locked in weeks.
At the same time, my favorite holiday ritual involved wandering through Back Bay and Beacon Hill as dusk fell, peering in the lighted windows of the brick brownstones at book-lined rooms with towering Christmas trees and staircases wound with garlands and bows. Afterwards I’d go home to our tiny unadorned apartment and sink into a steaming hot bath, brimming with contentment, my need for holiday celebration and tradition satisfied. I didn’t want any of the trappings of other people’s lives; I just wanted to live amidst the beauty and stimulation of it all.
In so many ways, living in Boston was a shot of pure stimulation, a free-fall of heady adrenaline: we were living the questions, not looking for answers. Weekends saw us searching out great new neighborhoods to explore or whiling away the hours in our favorite bookshops on Newbury Street. We squandered entire evenings sitting on a dock overlooking the Charles River, drinking wine while watching the sun go down and the lights go up over the city. We went regularly to the Boston Symphony and spent one New Year’s Eve at the Boston Pops Gala, dancing until the early morning hours. We knew every restaurant in our neighborhood and had a membership to the Museum of Fine Arts. We took trips out to the Berkshires to hear concerts at Tanglewood. We vacationed in Maine and Québec and spent one Thanksgiving snowed in a farmhouse in New Hampshire. Inspired by the short five-hour flights to Europe, we went to Ireland one December and to Paris for a long weekend over Valentine’s Day. After a while, it was easy to forget that we had not always raced across Boston Common for the train, walked those cobbled streets, or lingered in coffeehouses along Boylston.
Some nights after work, I’d spontaneously duck into a teahouse in Harvard Square to read a book over a pot of tea, knowing that it didn’t really matter what time I got home that night. I have a delicious memory of sitting out a wicked March nor’easter in a bay window of a café on Newbury Street a few blocks from our apartment, ordering cup after cup of coffee and writing my way through a stack of blank paper. Matt was away for the week; the school where I taught was closed because of weather. Liberated from any pressing to-do list, I was free to float from moment to moment and watch the snow falling outside.
There was something simple about a life lived entirely in the present tense, a world devoid of trivialities or surplus. I practiced. I taught. I played for voice lessons and church services. I learned a program for a concert with a string quartet. I played a recital with a mezzo-soprano in Amherst. This day looked much like that one. And also that one. One week, one month rolled into another.
One day, I was riding the T home after a long day of teaching. I had just opened a piano journal when a voice next to me said, “Is that Wanda Landowska?” referring to the early 20th century harpsichordist. I looked up to see a dapper older gentleman wearing a tweed coat and a bow tie leaning over my magazine. If he wasn’t a Harvard professor, he could play one in a movie. I glanced down at the photograph he was referring to. “Why, yes,” I stuttered, “How do you know that?” “I listen to her recordings,” the man responded, and turned back to his book. I was thrilled that a random person next to me on the train might know this rather obscure musician, and afterwards the anecdote symbolized everything I loved about living in Boston. “Wanda Landowska” became my code for this glorious experiment in living boldly.
Twenty-some years later, living a full, complicated life in the desert complete with a dining room and a dining room table, I wonder if there might be something worth pondering in that second bag of oranges. We are wired to love the second bag of oranges. We want the security, the safety net, the assurance that tomorrow is going to be okay. We choose quantity over quality every day. We overfill our plates, our schedules, our closets. Just in case.
Friends, I think the gift of the Trump administration (you never thought I’d put that set of words together in a sentence, did you?) is the daily, perhaps hourly, reminder that the future is uncertain. We must live fully in the present. Embrace the Wanda Landowskas and the curious Smoots of our days and patterns, our habits and rituals. Use the next 40 days to try to shift our perspective, change our inner landscapes, clean out the dark recesses of our closets and our hearts. Give up, not just chocolate and wine, but also the hatred and the judgment and the tired revisiting of the wrongs of this world. We should shed our skins at least once a year. Make plans but hold them lightly. It’s all practice. The meaning is in the doing.
And perhaps, dear readers, as a principle, we should consider not taking the second bag of oranges.