I went out apartment hunting yesterday.  Apparently now's the time to look in the neighborhood if you want to find a place for the fall.  My lease is up in September, and with my landlady antsy to sell, and Jake's continued shenanigans, I think I'm finally ready to return to the blissfully hermetic existence I once enjoyed abroad. 

Oh, don't worry.  I get out and do a good deal of what you could call socializing — you know: making noises and faces at others of the species — but when I come home and I close that door behind me, put my face (and my voice) in the pickle jar — I feel free, unconstrained by necessary convention, savage as Kaspar Hauser.   

I'm not saying I eat bugs and shit on the floor.  But I'm free to indulge my comfortable delusions without having to compromise them due to social necessity.  I don't know about you, but I like my most private self — that great, amorphous — not to say gaseous — thing — that mystery that fills the room, that sometimes does nothing but pass the time, breathing — and the whole room breathing along.  



When you think about it, a home is a second skin.  It shouldn't make you itch all the time, but you don't want to get too comfortable in it, either.  You don't want to become a real Kaspar Hauser.  And that's not just tricky for people who live alone.  You can't get too comfortable in this life.  Get out!  Shake it off!  You don't want the fire brigade to have to extract you with a crane and bury you in a grand piano someday, do you?

Which is why I'm fixated on the Fenway.  Well, there are at least three reasons: location, location, location.  When I first moved in to this place, I said I'd hit the bullseye, and I meant it.  Anyone who lives in a city like this knows that every block has its own unique ecology.  I was talking today to a neighbor here on this side of the Fens who said she had always thought of the neighborhood on the other side of the Muddy River, contained by Park Drive and Boylston, as a sort of enchanted isle. 

When I think of the Fenway, I think of the heart of the heart of the Fenway (to borrow from William Gass). I tend to think of the Fenway neighborhood as the area roughly bound by Mass Ave. to the East, the Fenway on the South and West, and the Turnpike to the North.  To me, Kenmore, which the Fenway is always coupled with, is a different kettle of fish altogether.  It feels more like Brighton than Fenway to me for some reason. 

In what I consider the Fenway neighborhood, that little island bound by Park Drive and Boylston is, indeed, something special.  Surrounded on all but the Boylston side by green space, it feels oddly like a real-life neighborhood.  The fact that I have been a gardener in the Victory Gardens there for the last five years and actually know many of my new neighbors here by name, might seem like cheating — maybe it doesn't feel like one if you just drop in from God knows where without knowing a soul.  Feels like one to me, though.

Studios in the neighborhood run around $1200 a month.  I saw four on Saturday — two were hideous, in a block of what might as well be dorms for Berklee.  Those were the two I saw first, and I had a terrible sinking feeling.  The rental agent — I went with a rental agent because, honestly, I'm tired of dealing with capricious landlords — so, the rental agent asked me if I was a student or had any pets, and when I said no, he whisked me off to another building on the corner of Peterborough and Park.

And, to my utter surprise, the first studio he showed me was perfectly charming.  Spacious and bright, with lots of windows overlooking a cute little park with a fountain, it wasn't just a big room.  It had a separate foyer, two large closets, a kitchen every bit as big as the one I've got now, a dining nook, and a vintage bathroom with one of those big, deep bearclaw tubs.  You know how long it's been since I've been in a bathtub built for two?  (I'm taking reservations, btw.)

Yep, I'm going to sign the lease tomorrow.

It's not Jake.  Yes, he's been annoying, but I'm sure it's been hard for him, too, somehow.  I mean, the guilt.  I'm sure it's just been gnawing at him. 

I knew all along this was going to be a layover here.  Even as I entertained fantasies of buying the place when my landlady sold, the more I looked at the layout the more I realized it was just that big airy living room that gets the afternoon light that I was in love with.  The rest of the apartment — well, first of all, it's too big for one person, but the rooms are of such vastly uneven proportions it feels positively feudal with a roommate.  I wouldn't want any roommate of mine to be relegated to the servants' quarters, while I luxuriated in the Lord Fauntleroy Suite next door.

Obviously some people don't mind.  Different strokes. (Oh!  Speaking of — good luck ever getting your precious sock-puppet back — Oscar's been chewing on it for two days now.)

What I'd really like now — or at least before September — is to find a Murphy bed.  And not an ugly one.  A classy one.  One like the ones you used to see in old Hollywood movies.  Any tips?