field handbook · pocket size · port authority series, no. 12
a small handbook for those who, by accident or duty, go back.
the returning ferry-passenger, the visitor to an old house,
the colleague who is rehired, the lover who is taken back. the
handbook is matter-of-fact: it advises slow steps off the
gangway, careful inspection of the
threshold, a private list of
what has changed before any conversation begins. it warns
against the appearance of triumph.
part two collects returns that should not be attempted: to a
city after thirty years, to a workplace one has been asked
to leave, to a person who has remarried. a brief chapter is
devoted to harbours visited again
after long absence, and to the very particular grief of
finding them unchanged.
the handbook closes with a list of other
handbooks in the same series. it ends, gently, with the
observation that nobody returns to the place they left;
everybody returns to a different place that wears the old
name.
marginalia · in blue ink, on the endpaper kept this in my coat for twelve years. used it three times. the third time it was wrong.