Bucharest Beatitude, 2

Blessed is the nostalgia of those who are leaving. The Greek nostos (the homecoming journey...the journey back...the journey home) combines with algos (pain, grief) to give us nostalgia, the pain of going back, or the pain of going home, which is broadly speaking the pain associated with memory, which there's no doubt one can feel before the memory even becomes memory, before the departure itself, since we can predict what will be painful to miss when it--and we--are no longer there.

Yes, we are officially counting down our last days in Bucharest, taking all the same old lovely walking routes (to market to playground to beer-garden to home) one last time just to wallow in what will soon become our urban nostalgia. And of course we're systematically saying goodbye to the parks: the rowboat lagoons of Cismigiu today, the trampolines of Herestrau tomorrow, and every day from now until departure we'll be kicking back at Icoanei.

Surely S. will have memories of her school, her bus riding and ballet and language classes, since she's old enough for such details to form the kind of narrative required by memory. But I wonder what A. will remember about his two seasons in Romania. Surely we expect that something (and it probably will be a thing...a single image that he'll come back to again and again later in life, not even knowing where to locate it) will become imprinted on his young memory banks: perhaps the smiling face of Andreea, his pal and guardian most mornings. Or maybe the winding pathway through Icoanei Park, which leads into the business of laughter and playground equipment. Or maybe the sound of his sister arriving home (at last) from school.

As for me, here I am with a week to go noticing exquisite houses I've not seen before, even though I've passed them almost every day: a cascade of ivy here, a gorgeous bit of iron-work there. And I’m thinking ahead to the people I will miss—not the ass in the BMW who accelerated in the direction of A’s stroller and the rest of us on the crosswalk yesterday—but the generous and brilliant souls who’ve been kind to my cranky expat self these past months. And I'm thinking ahead to missing the sense of living in a massive city, where the constant is NOISE and mayhem, which means it felt like a miracle today when we turned off Stribei Voda on to an alley leading down toward Cismigiu and noticed how quiet it was for a fully sustained moment, right there in the heart of teeming Bucharest. And I know I'll think fondly of the approach to Icoanei, whose little tree-lined horizon breaks up the landscape of rooftops when approached from any direction....Icoanei, which we've seen in every weather, which has been our daily oasis, our locus amoenus, our blessed refuge.