Packing is a metaphor. Everything is. Stare at a fact long enough and it becomes a symbol, emblematic of a more universal truth.

This is my recreation – in both senses: my game and my recreating of my world. I stare – in any direction – and a fact melts into a likeness – this instance is like others – the way opaque butter clarifies to transparency over slow heat. Packing for an overnight becomes packing for a journey, which becomes our final longest journey so, come to think of it, we are always packing, from first to last.

A mind trick, you call it? So it is. Also an escape – from the excruciating temporary into the consoling everlasting. We all do it, I’m convinced, in our way.

My dad’s death when I was sixteen started me down this road. Few experiences hurt worse than the first death we deeply experience. Suddenly a person who seemed permanent, whom we’d counted on to be always present, is gone. Ouch. We writhe. We can’t believe it. We fear we won’t survive this loss. We grope for stability like a ship’s passenger on a storm-tossed sea, praying not to be pitched overboard.

I wrote a poem. It wasn’t any good, but I thought it fine. (It survives on some dusty shelf, sad to say, for it was printed in the school magazine. “Good for sixteen” does not mean good.) Composing a poem mysteriously consoled. My father became all fathers, I the type of all sons, who bury their fathers in the natural course. My pain became a poem that would endure (naturally!) till the end of time. (Our fame never shines brighter than when we’re first learning to compose.) The metaphorization of my father embalmed him, so he would never die. Religions play the same mind-trick. The dead don’t die, they’re sucked into eternity. Ahh, that feels better.

Painkillers are addictive – and there’s no painkiller like art. Ars longa, vita brevis, you bet! – art is long and life short – only art can be longer than long. Did Shakespeare die – or Michelangelo – or Bach? The more one participates in art – as producer or recipient – the more one feels released from the manacles of one’s moment into a thrilling weightlessness. Who hasn’t felt “swept away” by a song?

The Transcendentalists were whizzes at this. Everywhere they glimpsed eternity peeping into the mundane. Thoreau’s lonely decampment to Walden Pond only looked like a nervous breakdown when, viewed rightly, it was an heroic journey to exaltation and mental health, a path for all! Imagine -- when my ambitions were thwarted or loves curdled, I wasn’t injured, no indeed, not if I could translate my ache into art! My worst experiences became my most precious – no pain, no gain. And this painkiller was priced right. Use only the ingredients you possess. Shine your mind on your life and watch it glow. Magic.

Materialists decry such escapism: You’re living in a dream world! To which the metaphorist replies, And what’s wrong with that? The sanest route through life is the one that makes you gladdest. To each their own.

I am packing – my overnight bag, yes, but my eternity bag too. What to bring for my stay? What to be sure I don’t leave behind?

I pack light. We need less for our voyages than we think. Besides, who has strength for all that extra weight?

Into my eternity bag I fold my loves and the words they occasioned. No stuff, credentials, boasts. I devoted most of my energies to stuff, credentials, boasts and now they’re dust. Funny how that happens.