The Leather Gloves

I was back in the dining room of my childhood home in Pittsburgh, preparing to leave. There were things to take with me and things to discard. Among them was a pair of leather gloves.

I remember thinking that I probably wouldn't need them again. Nowadays, I live in Palm Desert, California, where there's not much call for leather gloves. And if I ever needed a pair, I could always buy another. It seemed a simple enough decision, although I was having trouble making it.

This was a dream, but the dining room was familiar. There was an oval table that could be extended for family gatherings, glass-front cabinets for china and holiday dishes, and wooden pocket doors separating the dining room from the living room. Those doors were usually closed. The house had old wood beams, capped gas lights, and a fireplace that no longer worked. There were plenty of reminders that it had been built for another time.

We ate most of our everyday meals in the kitchen. The dining room was for Christmas, Thanksgiving, birthdays, and occasions when relatives and friends came to visit. My mother wrapped Christmas presents there, too. I remember how industrious she was, although that seemed true of most women I knew growing up. There was cooking, ironing, washing and hanging clothes, getting meals on the table, and getting children off to school. My mother also had a group of friends she bowled with, probably women from our Catholic church. Occasionally, they gathered at the house.

The dining room wasn't reserved entirely for special occasions. We passed through it regularly, and there was a freestanding metal coat closet near the window. I think we kept gloves and scarves in one of the drawers of the dining room furniture. Pittsburgh winters gave us plenty of reasons to use them. I hadn't thought about that drawer in years, but remembering it now makes the appearance of the leather gloves seem rather less mysterious.

My aunt, Sister Louis, was also in the dream. She was a Franciscan nun, a school principal, and probably the best educated member of our family. She had traveled to Rome and attended the World's Fair in New York. I loved and admired her. She belonged to our family while also having a life that extended beyond it, something I appreciated more as I grew older. My mother was present in the dream as well. There was a conversation involving belonging and my place among people I had known. I don't remember enough to reconstruct it faithfully.

What stayed with me was the sense that I was leaving more than a house.

I first left Pittsburgh for college in Philadelphia. Later came Peace Corps service in the Solomon Islands, years in Philadelphia and the Washington area, and eventually California. I lived among people whose customs and experiences were often very different from those of my childhood neighborhood. Some places felt like home quickly, while others took time. I doubt I could have imagined much of that life when I first left Pittsburgh.

My parents remained in the house. My mother suffered a stroke that left her partially paralyzed and using a wheelchair. After her death, my father continued living there into his nineties. Eventually, the house passed to another generation of our family, and someone still lives there today.

I visited this summer. The neighborhood has changed considerably since my childhood, when it was home to electricians, plumbers, mail carriers, and handymen, with an orchestra violinist and a few others mixed in. The house itself is showing its age. The dining room became my father's bedroom when climbing the stairs grew difficult for him. A toilet and shower were installed in part of the room. It was a practical accommodation, one that allowed him to continue living in the house he had known for so many years.

I didn't find myself mentally restoring the dining room to its earlier appearance. I saw what was there. The house was familiar but not similar. It had continued to accommodate the people who occupied it, and there was no particular reason it should have remained arranged for the family gatherings of my childhood.

I've spent much of my working life helping organizations change. I've seen companies relocate, teams reorganize, and people leave workplaces where they spent decades. The practical reasons for change are usually easy enough to explain. What is harder to account for is everything people lose that never appears on an organizational chart.

Sometimes it's the people who knew our stories, the familiar routines, or the casual conversations that made a workplace feel like somewhere we belonged. Much of organizational life happens in these small exchanges. We often become aware of their importance only when circumstances change and they are no longer part of our days. Even welcome changes can alter relationships and experiences that mattered to us.

Artificial intelligence is bringing another round of changes to the workplace. We talk about what people will be able to accomplish with AI, what work it might replace, and what new skills we'll need. Those are reasonable questions. I wonder, too, about the experiences through which people developed competence, built relationships, and found a place for themselves at work. Some of those experiences may become less common, or disappear altogether. Something can cease to be useful without having been unimportant.

I don't particularly long for the Pittsburgh of my childhood. Leaving opened possibilities I could scarcely have imagined, and I wouldn't want the house to have remained unchanged. But I can still remember where the furniture stood, which doors were usually closed, and how we moved between rooms. I remember my mother wrapping presents at the dining room table and Sister Louis coming for family visits. I can even picture the drawer where we may have kept our winter gloves, although the drawer itself is long gone.

The room I returned to in the dream no longer exists as I knew it, though the house is still there and people continue to live in it. I was preparing to leave, sorting through things that belonged to a life I left many years ago. I knew there was little reason to take the leather gloves. They had served their purpose, and I could easily replace them if I needed to. Still, for reasons I can't quite explain, I was standing there, wondering what to do with them.