You Moved How Many Times?

  

This was my home for the first 4 weeks.

I will soon be seventy years old, which blows my mind. This morning, while reading a biography of Louisa May Alcott and seeing that she moved around a great deal as a child, I decided to count up my moves. 

One of the things I realized as I made the list is that my memory does a lot more spinning than it used to as it tries to retrieve information. I can picture the little buffering circle going round and round. So I'm not sure I got them all, nor can I remember very many street names. 

The final count, in my just-short-of-70-years, is fifty-one. Five. One. Including a few instances of couch-surfing and camping out, which I never think of as homelessness even though I technically didn't have an address and had to use my grandparents' home address as mine. I never lived with my grandparents.

Evergreen, Colorado 1956

My parents moved quite a bit, every year or two, even once during the school year in spite of the fact that my father was a teacher. After they started teaching for the military dependent schools overseas, things actually settled down. Then everyone around us moved and we were in the same place for several years at a time.

Unlike Louisa, I didn't grow up with a fanatic father whose beliefs precluded him from working for wages or owning property ----- or eating regularly. My father was a musician, though, and an aspiring, frustrated concert pianist who always felt like his big break was around the next corner. If only he hadn't somehow saddled himself with a wife and four kids! So there are similarities. 

My sister Barb at our small, plain house - 1958

By the time I graduated from high school in Rota, Spain, I had attended 8 schools. I married at 18 and lighted out on a remarkable journey of geographical cures for anything and everything that ailed me. By the time I was 30, my lifetime score was up to 32 moves and still going. Thirty was a turning point, though. That's the year I got sober for good.

I've been in the same house now for 15 years. Jill and I bought separate new houses when we met and it took us three years to merge. We've been stable ever since.

Sometimes, I get itchy feet. Sometimes, I lunge at the internet looking for a place to move, a desirable house in a new city or country. I may never get over that urge to pack up and search for adventure. But it's different now. I love my wife and the house we live in. She has a hometown not far away with family and familiar places. Occasionally, I even want to move there and try to adopt her home since I've never had a hometown of my own. 

In the meantime, here we are growing older together in a house I still think of as brand new, though it was 2002 when she got it.  That's long enough to launch an entire kid from scratch! (we didn't.)

 

My children have houses of their own, and marriages and careers to go with them. They've been more geographically stable than I, despite my best efforts to haul them from pillar to post in the early years. 

Seventy, huh? That means what, fifteen or twenty years more? Twenty-five if I stretch it? Considering my grasshopper-wastrel days of yore, I'm already living on borrowed time. And here, in this house that is definitely a home, I have found a measure of peace I never expected to have. 

Feet on the ground, breathing the air. Who knew it could be like this?

Buddy and Nana

What will you do with your short long life?

I have long had the practice of creating a list of "Goals and Intentions" during the week between Christmas and New Year.  I pull out the old list, tick off the ones that came to fruition, and look ahead at what I'm aiming for next. I started doing this after (dare I say it?) taking the est training in the mid-seventies. Hmmm. That's forty years ago. I set it up as a game, not a rigid list of must-do projects. The year-end review was a chance to see how strong my intention had been. I never looked at the list from one December to the next.

The past few years I've been spotty about it. The list, when I do it, is much shorter. I think that reflects my focus on what's important as much as a narrowing of what's possible. Of course, I could be fooling myself.

The fact is, at the ripe old age of 65, happily married, gratefully retired, living comfortably on less, many of the items that made the list back in the day have already happened. I don't know that it had anything to do with listing out my goals and intentions. I think maybe they just occurred in the process of life.

So what to put on a list this year, 2016? I always tacked on an addendum called Outrageous Goals and Intentions, the things that I would love to see happen, but couldn't imagine any way for them to come about ---- mainly in the realm of fame, fortune, and travel. Now I consider myself fortunate that they didn't happen. I love my quiet little life, though I could do with a little more travel.

It has been one year and 11 days since my mother, Nancy, died. I have taken this entire year off. Oh, I did what had to be done ---- the legal finalities for her small estate, daily and weekly chores in the house, 6 months of being a produce fairy, delivering veggies for a local farm. I even accomplished becoming certified to teach the Qigong set I have been practicing for the last three years, and lined up 5 classes per week. But actually, I was pretty much on auto-pilot all year long.

Losing my mother, even though the Alzheimer's had taken her mind long ago, fundamentally shook my foundation. It was not simply that we were close, which we were. It was that since childhood I had trouble knowing where she ended and I began. Sometimes I had the odd sensation, when we were together, of looking at her and thinking it was me. I'm sure there are shrinks who can have a heyday with that. It's probably got troubling diagnoses and is the reason I have spent most of my life in and out of therapy. Nonetheless, that's the way it has been since before I can remember. I once wrote a short story in which the teenager who was pregnant and living with her in-laws tried to starve the baby out of her until she finally made the choice to keep and love it. When my mother read it, she cried and asked me how I knew. I don't know how I knew, except that I had lived it. 

Now the world is a different place. I don't know if I'll ever quite adjust to it, but it's getting easier. In some ways, it's even better. There's more of me available now. And in my imagination she is free and wild, a kind of sparkling energy let loose in the universe, unconfined, uncontained.

As for me, I have a new freedom and a new happiness as well. I miss her ---- the old her ---- every day. At the same time, I'm developing a new perspective on lifespan. Even though I have had a love of history through fiction and non-fiction, museums and living history, when I was younger I didn't quite realize how short a time we have. Even the longest-lived among us can only claim a little over a century. Once upon a time, that felt like a very long life. Now it seems like the blink of an eye. 

I personally knew my great grandparents, born shortly after the Civil War. The farmhouse my great-great grandfather G.W. built has now been torn down, I discovered this past

summer. My mother and her siblings grew up in that house, Edgewood Farm. The past is not that distant. I have known people who lived during what we think is long-ago history. The "kids" I grew up with and I are becoming the keepers of the past, the tellers of stories from when the world was different. It all happens rather quickly.

This has been my year of reckoning. A time to look at the present and prepare for whatever is coming up next. It's unsettling. Occasionally, I'm afraid. But the overwhelming feeling is satisfaction. I haven't done so badly, no matter how many things never got knocked off of my lists. Sometimes, the best thing that can come of a goal is to not meet it. 

My intention for this year? Curiosity.