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

Clarion Call!

First of all, Greenland is melting. Yes, really melting in a big way in just the past few weeks. It astounds me that nobody is talking about that very much. It seems like some of the biggest news out there, and I'm not being an alarmist. All of a sudden something like 97% of the ice has melted. What in the world??

All I can say about that is, it's a good thing the North Carolina legislature decided that a rise in ocean level is not a problem we need to plan for. Pretty soon, I'll have beach front property without even having to move. We can rent out our Raleigh beach house and make a lot of money and buy a place in the mountains!

Ah, the Mountains. Jill and I just spent 3 nights in a 100 year old fishing cabin above the New River. It was great! When you walk in the door, it smells like 100 years worth of fires in the huge stone fireplace. The cabin's logs were hand hewn. Of course it was updated, a kitchen and bath added (very tiny) and it even had internet. And there was the hot tub out back in a little covered gazebo. I don't believe that was original to the property.

We went to the mountains for "respite" ----- that's a big word in the caregiving business. I've been learning a whole new vocabulary since taking Mom in to live with us nine months ago. We definitely were in need of some respite. It's one of those situations where you don't know how much you need it until you do it. Though Mom had spent a couple of weekends with my sister Barb, we had not been away by ourselves for the whole nine months. When we're at home, even if she's asleep, there's never a sense of being alone. She's always popping up and when she does, she requires constant, though subtle, supervision. It's a tricky dance we do, keeping a watchful eye while letting her feel like she's independent. You never know what she's going to do next.

People with little kids are thinking, yeah, yeah, whatever. Try a three-year-old, a five-year-old, and an infant.  And that's certainly true. I've raised kids and I remember how relentless and tiring that is. They're every bit as likely to hurt themselves and be unpredictable as a demented old person. The difference is, that they learn (hopefully) from experience. Mom can't even remember what she did or said 5 minutes ago. There is no learning taking place, there are no memories being created. Every moment is in the now and when it's gone, it's gone. She can't explain what she was thinking or how she's feeling.

The past few days at daycare, she's thrown hissy fits over nothing that anyone can figure out. She's been destructive and mean, cussing at the staff, trying to break things, trying to escape. It's entirely out of character for her. I've had to pick her up early and she has no memory of what happened. She says, sorrowfully and sincerely, "I don't want to do that. I'm sorry." and I know that's true. The mother who raised me, who taught me right from wrong and how to behave, would be mortified if she could see herself now. It is truly heartbreaking to watch.

While we were "respiting" in the mountains, I left it all behind --- the stress, sadness, exasperation, confusion, anger and fear over my mother's condition. I was able to be in the moment with Jill, to reconnect with my wife, the woman I love to love, and felt immeasurably grateful for everything from the beauty of the countryside to the luxury of a king-sized bed. I left the worry behind, but not the awareness. I found myself haunted, as I am so often, with thoughts of  how immediate and precious all of life is to me now. Will I be my mother in 10 or 15 years? Will Jill have to do for me what I do for Mom every day?

It's not a worry so much as a call to attention. This day is well and truly mine. How do I want to spend it? Will I work myself up into a lather over Chik-fil-A and electoral politics? Even Greenland, that really and truly feels like a canary, no, more like Big Bird with a megaphone, in the coal mine for our planet --- even that is not something I will allow myself to lose serenity over.

I can't control what happens in the big world, but I can keep tabs on my inner universe. And my choice today is to be here now and breathe.