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

Once upon a time in Gibraltar

Fifty years ago today, I was a bride. I was eighteen years old.

The love of my young life was a sailor stationed aboard the USS Canopus in Rota, Spain. I was a high school senior when we met. To me, it felt like a match made in heaven. He was six years older, gorgeous, worldly, smart, artistic, and divorced. That's why we went to Gibraltar to marry. It was 1969 and Franco was in power in Spain. Divorced people were not allowed to marry on Spanish soil, not even on an American military base in the base chapel. So we set out for British soil where they weren't so picky about such things.

As it happened, it was a Monday and the people who were married just before the weekend in the same office, by the same somewhat elderly, very British official, were John Lennon and Yoko Ono. Not that we saw them. But they did scandalize the officiating bureaucrat by showing up barefoot which he described with much indignation. Heaven forfend.

There is no remaining photographic evidence of our nuptials. They were lost somewhere in my parents' move from Spain to England. Nonetheless, I remember some small details. I was shocked to see myself referred to as a "spinster" on the marriage certificate. I did not like the dress I was wearing. It had been purchased for my HS graduation from the Base Exchange and was brown and white. Who wants to get married in brown? Was it an omen?

My family toasted us at a Chinese restaurant afterward, a treat not available where we lived. Altogether, it was a long and happy day. We took a train to Madrid for our wedding night, followed by a honeymoon hitchhiking through Spain and Morocco.

Fifty years is a long time whether or not a marriage lasts. And a relationship can outlive a marriage by a long shot. We had a son after 5 years and split up when he was a baby. Ever after, we've all been family. New marriages, more kids, many moves and life's vicissitudes haven't changed the fact that once upon a time there was love. And marriage. And fun.

I'm lucky to have had many lives in this one incarnation. 

Pushme-Pullyou

                                                          Dr. Dolittle and friends

Remember the Pushme-Pullyou from the Dr. Dolittle movie or books? Aside from being the perfect image for today's congress, it has a different, but related, political meaning for me.

First of all, I loved the Dr. Dolittle books when I was a kid. I checked them all out of the base library, along with the Mary Poppins books, when I was in sixth grade. They were counterpoint to my effort to read every biography in our school library. Typical for me.

So I've carried the Pushme-Pullyou image with me for decades and come back to it often. This morning, I was thinking about the current political situation, a month before the mid-term elections, and in the middle of death-defying efforts to legalize marriage for gay people in North Carolina. It's easy to get wound up, especially when I feel like I have a personal stake in the outcomes. Which I do. But it's equally easy to lose perspective.

When I was 18, I was enrolled in a tiny, American, liberal arts college in Germany ----- Schiller College. It was a unique experience that I didn't have enough appreciation for at the time. I ran away (literally) after one semester. But I arrived at school in the fall of 1968, freshly graduated from David Glasgow Farragut HS (Go Admirals!) on the navy base in Rota, Spain. I had lived in Germany for five years prior to moving to Spain, and my German language skills were far superior to what I had picked up of Spanish in the last two years. I felt like I was going home.

I was also in the company of my best male friend and co-conspirator for all things radical, John. We traveled to Germany by Eurail for three weeks before school started, and got into lots of tangles and interesting situations before finally landing at our castle campus in Bonnigheim. (I don't have a clue how to put an umlaut over that o.) I was feeling adventurous from the moment our train pulled out of Jerez in southern Spain, and being at school didn't dampen that one bit.

So politics. On our tiny campus we had 69 students, all freshmen, all American. Some came from the States and many came from state department or military families overseas. The faculty ---- I don't know how they got there, but they were certainly representative of the times. We smoked weed with the English professor while discussing literature, and we drank beer and danced with others in the on-campus "Milchbar". And one memorable night, we formed an SDS chapter.

We met at a gasthaus in town for a regular political workshop. Everybody drank wine or beer and got really argumentative. It was 1968. The world was coming to an end. Important political figures were being butchered in the streets. Entire neighborhoods in cities were in flames. The war was devouring a generation of young men. Desperate times call for desperate measures.

We met with our political science prof ---- a wise and experienced man of thirty ---- who told us about this subversive, underground, radical group that was opposed to all the things that were wrong with our home country. Some of us had not lived there since we were children. "Breaking news" often broke a week or more after it happened ---- it was hard to keep up with what was happening back home. But the Students for a Democratic Society was in the vanguard, he assured us, and even though we were too young to vote (the voting age was still 21) we were old enough to fight the system.

I don't remember what exactly joining the SDS involved. I don't remember there being any secret handshakes, though there might have been some sort of membership card. I do remember that our meetings involved a great deal of wine and shouting. I'm surprised we didn't get thrown out of the bar.

The SDS in the United States probably did have some impact. For me, it was an introduction to activism, no matter how small and ineffectual. When I left school and married my sailor boyfriend and returned to the States the next year, this early foundation segued into active participation in anti-war demonstrations and street-level protest in the women's movement.

My parents were apolitical. I don't believe they ever voted until they retired and moved back to the US. I cast my first vote for Shirley Chisolm in the 1972 primary. I've missed very few opportunities to vote since then. In fact, I like voting so much I always want to go back to the end of the line and do it again. You know the old saying ---- vote early and often!

I hear a lot about voter apathy now, attributed to various causes, and I wonder if some of it is just plain lack of education. We're swimming in information overload, but still too many people don't know how government is designed to work in this country. The loud doomsday voices on both sides of the political spectrum tend to drown out the plodding local-issue necessities of day to day government. Too many people feel like they don't matter, that they can't make a difference.

My one vote out of millions may not matter if I'm focused on that one tiny action. But if everyone stayed home and didn't vote, because it just doesn't matter, then who would seize the power? Somebody will, and it's not likely to be someone with my best interests at heart.

I feel vaguely guilty because I haven't been out canvassing or phone banking. Over the past 45 years I've done all of that, multiple times. I even managed a local campaign office one year for a governor's race. I've worked the polls. I've gone to Washington to lobby for causes. Now I'm ready to turn that part of it over, not because I'm apathetic, but because I'm tired. And it hurts my heart.

I'll vote. I'll always vote. I'll talk and blog and make phone calls to elected officials and sign petitions. But the pushme-pullyou of politics has taken its toll on me. I can't jump in with both feet anymore without hurting myself. And these days, for me, every single day counts.

Go on, all you youngsters ----- and the oldsters who still have the passion and the energy for it. Save the country. Let your voice be heard.

EVERYBODY VOTE!