I don’t know what’s wrong with me. Maybe I need more protein. Lately, I have taken to eating sardines from a can, like an alley cat. Sardines are supposed to give you protein, including Omega 3, which I thought was in the Andromeda galaxy, but what do I know. A neighbor turned her nose up when I mentioned eating sardines from a can. Sure, let me take a day to drive to a fish market in Santa Cruz and buy them there.
There used to be a fish market two blocks from my new place, but they tore it down and are replacing it with a housing complex. It’s the same fish market I took my granddaughter to after going fishing with her and catching nothing. I bought trout and told everyone that we had caught them at the reservoir. “Gutted and wrapped them in newspaper, too?” my daughter asked. She thinks she’s funny.
It turns out that my “new” place is actually my old place, the one I moved out of in 2008 for a job in Washington, DC. I made the trip with a wife and a Catahoula, aka the Louisiana “leopard dog.” Neither one made it to the Bronx with me two years later, however, which is another story for another post, although that, too, was a move of sorts.
So, that’s what’s wrong with me. I have moved again. I have given up counting the times I’ve moved over the years, with family, a spouse, and on my own. East Coast, West Coast, metro areas, inner city, suburban tracts, university towns, student housing, even out of the country for brief periods. I can’t pick up another box of books. Do you know how much the Oxford History of the Christian Church weighs? I cannot look at another rental truck like U-Haul or Penske without experiencing respiratory failure. I avoid the U-Haul lot down the street like a Wuhan virus (cf The Tapeworm).
I think the greatest challenge of all was moving a refrigerator up the rickety back steps of the graduate student housing apartment we rented in Berkeley, California. At the time, graduate housing consisted of barracks that the Army had used during the 1930s, which appealed to the historian in me. But moving the refrigerator defied conventional physics and cost blood, sweat, and tears–literally. I had no choice: the family stood there, watching as dad and friends attempted the near impossible. It would have been easier if they had just shot me out of a cannon. (For even greater moving trials, see the “Bloomington” series of posts, starting with Bloomington Blues #1).
This is my last move. In my next move I will be carried shoulder high. So, what have I learned? Some practical things like you own more than you think you do. So if you plan to move, get more boxes than you think you’ll need by a factor of 2x. For big moves, don’t try to save money by moving the piano yourself. Get help. And, for God’s sake, spend money on blankets and a dolly. Also, don’t be surprised when those who have sworn to help you experience unexpected demands on moving day that require them to be elsewhere. All day. Without cellphone service. So, multiply the number of people you are expecting by 1/2x.
But beyond the algebraic formulations of moving, try to be present in each situation you find yourself in, whatever the circumstances and for however long, since that particular configuration of people, events, and places will never occur again. Even if some future configuration comes close, it still won’t be the same. As Jackie Gleason put it in his role as bus driver Ralph Kramden in The Honeymooners: “Be kind to the people you meet on the way up, cause you’re gonna meet the same people on the way down.” Something like that.
In a deeper sense, moving is about stability: finding it, creating it, or going back to it. Maybe all three. That is, we move so that eventually we may stop moving. For the ancient Greeks, it was about going back to your origins. Homer’s Odysseus spends twenty years away from his home in Ithaca and tries desperately to return to it only to find it completely changed after all that time. But he has kept its memory alive. He has carried home with him, and that gives him the strength and moral courage to right the wrongs that have occurred to his family. His soul finally becomes aligned with the earth under his feet.
I’m not saying I am Odysseus, but I have been trying to get back to some California grass for a while now. If I had to do it all over again, I’d buy a pickup truck.
Image credits: feature by Jesse Ramirez. Ralph Kramden quote is from Wilson Mizner. Want more? Go to Robert Brancatelli. The Brancatelli Blog is a member of The Free Media Alliance, which promotes “alternatives to software, culture, and hardware monopolies.”
Share this:
Discover more from The Brancatelli Blog
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
I see an even more general meaning I can relate to. Many stresses and physical hardships when younger can more easily be interpreted as “part of the adventure.” Later in life, they’re just stresses and physical hardships, and rather than character building trials, they become distractions and detriments from later phases of the great adventure. Of course, if it’s a full-on zombie apocalypse inconveniently staged late in life, I’ll accept it as part of the adventure, but if its just some mundane, extrinsic necessity forcing a move that’s not a good thing.
Thanks for the comment, Jonathan. I would think that for most people moves later in life may not be zombie apocalypses but probably far from mundane things. Then again, moves might just be part of life coming round again, completing its cycle or cycles, which is a good thing.
Hello! I have to say, I really enjoy your words..they feel familiar or should I say familial..I find the language comforting and clever..Thank you! Happy Holiday Season!!
Appreciate that, Barb. Same to you!
As I think about this topic, Rob, it occurs to me that I didn’t have all that many moves.
As a young man, I quickly moved twice on company transfers. Once married, there was the apartment outside Philadelphia, then our first house and the the subsequent larger house in the little town of Paoli, from which I commuted to Center City Philadelphia for many years (or to the airport, almost as frequently).
Finally, our move two years ago to a retirement community where, like you, I expect to be carried out feet first.
They were relatively few moves, but each marked a fundamental change in my life. The apartment and first house served us as a married couple, without much money and birthing three children. The second house found us with the need for more space, and with more money to pay for it. We lived in that house for 33 years, the only family to have used it as a home. My children will always consider that their home.
This last move marks the fact that we are retired, the kids are well grown, and our needs are less – including the need for space. It’s a place of no maintenance at all, convivial fellow travelers, and an all-around nice place to live in retirement.
So, each move marked a passage of sorts, and perhaps that made the actual move less sad and even a bit less exhausting. However, let me advise anyone reading this reminisce that the final move to smaller space means getting rid of an unbelievable amount of acquired goods – most of which nobody wants. It was a grueling process, but told me something abut the value of things, as compared to people and relationships.
May this move be part of your own unburdening in retirement.
Moves marking key stages in life, like sacraments…I like that. I hope you were able to keep the 33 year house in the family.