And pack the old arm chair
Tell the china
To ask the silverware
To pray we find that
They speak the language thereAnd say good-bye to Carolina......Lyle Lovett, Goodbye to Carolina
We have a new parlor game. It's completely harmless..doesn't cost a dime...yet keeps us entertained on long car trips or during coffee breaks in the office. At least once a day, and frequently more often, an email appears with listings for a whole bunch of houses near or around the Lake of the Ozarks. Sometimes the houses are small and old and cheap; sometimes they are upper floor condos with big balconies overlooking the water; and sometimes they are monstrous vacation homes with docks and six bedrooms, decorated in an unmistakably generic yet tacky style that features pelican door knockers and shower curtains with sailboats. They are all fun, good for daydreaming on wind whipped afternoons when grit irritates your eyes and dust fills your ears. We are modest folk: not for us the vistas that top seven figures on mountain or beach. Best to aim low if one is going to aim at all. And it does no harm to look.
My dad must have subscribed to that notion. Every once in a while, he'd decide he wanted to move somewhere else, so we'd load into the car and drive to some other suburb and look at apartments or neighborhoods.
Picking up and moving out never struck me as the least bit odd. Everybody did it. Our subdivision had been built on bare dirt and populated mostly by young families just starting out on their own. At the end of every school year, some friends would leave to be replaced by a whole bunch of new kids when September came around. This was the Sixties, we were the end of the Boomers, cars were cheap, homes were plentiful, and people knew they could do better..somewhere else. Of course it would be our turn to move...it was only a matter of time.
Eventually, the discussions my parents must have had after our bedtime crystallized into actions. Instead of a summer vacation, we would have a "Moving Adventure"thanks to the U Haul trucks my dad rented. Laura and I were tasked with devising an efficient plan for loading the big pieces of furniture; we measured and drew and cut out paper representations of the love seat, the hutch, the dressers and trunks. We bid farewell to the black baby grand that had dominated our living room. I'm sure there were other items discarded or given away, but for the life of me I can't imagine what they were, only that the truck was packed to the gills and the metal shelving for my dad's radio equipment was tied to the back.
By this time in my life, after several trips west along the paths of the pioneers, I was enthralled with the Oregon Trail and the great American Westward expansion. In my imagination, our yellow U Haul equated favorably with a prairie schooner and a family on the road to a new life. If we made it down I-55 and Highway 54 with our teetering truckload of possessions, we'd arrive at our family's Oregon in Calloway county, Missouri. Other folks might use Mayflower, but we were rugged and self sufficient and moved ourselves.
That was my romantic notion anyway. After I helped hoss those self same possessions up the steep and narrow stairs, I might not have been so enthusiastic.
My mother's best friend, whose family had, it goes without saying, also moved before we did...to Beatrice, Nebraska, home of Homestead National Monument, wrote my mom a letter afterwards saying, in no uncertain terms, DON'T MOVE YOURSELVES! When I read it just last month, I had to laugh, having helped to move everyone in our family multiple times in the last decade and a half. There was another letter among my folks' things, one from our pastor in Illinois. He had come by the house to find us up and gone...
I know the process of packing up life and leaving was way more complicated for my parents than it was for me as a kid. Like the pioneers, I figured life would be better somewhere else and I looked forward to a new town and a new school. Our grandparents lived in Missouri and we loved to visit. Illinois was where we lived, but not permanent...not home. Even when our house sold, I never really missed it, not like places I have missed since that time.
Back then, we were all pioneers....
Go west young man while you still can
Before you're old and gray
Go west and make a better life
Than you could if you stayed
Lyle Lovett, Goodbye to Carolina
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