Over Easy:Time To Move On
My daughter and I went to see The War on Drugs at the Greek Theater in October 2017 two weeks after Tom Petty died. In an understated tribute, the band played “Time to Move On“ from Petty‘s “Wildflowers“ album. We’d seen one of the last Tom Petty shows at the Hollywood Bowl and it reminded me how his songs reveal layers through time. On this occasion, “Time to Move On” could have been about moving on from this world.
I’m moving, in the terrestrial way, so of course I started with a playlist (link below). It features Hank Snow, Janis Joplin, Ry Cooder, Carole King along with Tom Petty, so you know it’s good.
It’s been said that the stress of moving is right up there with death of a loved one. I’m not sure about that, but it is truly awful. I’m moving and I didn’t have to do it. I chose to turn my life inside out, inhale years of dust devils, and embrace bubble wrap. On the upside, I located the missing J from my Scrabble game. I’m better prepared than I used to be, but Marie Kondo still winces when she hears my name.
When you mention to someone that you’re moving, they get that look like they’re recalling a bad experience with seafood. It’s not that much fun. And for some reason, people persist in regarding it as an event, like something that’s done in a day, rather than the tortuous saga that it is. Like grief, there are stages of moving. It starts with the best of intentions – “I am purging! This will be so good! Like a juice cleanse with furniture!” But it’s not long before those ideas are revealed to be the shallow workings of a deluded mind. We the moving travel through many of the same stations, starting with “I don’t remember buying this!”, which morphs into “who’s shit is this anyway?” So many cheese knives. It’s not long before you land at the “perfectly good“ stage because it applies to so many things – the corkscrew that looks like a Modigliani, the shoe trees, the Moody Blues biography.
Why? Why move? My home wasn’t being torn down. It remains untouched by quakes, fires and infestation as far as I know. No, I just needed a change. Most people would be satisfied with pink highlights or a romantic holiday in Uruguay, but no, I had to move.
It’s not like I have a shortage of experience in this most heinous of acts. When I was a kid, I went to seven different schools, which, as you can imagine, involved moving. It was the same routine every time – my father would swivel sideways in his chair at the dining room table over dessert, saying with barely contained excitement that he had something to tell us. We were moving across town, across the country. It didn’t matter – we had no say, no power and my mother suffered in silence alongside us. How many times was I the dumb new kid at yet another school? I remember staring through the wet leaves plastered against the windshield, my dad listening to CFRB with their funereal playlist as we made our way towards the latest in a string of new educational opportunities. Nausea. Dread. That moment when they escort you from the gym to your homeroom where everyone is talking about what they did in the summer and all the cool seats are taken and as you’re being introduced to the class, they look at you like you possess all the charm of a lima bean fart.
So, as you can see, I bring a lifetime of unwanted experience to moving. But just when I think I’m getting good at it, the hair on my arm gets stuck in the packing tape and I think about getting up and walking out, leaving everything I’ve ever known behind.
When I think about moving, I think of my dad. Maybe because he was involved in the best move I’ve ever done and the worst. And even the latter turned out well. I was 15, and we were living in Toronto. I had friends. Girls and music were figuring prominently. That sick feeling welled up quickly when my dad swiveled in his chair at the dining room table, and I thought I heard the words “Moving to Winnipeg.“ A stony silence doesn’t do it justice. More like the wailing of 1000 tortured souls. Maybe because I was the oldest, and the one most deeply affected by this startling turn of events, my dad knew he needed me in his corner. That hyping the swimming pool at the Holiday Inn in Sarnia wasn’t going to cut it. Not this time. So to bribe me into accepting relocation to the ‘Peg, my dad gave me my first guitar. It was an arch top F-hole Silvertone from Simpsons. And it was the best thing I had ever seen. And while the rest of them frolicked in the pool at the Holiday Inn in Sarnia oblivious to the dark fate that awaited them on the other side of the Manitoba border, I sat in the hotel room literally playing my guitar until my fingers bled. No lie, no exaggeration. Our last stop upon leaving Toronto had been my aunt and uncle’s place. My cousin John, who got a guitar earlier that year, showed me how to play “Can’t Buy Me Love“ and “The House of the Rising Sun“. That was more than enough.
The best move was from California to Paris with my wife and daughter. We decided we needed an adventure, and traded in the redwood fence with the blushing bougainvillea, the darting lizards, the millions of Monarchs, the hiss of sprinklers, and the scent of the jasmine at dusk for an explosion of cheese, the ancient stone streets, daily walks through the market , the chestnut trees at the Luxembourg Gardens, and always the river running through the day. The night we left the canyon was garbage night, fortuitously, because the movers left behind 23 large bags of trash in a house that in a matter of hours would no longer be ours. My dad took the wheel and we careened down the canyon stopping at every house that had space in their garbage can, arousing considerable suspicion from my now former neighbours, as we laughed giddily through 23 bags of garbage.
If you’re moving, hang in there and if you’re moving to Paris keep the cheese knives.
“It’s time to get going, time to move on.”
Here's the link to the "Time to Move On" Spotify playlist.
