Perpetual Motion

I’ve been making noise about moving the family to Texas – Austin, specifically – where I have people and where more than ten musicians make a living. In fact, I’ve assembled a bulleted list of reasons to head south and west, all of them real and most of them probably viable to boot. Of course, if I were successful in my bid to convince my wife of the necessity of this move, I would be repeating a familial pattern: My parents moved when I was in my first several months of life, from San Diego to Stanford, in order for my father to attend law school. What I’m getting at here is that, even though my bulleted list is legitimate and probably full of important information for me spiritually, I probably need to be aware enough not to simply repeat this miniature family pattern. As I think about it, now, it occurs to me that my father’s parents were unusually mobile during his childhood, wintering in Florida and living the rest of the time in Highland Park, Illinois, in the lush suburbs north of Chicago. Not a lot of people did the snowbird routine in the 1940s, but the poor health of my grandfather and namesake was the impetus, his doctors having suggested that Florida’s climate could extend his life, if not save it. He died when my father was ten.

My mother’s parents, as luck would have it, moved several times during her young childhood. They started out in Albuquerque, New Mexico, moved to the Sierra Nevada foothills of Central California, and then settled in Madera, a more or less forlorn spot on the map in California’s Great Valley.

So much dislocation would have been highly unusual in the middle of the nineteenth century. In the middle of the twentieth, it was far less so, though still not exactly normal. In the twenty-first century, which I’ll have to call my own, dislocation is so normal as to be almost beyond notice, and yet I’m glad to be seeing that I don’t have to move, now or ever. It is not impossible that my daughter, like her mother, will spend the eighteen years before college living in a single town.

It is also not impossible that my daughter will grow up saying “Y’all.”