Stirring the Pudding: Singing a Sad Song Sort Of

Singing a Sad Song Sort Of

I'm not sure what to call our last six months, but it has been a major departure from our previous life. Embarking on a new adventure seems a touch too romantic and the end of the line seems too pessimistic, so let's settle on the more neutral it was time for a change. Change, of course, is the norm for all of us even if we are making a home in one place for over fifty years. Proof of this begins with the blog you are reading this on. It has asserted from the beginning that life goes only forward, never back. You cannot un-stir a pudding once you have stirred the raspberry jam of living into it.

My recent review of Jacqueline Winspear's A Sunlit Weapon looked at change particularly as it impacts place. Winspear cites Masie Dobbs' old teacher who said, “Place is a crucial factor in our work—and places leave their mark in the same way that a human being can touch us. We have to make our peace with place, with the locations where we have spent time. We must consider how we’ve been affected by being present in a certain spot—and how the place itself is changed by what has come to pass.”

Oh so true! As the Covid shut-down proceeded in the last two years, it became more evident that my wife and I were fighting that eternal battle with age. We had to quit tending our small garden and hire out the mowing of the lawn. The stairs to the second floor in the house seemed to be getting steeper and higher. Never mind the extra flight to the attic. And the work PLACES my wife and I had inhabited were increasingly populated with new faces that we had never worked with and did not know. Even though both of us had survived some major medical issues in the past, we were having to make more appointments with more doctors than before. Finally, a number of our long time friends began to move from their places in our town to places closer to their children.

Was there a single straw that broke the camel's back? No. It was just was the load on the aging camel's back was getting harder to carry. With that in mind I think we made our own change of place at the most opportune time for us. We were not forced into a series of quick decisions by any kind of family crisis or health emergency. We were not being pressured by our children to move someplace where our diminished capacities could be better serviced. We were both still generally mentally competent and had passed driver's license exams recently.

Even accepting all of that, we still tried to hedge our bets. We committed to renting an apartment in a senior community on a monthly no lease arrangement. As we worked on downsizing the material acquisitions that cluttered our old home, we began to spend more time in the new place. If things did not work out, we could return to our previous surroundings without too much emotional or financial strain.

Happily, I think enough time has passed to report that things have worked out quite well. We are nine months into a series of changes that are fast becoming our new permanence. Our move has taken us into a far more urban area than before and closer to our daughter, who is a teacher like her parents and lives only ten minutes away now.

In trying to keep my own sights on how the "sense" of place is important, I began to think about some of the items that symbolized change in lives. For instance, one of our very first acts was to visit the post office and file a change of address form. We had filed temporary changes or holds many times over the years as we wintered in Arizona or took extended trips abroad. But this was the first time since 1963 that our address change was permanent. This was a real new place. It led us to make a list of all the entities who needed to know we were moving. This first list contained our kids, our close friends, our bank, and of course the service areas of natural gas, electricity, and the water, sewer, recycling, and garbage pickup operations. Along the way we also noted people and organizations that we had no interest in informing of our departure. I trust you are pleased to note that if you are reading this, you are safely on the first list.

We were quite surprised that many of the second list members easily and quickly re-found our new place almost before we had moved. Political groups, charities, and people selling everything from miracle cures to ways to make a million dollars by buying crypto currency seem to be impressively efficient at finding us anew. Their missives poured in at our new abode and often included little stickies imprinted with our new address. "Use these to make it easier to send us more money faster" was their theme song. How they found us so soon again, I know not.

Other changes symbolizing our new location began to accumulate. We had to get right with the government and the medical establishment. Social security and Medicare were like climbing Mount Everest without oxygen. Days would go by as phone calls were deferred by the bureaucratic equivalent of Microsoft's Blue Screen of Death--"All our operators are busy. Your call is important so stay on the line while we play you the worst possible version of canned music we could find." Several hours later, long after every operator has certainly called it a day and gone home, we would hang up in despair and decide to try again tomorrow. Dogged diligence with the government is absolutely necessary whenever you decide to move.

We are thankful that the offices of Iowa's state government were more amenable. I think that is because you are going to give them money rather than trying to get them to continue sending you money that you had earned over the years. In quite short order we got new Iowa plates for our car and received our new Iowa driver's licenses. These acts seem small, but they put an observable visual stamp on our move.

That is beside the fact that in the first week after getting our new license plates, we almost lost our car a couple of times because we were looking for a white vehicle with Illinois plates on it. Do you know how many white cars there are in every parking lot in Iowa?

Then there is my new driver's license. It stares at me every time I open my wallet. A fresh horrible photo looks back at me and under it is that strange new address. An even more powerful reminder of change was that my new license no longer carried a "Glasses Required" notation. Eye surgery has given me a 20/20 view of the world without the necessity of the lenses I had worn for the last seventy years. That, I tell you, was a real change. I am still waking up in the morning and reaching for the non-existent specs that were always just within reach on the bedside table.

Another important change for our intellectual and mental health was the acquisition of a new library card. I am pleased to report that libraries are still truly client centered operations. You just show them a piece or two of first class mail addressed to you at your new address and a library card is issued zip zip with no muss, no fuss, and no bother. Free access to thousands of books, magazines, and videos are opened to you in a flash. What a splendid welcome to a new city. The federal government might take some lessons here.

The greatest change of all has to be the selling of our family home and the leaving of our many friends and neighbors. We bought our house in 1975. It sat on a tree surrounded corner lot on a street that reminded me daily that I, a theatre guy, was living on Broadway. The house had a two car garage, a nice kitchen, a formal dining room, a large living room with a fireplace and built in bookcases at one end.

To get to the second floor you used a magnificent solid oak stairway that remains something to kill for.

On the second floor there were three bedrooms, a sewing room, and another bedroom that we soon converted into to a full scale study complete with bookcases and old fashioned office desk.

The house also had a full attic, which became ever fuller as the years went by. That space kindly accepted all the assorted detritus that had worn out its welcome on the floors below. Plus, there was room for the remnants of several past places long left. There was the mirror from my parent's living room as well as the baby book my mother faithfully compiled on me. There were cartons of crystal and dishes from my wife's mother and grandmother, as well as my wife's mother's dressing table and mirror. And there were toys ranging from my old standup slate and stamp collection to my wife's storybook dolls and our own children's matchbook cars and dolls. Although most of the children's books had been passed on or given away, there were tons of photos--some in albums and some in antique frames. Many of them were unlabeled and are of places and people who lost the battle of identity to the passage of time. All in all our attic, and I suspect yours if you have one, was a large dusty museum of other places in other times.

Let's return to the lower regions now. We raised our children in the rooms of this house and lived on in it long after the kids had left the nest. More unusual, in the current world of constant movement, is that my wife and I owned only one home. The buying of it was a singular place event in our life and the selling of it became another. Here it is around the time of purchase in 1975. It was built in 1906 and through the years we resisted the covering of its grand old Queen Anne exterior with aluminum. The 2 1/2 inch cedar siding allowed for a rich softness of appearance and a graceful bump out that helped separate the first and second floor by creating a nice horizontal dividing point for a tall house. The soffit overhang and its decorations put in another line to separate the second floor from the attic and roof. We retained all of this because covering a house with metal generally tends to erase such distinguishing features.

The big trees that surrounded the house when we bought it are all gone now--victims of disease and ferocious midwestern storms. The scrubby pine you can see in in front of the porch is now taller than the house and threatens to take over the entire front yard. As you can see the house was a dreary white when we moved in. I personally painted it a mellow sea breeze blue around 1977 and that has been its color ever since. By the time the fifth re-painting rolled around (I only did the personal painting twice.) we had long ago renamed the home our "old blue monster." Below are two current views. The first was taken this spring and the other a few winter's ago. I hope you will agree that it presents a noble presence.

The interior, where most of the memories reside, has evolved a good deal over time. Old furniture was replaced with new, the kitchen was modernized, walls were re-papered to change figures of children's toys to more staid patterns, the bathroom now claims a walk in shower, etc. We did not take a great deal of our old furniture with us to our new apartment. We bought a new bedroom set and a smart TV to replace our stupid one with the tiny screen. We retained some familiarity by putting some of our precious pictures back up on the new walls and displaying some of our favorite pottery. As you can see my Wisconsin roots are now celebrated on the big screen. "Go Pack!"

Even though we moved into our new digs last fall, we did feel that moving physically was enough trauma for both of us. Thus we made the conscious decision to wait for spring before putting our house up for sale. I suspect now that this was just another sign of hedging our bets. All through the winter we still were holding out for the possibility of going home again if we had to. When the big decision to sell was reached this spring, it happened fast and furious. We had a whiz of a realtor and she helped us complete the sale quickly at what we felt was a fair price in the current market. An internet auctioneer was hired to remove and sell all the remaining household goods.

My large collection of theatre books and plays mostly went off to the college library and to former colleagues, but "Empty rooms Empty tables" from the musical "Les Misérables" kept playing in my head as the auctioneer emptied the place to take to his warehouse and showroom.

At the end only the memories remained. Past sorrows mixed with joys, and periods of sickness morphed into long stretches of health. The strongest feelings were of the thousands of daily departures and and returns that house had seen. The "Byes" and "Hi, I'm home's" that came from all the residents as they left or returned from work or school, or outings or play rehearsals, or events or travels seemed to float about in the now empty rooms. The globe keeps turning and the places abroad from England to Finland, Japan, and Egypt added their special sights and sounds to our home in that small town on the prairie.

As the closing approached the house seemed to slide slowly toward the same ambiance it had when we had moved into it some fifty years ago. Our memories would now be replaced by the lives of the new owners.

The rooms became almost barren.

And then totally empty.

The living room was poised to await the sounds of new music and new conversations.

Just prior to the closing we placed the house keys and garage door openers in a manila envelope that would be turned over as soon as the final documents were signed. When that was accomplished, all that remained as we drove out of town, was this final exclamation point. I do not mind admitting that I shed a tear.