Moving

move. v. to change in position from one point to another; to follow some specified course; to stir the emotions.

                                                                         I

ginkgos never forget

My favorite dictionary, which has remained nearby on various desks and tables in a number of rooms and homes over forty years, devotes seven inches to the verb, move. Nowhere in those seven inches is there a warning about why one might not even attempt to do so, and maybe there should be. But, we would ignore it, I'm sure, out of curiosity, or just because we must do what we must do, sometimes when we least want to do it, but also, on occasion, at just the right time. We don't get to decide these things, no matter the size our car, bank account, or ego; we just get to think that we do, because we're human and because we're inherently silly.

Sometimes in life, we really do get what we wish for: the girl or boy, that perfect job, the last- second goal, the house to die for. Before the dream plays out, we suffer. Awake at night, on too many nights, we stare out the window from our bed at the red light on the corner; the headlights of a turning car shine on us, as if God has answered our plea, but it won't be that night, or the next, or even the next.

Walking the dog in the dark late on another night ,we reach out to touch the bark of a beloved gingko tree, as we might reach out from the platform to someone we love who is departing on a train too soon. "Don't go yet," our fingers seem to be spelling out in braille. For, in love for people and homes, we are indeed blind.

But, we've had one more autumn than we supposed, when the yellow ginkgo leaves mixed with the crimson ones from the japanese maple, forming a path up the stairs, little buddhist monks ascending. And that is a very good thing to have had.



                                                                             II

Little Monks

These wishes come in their own time, and while you are waiting and waiting, you discover things that you had forgotten or never knew. You will open an old wooden box with rope handles and find treasure: a brother's first baseman's mitt; an old Jack Kramer from camp; another like it in a green 1962 canvas cover, still perfect in its press, gut intact; hockey pucks and a well-used mouthguard.

Old

Did someone say books? A regular Strand on each floor, musty cellar to vast attic, many not even on the library shelves, where there are about 1200. Almost all keepers there. So, you must donate, discard, dust each one you save, then box, bag, stack and carry every last blessed one of them. All your life, you've loved books from the very first two -a Grossett & Dunlap Riders of The Purple Sage and a Doubleday orange Kipling - and you will come mighty close to not wanting to see or hold another book...ever again, but it will pass, while you chose the 100 or so that will fit snuggly on the new shelves.



And, you stand in the kitchen, looking at the big old Paris clock and think: where in the world will we put that?

In fact, you also sit on the floor of the new place, months before you will move and wonder what it will be like to live here. Where will this and that go? Will the TV work over the fireplace and mantle? Will the dining room table from our old, old house work again in this one? And, where, oh where will we fit all of the things, generations of things, in 2500 sq ft. that lazed about so easily in 6,000? Yet, you love this new place in a way that is hard to describe, perhaps because you have not yet let yourself fully love it for fear of offending the memories still residing in the other place you've loved much longer.

And, where will that clock go?

                                                                          III

Last Train, 35 Mins.


Where some home browsers hear noise, you hear sounds: trains arriving and departing, tooting; especially the diesels, and the last train departing GCT at 1:40am, hopefully with a son or daughter on it and your friends' too, and its arrival at exactly 2:40am; you count the ten minutes until you hear the front door open. Glorious, safe sound.

Oh joyous moment, on that first night in the new place, when you hear the train toot at the new nearby station together. Ecstasy of a kind.

The big clock ticks in the new place, but the hands will not move, as if time has actually stopped and you are stuck in between one universe and another.



                                                                        IV

New

Where other visitors saw and heard traffic and dust, you witnessed the world going by on ancient and new roads outside the old gate.

Again, you rejoice one morning while showing the dog her newly appointed path, as you hear the traffic on the Turnpike and it sounds just the same as it used to, at least in your imagination, like waves constantly breaking on a shore.

Boxes get filled, trucks get filled, a new cellar is filled with what got emptied from another one. Too many clothes try to get into smaller closets, like one who has not been exercising trying to get into that favorite suit or dress. Well, we 'll have to start feeding these closets!

And one day, one amazing day, after near-panic, actual panic, fear of this and that and an exhaustion you've never quite felt before except when someone close had died, after sleeping like the proverbial baby...it is over. You've moved. You begin to recognize a kind of buoyancy that you've been missing.

Good As Old

You go downstairs and into the new library, push the minute hand of the big clock in a certain way, and, it begins to move, one minute at a time, and keeps on moving, and so do you.