« Time Magazine Merges with The Onion | Main | Ma Deuce Goes to Sea. »

Leaving Roseton Avenue

They dropped it on me on the last day of the Sixth Grade. Expressed with only two words, it was contemplated conspiratorially between my parents without our knowledge. They secretly developed this plan one evening a few weeks earlier at the kitchen table after my sisters and I had gone asleep. While my sisters and I dreamt of the petty politics of the schoolyard, my parents had decided on a course of action that would have consequences in all of our lives for a generation. There was no more thought to discuss this major life event with my sisters and I, than there would be by most people to discuss such a thing with their pets.

“We’re moving”, they said. Two simple words, and that’s all there was to it. It wasn’t a discussion of what the move would net us as a family in terms of its necessity, or what the adult problem was that caused the move to become necessary in the first place. It was just a simple straightforward fact of action, put into two words by my mother with extreme precision. “We’re Moving” she said, and move we did. There was no discussion, debate or contemplation. As kids, we were self-absorbed, we could only see what it meant to us personally, and not the agony that had caused the need to move to occur in the first place. For me, the words “ We’re Moving” were not unfamiliar. With the exception of those four years, my family and I had moved nearly every year, sometimes twice in the same year. I had learned the art of not being too friendly with my classmates or getting too comfortable with the teachers. I had learned the necessity of not unpacking.

My problem was that I had let down my guard. In the comfort of living in the same place for more than one year, I had unpacked. I had made friends, I had ‘made my bones’ in the playground battlefield. I had found a home. I had established myself and within the triangle shaped universe bounded by Centralia, Pioneer and Del Amo Boulevards, I was the kid who liked airplanes way too much, the kid who navigated the San Gabriel River Channel from Lakewood to Seal Beach, the kid who beat the bully Lance Herrigan to a bloody pulp( and enjoyed every minute of it), I was the kid so maniacal, he broke his arm playing soccer (a game played specifically and with purpose, with no hands at all).

And now, with two words and a snap of the fingers, I once again found myself "moving".

I didn’t get a chance to say goodbye to the friends I had made in the four years we lived on Roseton Ave. My parents made their announcement to us after we had returned home from school and my Dad had come home from work. I knew that something was up when the living room of our house was filled with empty cardboard boxes. Throughout my life I’ve learned to dread cardboard boxes with the dread that the sight of sandbags gives to former flood victims or the way ER Nurses knowingly dislike Saturday nights, when there is a full Moon. I went to school that morning planning out the monumental leap to the 7th grade with my friends, I ended the day dealing with the heartless logistics of moving my possessions to another town far away that I had only visited once. What would stay, what would go, what was important, what was expendable, it was all the functions in the cold calculus of moving, played out in the bedroom of the place I had mistakenly thought was my home, but was really just another temporary camp. If you have ever moved, you know that no matter how well planned or executed, every move results in a loss. Something you deeply valued always gets left behind or broken. It’s in the calculus of moving, there’s no way to avoid it. You learn to expect it. You do your best to limit it, but it’s a guarantee that it will happen. No matter how well planned, something will be lost, and I’ve also learned that there’s no way to predict what it is you will lose.

You can move your things from place to place, but you can’t take what you put into a place with you. In the four years we were there on Roseton Ave, My dad and I had put up wallpaper, replaced plumbing, a front lawn and a rock walkway along the side of the house to the backyard. All hours of labor spent on someone else’s house as we were renters but it all made the house more livable for us. Today, there’s someone in a house in Lakewood California with a rock walkway that knows nothing of the summer that my father and I labored to turn what had been a siding of mud and dirt into something more serviceable. To them, it’s always been there and always will be. It was not until we made it so. One summer, my dad and I filled a truck with rock and concrete and converted what was dark slime and mud into a liveable patio. Please enjoy the fruits of our past labor current renters, that’s what we’d hope you’d do with it...

The rock walkway would not be coming with us, nor the wallpaper or paint or plumbing. It would stay with the house. The house was not ours, it was rented, as would be all the houses I lived in until I bought my own at the age of 30. All of our possessions would have to fit in the ‘68 Chevy truck that was my father’s main possession and the core of his persona. For a solid week, we fit and refit, changed and stacked and redirected the goods and possessions we had acquired in the time we had been at the house on Roseton Avenue. All of it under the close inspection of my father, the master mover and knot artist of his time. In my Fathers universe, you were simply not a man unless you could master knots and ropes and all other men were automatically suspect as to their abilities. All the boxes my sisters and I packed were inspected for its proper loading and placement on the truck. In spite of all the disruption of placing everything we owned into cardboard boxes taken from the back of grocery stores and then deciding what should go and what should stay, there was no fighting or arguing. My father’s word was law. There was no debate or discussion. He was fair and understanding when he could be but in the end the mission would be accomplished above all things. There was no room for sentiment in the bed of a Chevy, in the end, everything except the family itself was expendable and we knew it. On two previous occasions we had moved in the middle night to avoid the landlord and had quite literally, lost everything. We were put out and bothered that things were as such, but we knew that it could be much worse. This was bad, but it was not the worst. The worst would come later, only we didn’t know it at the time...

After seven days, we were packed, and it was done. We sat in the driveway, My Mom and my sisters in the Lincoln and I sat in my designated spot to the right of my father in the front seat of the truck. We sat and watched as my father stood in front of us,alone, on the long driveway as he looked back at the shell of a house that was just the week before, our home. We sat and watched, as he stood alone in the long driveway with his back to us. He stood there in his black boots, straight-legged Levis and simple white t-shirt. His white Budweiser fedora style hat in one hand, slowly smoking a last Benson and Hedges silently stroking his red-blonde goatee as he looked at what after all was said, had been his home as well. I always wondered what he saw when he looked back at the little house on Roseton, standing there in the open carport, his family and everything he owned in the world packed into one truck and a car just a few feet behind him. Three girls, one boy, a wife and a stack of cardboard boxes placed on the bed of his truck; the truck, made in Detroit, bought used and kept running by a man born just down the road in San Pedro who was now using it to move to body and soul to Sacramento. For just a moment there on that driveway, he must’ve been the loneliest man in the world with no one to carry the weight of it all but he himself. For far too long I thought him eager to leave, and blamed him for it. It’s only as of late that I’ve begun to understand the desperation he must’ve felt on that day. He never let on the pain it must’ve caused him. He just did his job and made sure we did ours.

We drove down Roseton Ave. for the last time, over the bump in the road, past the homes of friends we would never see again, past the places we had celebrated Christmas, Halloween parties and Cub Scout Den meetings, where we had played endless games of “army”. Past Willow Elementary and all I had survived there. At the end of the street was the Junior High that I would never attend. That school and the loss of it would haunt me as the ghost of a life that “might have been” but would never be. We turned left and were on to the freeway, and I would not return to Lakewood for another 10 years, by that time it would be to all still in Lakewood as if I had never been there at all.

Our destination was 500 miles to the north. Sacramento, a place I knew nothing about and had only visited once before. My mother’s grandfather had died there the year before and my mother had decided it was important for us to be near her grandmother. My grandfather had moved there because the fishing in the lakes and rivers was apparently very good. I had never fished and could not have cared less about the prospects of fishing. Here I was, watching my whole life growing smaller in the rear view mirror, because a man I hardly knew had admired the fishing in a far off lake and decided to move there, and then had the bad timing to die after he arrived there, leaving his widow lonely for the company of family, yet unwilling to leave her husband behind in the grave, causing his granddaughter to want to move there to solve "the problem". If he had died when they lived in Gardena just a few years earlier, we would still be in the house on Roseton Ave. Timing, as they say about most things in life, is everything. A man’s simple decision to improve his fishing prospects had the unintended consequence of disrupting my entire life. It wasn't planned that way, it just happened, again, like most things in life.

It was not how I had planned to spend my summer in 1972, but there it was. I went to school one day, and the world was changed for me before I came home. For weeks before they had announced it, they had been plotting the move. It wasnt just the move itself but the deception, although innocent and honest, that bothered me deeply. It would be years before I would trust my parents again. You see, in every move, you lose a little something. In this move, I lost the ability to trust my parents. Until this move, despite everything, I had managed to keep the faith, but after this move I could no longer see the logic or the sense of it. The loss I faced from this move lives on with me even today.

It’s been 30 years since that move. Today, I still have two things to remind me of that time, a propeller from a WWII Drone aircraft and a deep resentment towards two people who were really just making the best of a bad situation. While I’m not going to give up the prop for anything, it might be time for the sixth grade boy inside of me to find a way to let the folks off the hook for their acts from three decades ago.

Posted @ December 19, 2004 07:26 PM | Project 2

Posted by: roberto at December 19, 2004 08:38 PM

Posted by: Frank Martin at December 19, 2004 09:59 PM

Posted by: bkw at December 20, 2004 09:42 AM

Posted by: DC at December 22, 2004 01:48 PM