Falling Down the Hill

 

We moved a lot.

Over many blurry years while growing up,

I didn’t really think much about the world passing around me.

Only the merest of plans would float through my thoughts.

Little was permanent. We just followed the moving truck.

 

Along the way, a low-grade shame slowly crept into me,

like a fever of 99.4. I felt a little off from not having enough of something,

but not quite sure exactly what that something was.

Maybe it was not getting that other half stick of gum from mother,

or the skipped lunches replaced by a coke and a packet of peanuts. 

Sometimes I still dream about whole sticks of gum, hamburgers, or a real Schwinn bike.

My friends, thunder and lightning storms,

did manage to follow me to each new house. I still love them so.

They, like the moves and cardboard boxes, were the constants in my life.

Sequential memories seemed to start for me in Houston.

We finally ate hamburgers the day we moved in.

They were served on waxy paper set on moving box tables, and it felt special.

Then Kennedy was shot, Kindergarten, smallpox and sugar-cubed polio vaccines all happened, and I even decided to call myself Alan for a while in first grade.

No one else was named Greg. It felt safer.

 

Dad found an old, discarded cheese barrel one day. It became a table

in each new living room after that. Once the furniture was in place, I would crawl

over to it and sniff the round hole in its side.

Always checking if it still reeked of its original occupant.

I got a belt with a buckle and then went to my first rodeo.

That Christmas, Santa brought me a used Wards bike that had belonged to a neighbor girl.

Never was quite sure how that worked out.

 

After Houston came L.A, then second grade back to TX, then third in LA.

Caddo Parish was home till Thanksgiving of sixth grade,

then it was off to Dallas.

 

In each new school I was introduced as

the new kid from somewhere else, standing in front of a room

full of eyes and faces that I didn’t know.

From one handhold to the next. Some safer than others.

Some friendlier, some not.

Roll the dice.

 

Towns faded in the rearview mirror. Around four I waved

goodbye to my first dog that we left in Wyoming.

On to the next sunrise ahead.

During sixth grade, and seven states

later, my next dog Charlie got hit by a car while we walked one afternoon.

 

That constant move from town to town set a rhythm in my head.

I heard it in the background.

I felt it in my stomach.

It was my soundtrack.

Playing over and over. Time to go.

 

As a younger version of me, the art of imagining, of planning or projecting

forward more than three steps down the path, was thrown out,

all from lack of use.

 

There were always new faces but not the real joy of knowing any of their secrets

or that hidden place that folks born there knew about, nor my place

in any one’s history very long.

I was just passing through.

A couple of thousand suns set, and I seldom wept for any of them.

 

That implanted, learned impatience lived in me for so long, demanding me

to hurry up, on to some vague Eden elsewhere over the horizon.

But it never told me where that was. Impatience still hangs around.

So many new address', classrooms, introductions,

moving boxes, Welcome Wagons, and expendable new names to learn

at the next new house. It was the thrill of anticipation more than

anything that seemed to get me through, that got me to buy in and move on.

 

Birthdays brought me weariness and settling for whatever

my arms could gather instead

of what could be.

My head had told me my plans didn’t change where I was going.

Just take what is there. Settle. The final option.

I forgot the taste of what I had wanted

and kept licking the same old thing, That thing left in my head.

Living and eating what was in my hands,

not my hopes or what I wanted from the menu.  

 

Till it was tasteless,

colorless, threadbare.