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.
