Thirty-Six Hours, Roughly

We were in our old house eleven years. That was plenty of time to add a few locks and have a few lock mechanisms go bust. The remodel we undertook some nine years ago added hot-water tanks that could be accessed from the outside. They, too, required locking door-knobs and keys. We never quite got around to keying all these doors to one master. You can just hear Mike the Half-Scot grumbling that what's the good of having a locksmith out for God knows how much money when you could just carry a half-dozen keys around. Consider it weight training.

So I carried a half-dozen keys around these many years. Two months ago, I shed most of them. Then I shed the key to the Wee Flat in Austin and the key to the Wee Cottage in Huntington and the key to Old Red, our rumbling Toyota pick-up. So now I'm down to this, the key to the Corolla that Mike won't let me get rid of (that man is always trying to improve my character) and the key to my hybrid bike's lock. Note that I've acquired a fast-tag for one of the local libraries to our new house and a fast-tag to Bottles and Cases, the only liquor store on Long Island with prices I can stand to pay. I hope the Corolla doesn't become too much like my Dad's old Lincoln, which he said had a mind of its own and would always turn towards Pinkie's, the closest liquor store beyond the Tom Green county line, whether he was thinking of booze or not.


Now I'm down to two keys and trying to dampen the melancholy of leaving friends, family, and a fair city, by remembering that the friends and family will have to come visit me often. Hey, I'll be on Long Island, where mafia heavies are two a penny and if my arm-twisting won't work, surely their's will. And I have to remember, too, that the Austin I'm actually leaving behind is one that left us all long ago. Our symbols of that local feel vanish rapidly these days. I'm leaving the Austin of chain stores, sprawl, and a Barton Springs once clear as glass and now murky as dishwater, thanks to the pen of one Governor George W. Bush, may he be plunged into poverty and may I live to see it.

We're only half-way into our goodbyes, but I'm already abstaining from them wherever possible. I picked up Jesse from the first of The Final Sleepovers, and watched her say goodbye to the girls who had been her close friends in the Kealing Band. Well, I tried to watch. I don't know what the parents of these girls thought when I bolted, sobbing, from the living room. I've already told other parents not to be offended that I have no plans to come to the door.

It's funny, but over the last few months, I've wondered if I was turning into a monster because I was more than a little resentful of having to stay in Austin while Jesse finished eighth-grade. For her, we undertook far more stress than was necessary, and did it while I was undergoing radiation. Other, less cowed, less yuppiefied parents, I thought, would have just told their kid to suck it up, we're moving. I resented the fact that we weren't free to be that kind of parent.
But seeing my Jesse say goodbye to her friends, I found myself wishing I could cut another body part rather than suffer this pain. I could no more hurt her than I could drown a puppy. I can resent my own nature, perhaps, but it's hardly her fault that I am what I am. I think she has already forgiven us.

So the dread and the excitement mounts. I wrote last time about the dreads. Mike and I have started calling it "Armistice Syndrome", the feeling that even though peace has been declared and we're about to ship out, we, we will be the poor chaps who get felled by a stray bullet or an exotic infection. I will leave my sister's early tonight, eager to miss the drunk drivers. I will drive like an old lady going to church. I will not believe that it's just a little bit of turbulence.

But the excitement is as real as the dread. Soon, soon, when I get a new haircut, I won't have to share it with Mike by sending him a picture from my I-phone. He can actually see me! And I can actually see him.