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Heraclitus is oft quoted as saying that the only constant in life is change. I would argue that there are more constants than that. The constant of the transcendence of love. The constant of the inevitability of death. The constant of the smoke detector chirping only in the middle of the night to alert you of a dead battery. The constant of the wild turkeys making a holy mess scratching up the front yard looking for dinner. The constant of the position of the stars in the night sky. But it is true that change happens with steadfast regularity.
I would say that I enjoy change, although it doesn’t happen as frequently in my life in recent years as it did when I was young. While in college, I moved around a lot. For a dozen years I never lived in one place more than ten months at a time. My philosophy was something like, “when the stove gets real dirty then it’s time to move.” I could fit everything I owned, including two cats and a dozen houseplants, in my car, which was an olive-green Volare station wagon. Actually, I didn’t have a car or even know how to drive until I was nearly twenty-two, when I moved to St. Louis to attend a PhD program in English at Washington University. After hearing from many people that I needed a car to live in the Midwest, and in the St. Louis area in particular, I decided to learn to drive. Before my move to St. Louis, while visiting my parents for a month before heading to Bread Loaf School of English in Vermont for the summer, I got my driver’s permit and had my mother take me out to practice. I learned to drive (more or less) in two weeks (without causing the death of Mom although I came close to it), passed the test, and bought the Volare. I wound up with that ridiculous vehicle because I wanted to buy a VW bus but my mother feared that, having just learned to drive, I wouldn’t be able to handle a VW bus because (as she said) the turning radius was different from that of a car. She thought I’d crash the VW bus. So, in a classic Jewish mom lifesaving move, she offered to buy me a used car instead if I bought something else. Since I needed a vehicle large enough to transport my belongings, she suggested a station wagon. She found the Volare. Wearing my patched hippie jeans and sporting my untamed mane of Jewish curls, I wound up improbably driving a starkly middle-class suburban vehicle that looked like something I had borrowed from my father. It’s just as well since I probably would have been pulled over every fifteen minutes by the cops if I drove a VW bus. For the next few years, behind the wheel of a giant motorized martini-olive, I kept dreaming about the VW bus that got away.
Once I met my husband Ron and had someone to clean the stove for me when it got dirty, I tended to stay put for longer. Then we got married and started a family, and that put an end to my wanderings. With two small children and another one on the way, we shot the moon in 1991 and moved from Berkeley to our forty acres of remote forest at McNab Ranch. That’s a famous family story, which many of my readers have heard already, including the part about the first night we were out on the land at our country home when my Chicago-born-and-bred husband turned to me and said, “Where the f--- are we?” That moment resulted in the creation of the where-the-heck-are-we sign that held pride of place on the road leading to our property for nearly two decades. My point is that I have never feared making big change. It’s good for the soul to shake things up now and then.
After our magical years raising the children at the Ranch, we moved in off the land. That move was precipitated by an emergency situation that made up my mind. One night at the Ranch, Ron’s blood sugar dropped dangerously low (he’s diabetic), the glucagon shot malfunctioned when I tried to use it, and I had to call 911. It took the ambulance half an hour to get to our house. Fortunately, Ron is still alive. But I said, “That’s it. We’re out.” We sold the property and moved less than a year later. Our house in town is five minutes from the ER. I have had to call an ambulance quite a few times in the thirteen years we have lived here and the paramedics can get here in less than five minutes. Sorry Grim Reaper, Ron’s a hard man to kill.
Why am I reflecting on changes and moves at this moment? Because in two weeks we move to Portland, Oregon after forty-three years in California. I anticipate loving my new life in the far Pacific Northwest; however, I will always consider myself a Californian and think of myself as a climate chaos refugee who fled the inferno. When we moved from Berkeley to the Ranch, we had to deal with a lot of craziness from the people who bought our Berkeley house because their realtor was as reasonable as a sack of cats. To cope with the stress and insomnia, Ron started watching a French children’s show broadcast out of Montreal that starred a talking pineapple puppet. When he woke up in the middle of the night, he would find the talking pineapple on the TV and watch an episode. The French-talking pineapple got him through the move (and gave him a somewhat-French accent for a few weeks, very sexy). Now he is coping with bouts of stress and insomnia by watching Steve Irwin swimming with sharks. This apparently calms him down. (The sharks do not speak French.) Perhaps he finds the vision of someone in more danger than himself soothing. Perhaps he identifies with a man encircled by deadly sea creatures. I have never understood how that man’s mind works. He keeps me guessing on purpose.
So this is the part where I say farewell to the beautiful land that I have loved. But don’t cry for me California because I am going to live near my grandsons. I doubt I will care so much about the weather, the landscape, the size of my new apartment, or the luxurious absence of the necessity to remain on evacuation warning for six months out of the year, because I will be too busy keeping a toddler from eating the crayons and chasing a three-year-old on a scooter around the apartment complex. As Obama said, “change we can believe in.” I’m down with that.
