During the past four months, I had declared several times that a GREAT MOVE had been decided upon. The first announcement was that I was moving to Norway – to be an expatriat socialist — and I even got a Norweigan friend’s real name, address, and phone number to use in an application for immigration. Norway was too expensive, it ended up, and someone said it is cold as Alaska there in winter. Talking to my therapist one day, I suddenly realized my European plan had, all along, been more of a beginning gesture at actually leaving the city where I’ve been for over 20 years. At the time, though, it had to start out as leaving a whole continent. Then there was Canada: I felt this was where I’d always wanted to immigrate to, anyway — somehow I am a North American before a U. S. citizen. It seems, though, that no country wants disabled people over 50, with only enough money to maybe afford another five years of life without an income. Since this time, I have learned that hoardes of wealthy Americans are moving to Europe. It’s as if they have decided they don’t want to be on a sinking ship.
Another month went by. It looked like I would have to remain in the U. S. First I thought of the small, vibrant towns along the Oregon coast. I would leave the midwestern north for a small town where there were no longer the extremes of heat and ice. I would forego any kind of suburb whatsoever. How amazing it would be to live again in the northwest, the misty green glow. But then someone told me there are meth-heads all over Oregon. I didn’t ask questions, right away remembering the only meth user I knew about personally actually had lived in Oregon. It was this woman’s younger sister; she had become addicted to meth as a young wife and mother of 21. She lost her child and husband, but remained a meth addict, eventually managed by a public health program . She had kept employed all these years, to the age of 45 or so, as a housepainter who worked with a master housepainter. Finally, I thought of Washington state. I really didn’t think at all about Seattle, where I lived for five years in the 70s. It has twice the population it had when I left in 1981. There are stories about bad Seattle traffic. And of course is the added expense of living on the coast. I would live in maybe Bremerton, I thought, north of Seattle….I went on the computer. There I found, on a message board, a testimony as to why a woman was leaving Bremerton — uncaring and too high priced — for Olympia, “where rent is affordable and there are plenty of hippies.”
So I’d decided to move to Olympia. Why not? I liked the thought of hippies. When I left Olympia, I had been attending the experimental college there and had tired of everyone seeming what I called then “new age.” I had left for Seattle to punk out, go to Ramones concerts and smoke cigarettes without everyone inquiring about my self-destructive behavior. Maybe now, by 2010, Olympians would be less lockstep as hippies than they had been 30-some years ago.
Within a week’s time, I was showing my online friends photos of apartments I might be able to rent near Olympia. I was gathering excitement about moving in the spring as the days went on, talking all about it with all my friends. Then one night, I was speaking with a women I’d known a while who was a Matis native Canadian. She had told me she was a medicine woman, and smoked a special pipe. I had found her, mostly, psychologically aware and insightful, and very low-key. I was telling her again about not having left my apt in three months, even if they were months of ice and snow. I even told her about problems I was having with my weight, depression, and finding myself debilitated by lack of exersize and normal activity.
This woman finally said to me, “this is called geography.” She explained that alcoholics, which she had once been, play “geography” all the time. A person has a life full of problems. Instead of approaching their problems, they find it easier, for whatever reason, to simply move, but then there they are: in a new location with the same basic problems they had brought with them.
I realized that I had, many times, employed geography to help me with change when I wasn’t willing to work on it in any other way. I have lived all over the U. S. — the south, midwest, southwest, northwest, New England, and back to the midwest, right in the middle of Chicago. As a child, though I mostly lived with my parents and brother in suburbs of cities, I spent every summer on my grandparents’ farm in rural Tennessee. I can live in a big city, a small town, or maybe even in something close to wilderness. I might even make it in Alaska in winter. I would not make it, though, in a suburb, in the sun nor shadow of parking lots and malls, housing developments, haphazard commercialism for miles and miles. And I would not make it in Florida, which is one hot, humid, semi-tropical suburb. My mom is forever telling me it is time to move in with her in her little house in Florida. I could not live with a parent I allow so easily to try absorbing my life into her own. And near her is my republican, younger brother — the proginy who runs the family business, manages all finances, and is the executor of my mother’s will. The drama of parental favoritism and sibling rivalry has never been more wacky! My brother, a golfer, who’s probably never read a book in his life, is like a villan of women in a Jane Austin novel: a biggoted, moral force.
Much has transpired since I was first daydreaming of becomming Scandanavian. I made a reservation for a moving van in March. The next day was when I realized it was all geography. I have to become active and conditioned, get over my social phobia, and find a reson to live despite my exhaustion, chronic pain, and lack of local friends. First I told myself I would need six months, and that I could move in the fall. Later, though, I realized I need a whole year. So the moving date is set for a year from next month, when the lease is up. I keep forgetting to mail the signed lease to the landlord. I have so much trouble keeping papers straight — I don’t even have a desk anymore. My books – this past two years out of boxes and on shelves the first time in 12 years – they will have another year to be on shelves and actually available. And then I will move. And hopefully I’ll still have room for my books. And it won’t be geography.
