Night moves
On the night before my fifteenth birthday my parents told me that my family would be evicted from the home where I had lived since I was born.
My mother sat me and my brother and sister down on the big stone hearth. The sun was low gold in the sky, and outside the window behind the hearth I could see the white honeysuckle winding around the deep green Bay tree that shaded our house.
“We need to gather our things… we are moving… tonight,” my mother said in a voice that drifted between here and somewhere else.
“Move? Tonight…? Why?”
It was the first time either of my parents had told us. It was the first time my heart was broken.
All night, I shuffled up and down the walkway, under the Bay tree, between the rooms in my house and the driveway carrying armfuls of GI Joes, plates, Legos, dresser drawers, towels, photo books, Bibles, Easter baskets, a light up nativity set that had goats and camels and shepherds and a big north star that plugged into the top of the stable. No plans for a moving truck had been made, and there were no moving boxes; I had never moved, so I didn’t think to ask.
Through the night, my sister, brother, mom and I piled the things that had marked our lives in heaps on our round gravel driveway. In the pre-dawn darkness of the early morning of my fifteenth birthday, a UHaul truck appeared. Its headlights shone on our mountain of life detritus. My father stepped down from the truck and pulled up the rear gate. We filled the truck with piles that corresponded to rooms in our house. Lacking containers, laundry room soap jugs rolled and tumbled in with Lincoln Log sets and Narnia novels. Porcelain teacups hastily wrapped in sweaters pinged and crunched across the riveted metal floor of the truck.
When each pile was as high as we could manage, I climbed my lanky frame into the passenger seat and sat in silence as my father drove to the house where we would live.
A difficult question
That house, located on Sunshine Avenue, belonged to a man who had hired my father to wash cars and do odd jobs. That man’s daughter, Cara, was the beauty of my high school. She dated the star of my varsity basketball team. A late bloomer, I had made the varsity team on account of years shooting thousands of free throws and jump shots on the patio of my childhood home. I was a good shot, but I rarely took one. The coach played me because I delivered what my teammates needed when they needed it: I looked for assists, set screens and scrambled for rebounds.
Once, after Cara asked me to communicate some drama between her and my friend, the varsity star, she paused and looked at me with quizzical glance. The breeze through her auburn gold hair and her button nose framed in the gloom of the locker hallway against the bright sunlight beyond. I remember this like it happened five minutes ago: “Who do you like? What do you think about? You never say!”
I staggered for an answer. Her face was beautiful, but her question was breathtaking. There was a knot of undigested longing in my throat–to be asked that question by this girl–until I croaked out, “We’re not all open books, Cara.”
I don’t remember her response. I was looking at the ground and imagining what her dad would say when our rent check failed to arrive in her mailbox. It would be many years until life asked me again.
My paradise, lost
Twenty four hours into the move, night fell on my birthday. Instead of blowing out candles and eating German chocolate cake, I gazed with glassy eyes around my old home as the eviction deadline passed. About a third of our household items remained. I made made and moved piles.
A police car pulled into our driveway. The officer approached my father, who gesticulated with strained friendliness in the way I knew so well. My dad called this “shucking and jiving,” and it often got us a free drink or a cookie from a restaurant. The officer shook his head, and my father walked back without affect to resume loading the truck. The officer sat in his car and watched us, red and blue lights casting a strange palor on the detritus of our lives.
The next morning, after thirty-six hours of moving, I sat in the passenger seat of the uHaul truck and peered back for the last time at the hill where my childood had happened: golden in the California morning light, dotted with oak and pine trees, riven by a small, swift stream where I had sailed tiny boats made of sticks and pinecones each springtime. It was March 29, and the stream was swollen with spring rain, but I was too old now to play with pretend boats.
new gods 