Copyright 2008 Ben S. Pollock
I of II
Decades never start on a zero or one and never end on a nine or zero (depending on how you count). The 1960s, for example, was (not were) approximately 1967 to 1974.
Beginning in my 20s — which started when I was 22, the week after I graduated from college — I always felt like I never unpacked, that I never settled into this or that apartment. I traveled to North Dakota for my first job, at the only public radio station that year that would hire an entry-level journalist.
I didn’t quite unpack. I didn’t like the apartment-complex apartment I found and a few months later found an old house near campus that had been split into apartments. I didn’t fully unpack there either, as it was very small. Good thing, too, as that job ended within a year (budget cuts and me a new hire).
Probably in that first location I began wanting a career move where I’d say, “At least for a few years, this is home.” This is not what happened. Even in better locales, I always felt like I was living in boxes. Sure I unpacked, set out the furniture and filled the drawers. But I kept those boxes that were in better shape, because, one had to be ready to jump at opportunity.
And opportunity may not pay moving expenses.
Next was the Dallas area, where I ended up taking two apartments over four years, in similar fashion. The first apartment used the first year, wasn’t great, but I didn’t know the area. The second one was much nicer (both complex apartments), and though the commute grew worse with each of the two newspaper job changes, moving was not considered. These were short drives by DFW standards.
Little Rock was a repeat in this sense, with a complex apartment for the first year then finding The Bengalow, part of an old downtown home split into apartments. Even there I kept the best boxes flattened and stowed. Yet this was my most home-like residence as a bachelor. B.C., the cat I got toward the end of my Dallas sojourn, and I made it a real home. We made good friends in LR, and the friends came to the Bengalow pretty frequently.
I gained a third home in Little Rock when I married, and we bought a bona fide house, Camp Pollock. My Beloved was a career gal and also experienced at settling in while being ready to pack up. Unexpectedly it took us a full year to empty most boxes, stacked to the ceiling in the kitchen. The rest held things worth storing but not using or displaying. Those, and the best empties, were stored in the falling-down, stand-alone garage.
MB and I knew well the feeling that something big is just around the corner so why get too comfortable? We knew that the 1920s-era garage was mildewy and damp, with that leaky roof and dirt floor, that when it was time, would ruin almost everything we stored there aside from outdoor equipment. We perhaps lived a metaphor of delusion.
Camp Pollock was a happy home. Then we managed a resort-area bed-and-breakfast. We had no need or desire to unpack into our nearly windowless apartment behind the gift shop and under the guest rooms, leaving so much in a conventional storage locker. Moving a year later to Fayetteville was complicated by having short-term stuff in Eureka Springs and the big things in Little Rock.
We unpacked for this house, Shady Hill, in fairly short order. We still dream of packing and moving, or just crating the critters into a car with a full tank of gas, leaving both the good stuff and junk behind. For that new life.
Keeping old suitcases handy doesn’t make moving, or the decision to move, easier. Leaving some of one’s obsessively large book collection in boxes won’t ease a move by more than two hours. There’s a lot to be said for not obsessing over the next opportunity or crisis that forces a move. For one thing, planning for so complicated an unknown doesn’t accelerate the process, and another has been enjoying the irony of entering the side door after a shift, day after day after year, and call, “Honey, I’m home.”
