It’s funny that I have very little recollection of my father’s absence for nearly six months-the entire time I was at Hendricks Avenue. My dad had left academia for insurance in 1972 and worked at Blue Cross/Blue Shield in Jacksonville, but for reasons I don’t know desired a transfer. They transferred him to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Dad moved first, living in an apartment and teaching at the community college part-time while adapting to the job that would eventually carry him through to retirement. He visited us sometimes, but doing so was expensive, and with my sister in her first year at Princeton, it was just my mother, my brother, and me. I do remember a winter coat arriving one day-royal blue with a rainbow band at the waist and a hood. I was excited to try it on. I also remember loads of used and rather frumpy clothes from my mother’s cousin’s daughter, who was a few years older than I. I was horrified once to open a sack and find a dead Palmetto bug stuck to a flannel nightgown. I screamed and screamed (I was and still am pathologically afraid of roaches), and refused to ever wear the garment. It was pink and frilly, at any rate, and not at all to my liking. I’d have worn sweats or grubby jeans day and night if my mother hadn’t believed it was her task to at least attempt to make me look like a little girl.
The move itself seemed endless. Round after round of goodbyes. Alex’s family took the stray cat that had recently taken up with us, as well as our tropical fish tank, and we bade one another a sad goodbye. Incidentally, other than one short visit on our way to my grandmother’s in Orlando a few years after our move North, it would be twenty years before I saw my friend again, and we’re still as tight as ever. My father came down to make the drive with us, and to direct the movers. Slowly, my way of life, and my stability, disappeared into the giant maw of the moving trucks. I wandered through my empty house and wondered if my new bedroom would have tulips on the wallpaper (it didn’t), or whether the house would have a sun porch (nope).
We arrived in Pennsylvania in the middle of a huge snowstorm to discover that something rather important was missing-our furniture. One of the trucks had broken down, or something like that, in Virginia, and they had someone else’s furniture to off-load first, and our house was therefore uninhabitable for nearly a week, until the movers finally showed. We stayed in a hotel, and up on the bank of the highway, my brother helped me build my first snowman. It stood for some weeks, as it was a record year for snow and cold, and I loved riding by on the highway and looking up at him. The delay also prevented the thing I dreaded most-having to start school in this new place.
Posted on March 24, 2007