A few weeks ago, we walked along the pacific shoreline, Christie and I hand in hand, the boys playing chicken with the mid-day tide. I'm the first to give in and take my shoes off. I want to be able to say I've had my toes in both the Atlantic and Pacific waters. Christie and Brennan lose a few waves that push farther up the beach and end up with wet socks and shoes, so off they come. Rich, not so keen to ride home barefoot, keeps a cautious distance. We don't say much, just listen and look as the sun sinks into the seemingly infinite horizon.
It's been a long few years. I survived an aggressive case of shingles in late 2018, and spent most of the 2019 trying to recover, while I played in a dozen different bands throughout central PA. Christie took a more comfortable job in radiology that year too. Rich began looking to college, and Brennan the SATs. Some friends faded away, others grew closer. But we began to feel like aliens in a place that still wasn't home. We're not even sure what that looks like anymore. We dug into our respective work and life together, but we couldn't shake it. Especially me.
I grew up in the Air Force. We didn't move as much as most people would imagine, only a few times during my school years. It was hard to say goodbye to friends, but that kind of life afforded me the opportunity to make them, to adapt, to learn. But as many military brats will tell you, it does something else, something that is, to my mind, far more valuable.
It makes you restless.
I don't mean it makes you dissatisfied or malcontent - that's a different thing that has more to do with entitlement and maybe a little greed. Restlessness is the cousin of Wanderlust. It causes you to soak a place in with all your senses, experience as much as you can, mingle until you're no longer a tourist. Then it draws your heart and your mind to the horizon, plants a seed of curiosity in your mind. What else? What now? What next?
We put down roots in Pennsylvania, but it took me a year to exhaust all opportunities in the music scene. Christie loved her co-workers but the job didn't challenge her skills much. Our little homeschool group was growing up, the ages differences starting to glare a bit more. Then Covid came to the U.S.
We spent 2020 living apart; Christie with a co-worker, then in the backyard in a camper. Then in the house, isolated to our room while I moved into the den. Her work became dangerous due to lack of PPE. All momentum I'd made in the music scene stopped abruptly, as did social life and homeschooling interactions. Friends who lived down the street or an hour away may as well have been in another country. I was trapped, like I'd been for most of the writing of this blog, living apart from the outside world, worried for my safety and well-being as an immune-compromised person in a pandemic. The restlessness that bubbled under the surface the previous year began to boil. Then Rich decided he was headed inevitably for art school somewhere near L.A. Brennan began looking hard at programs and colleges on the west coast where he could realize his passion for environmental change and climatology. It all culminated in a tipping point.
We made short working of storing all our stuff in a POD, selling the house and our beloved Honda Odyssey that carried us through this whole ordeal so faithfully. We bought a camper and a Nissan Armada to pull it. Christie jumped back in with the travel nursing company that got us to PA back in 2011 and took a three month contract in Concord, CA, east of San Francisco Bay. We made it from PA to CA in ten days without setting foot in a hotel, restaurant, or public bathroom.
We've been here since November of 2019, waiting out the pandemic, soaking up the sunshine, sitting in the traffic. In two weeks I'll be fully vaccinated against Covid, and hopefully out playing music again, maybe even the Kyd Kalydoscope songs I recorded in 2020. Rich starts at a small art school in Van Nuys in October and we're in Napa trying to find a job and housing down there, at least for his first year or so (no dorms at the school). These are adventures within the adventure. Nothing is certain, and we often don't know what's happening until a few days before it lands. It's a cure for Restlessness.
Rich and Brennan walk down shore as I sneak pictures. They're out of earshot but they share a joke then turn toward a sun, water, and sky and both stretch out their arms, spread eagle. It's a gamer thing that transmits a one word message; Dominance. I manage to snap a picture of them there, silhouetted against the endless purple orange sky. I wondered all those years, them sitting in waiting rooms, wondering if I'd be alive on the other side of whatever emergency or procedure was happening this time. Shoveling snow with shovels too big for their small hands, digging the van out for an early morning ICU admission. Riding in ambulances, and embracing friends and grandparents with tearful goodbyes.
"We have done the impossible, and that makes us Mighty," said Mal Reynolds, our mascot, captain of Firefly class Serenity. We've repeated that to one another more times than I can count, but here, now, with the Atlantic breeze growing chilly and the sun in our eyes, the waves crashing harder on the beach, I see that it's true. HCM, UNOS, the waiting list, heart failure, death, grief, trauma, chaos, and instability tried to break us, make us give up, on happiness, each other, even on life at times. But we are still holding hands, and the boys are still best friends, and they only intend it as a joke, but yes, they have dominated, stood over all of it, tamed it, absorbed it, and we are all still here. Happy, alive, hopefully a little wiser, and definitely older. This is not the end of our story, and there are so many parts that no one but us will ever know, that belong to us, that no one else will ever understand. But it's all I need to tell for now.
It turns out the News of my Demise, though not exaggerated, is no longer needed. No news is good news. And life goes on, as it does. Unexpected in my case, but not unwelcome.
Thanks for reading all of this. Sometimes, just knowing someone is listening makes the telling easier.
