I think I know what went wrong when Kathy and I pulled up
our tent stakes and slipped southwards towards our new home. Our whole family surprised me with the depth
of their sadness at our departure.
That’s when it hit me.
We weren’t the ones supposed to be leaving. Somehow, that upset the Natural Order of
Things.
Old people don’t leave home … unless you’re an Inuit Eskimo
elder in time of famine, who crawls out onto an iceberg to die so as not to
burden the rest of the tribe.
It’s our kids and grandkids that grow up and leave
home. It’s the young people in our
nation that have new horizons and new homes and new adventures waiting for
them. Old people are what the youngsters
push against. Elders and the family home
are what get left behind.
We’re supposed to be solid, substantial, stolid … cemented
in place.
Funny, despite the host of aches and pains that daily remind
me I’m not 25 anymore, I don’t feel much older than I did when I was a
long-haired college kid back in the 1960s.
When I shave the face in the mirror every morning, I don’t exactly see
the fresh-caught young sailor who loved going to sea … but I know he’s still in
there.
Except for the sheer discomfort entailed by most adventures,
I still yearn to see new places and meet new people.
So weighing the existential anchor and sailing off towards
the unknown felt as familiar to me as waking up in my own bed (now packed
safely into a moving pod, somewhere on the road behind us.)
But I get it, Kids.
Still, maybe it’ll help to imagine your parents blazing a
trail somewhere out beyond the horizon.
Or maybe it’ll be helpful to know that, when you come to
visit the Casa de Chaos del Sur from now on, Christmas dinner will be held someplace
warm.
