Recently in on the move Category

As I pack to head for Boston for this week's MFA residency, I'm thinking about stability and mobility and how they affect a person. 

Visiting biological relatives in Wisconsin last week, I was struck.  My half-sister, who's 33, currently lives with our mother in our mother's house, the same lovely house where she's lived since she came home from the hospital as an infant.  She's known her best friend since she was two.  She's traveled plenty (and has lived on her own in other states), but she's always had a stable base.  When she recently got tired of San Diego and wanted to come home, she could, and did.

My husband's parents still live in the house where they moved when he was 6.  The same art hangs on the walls; the kitchen, living room, and dining room remain largely unchanged, with furnishings from the 1960s.  When we visit, we can walk past the field where he played baseball, the lake where he swam as a boy.  He is still in touch with his childhood friends.  As far as I know, however, he has no connections to anyone from the town where he lived before his family moved to Louisiana.

James and I read long ago that stability--after the absence of trauma and divorce--is the single most important factor affecting a child's development, so we stayed put for Grey as much as possible, including spending 10 years in the house we bought in Indiana. 

Even with those 10 years, our current apartment is my 24th place of residence.  By the time I graduated from high school, I had lived in 11 homes and attended 9 schools (in Florida, England, and West Virginia--plenty of cultural variety!).   If stability is a crucial factor in a child's development, I'm wondering how  these many rapid changes affected mine--each school a new social system to navigate, and so on.  At that time, there was no practical way for a little kid to stay in touch with friends across the country--or across the Atlantic!--and I learned to let friends go and swallow the loss.  When I left home for good at 16, I continued the pattern, moving at the drop of a hat.  Only having Grey made me (eventually) slow down, take stock, sign a mortgage, plant trees.

As a writer of memoir, I've given a lot of thought to what trauma has meant in my life, and divorce, and abuse, and adoption, and ethnicity, and poverty, and weird religion. 

But the very fact of moving and how it inflects people's views of the world, their ability to bond, commit, and emotionally invest, and so on--that's interesting, and in a hyper-mobile global society of migration, disruption, and exile, it applies to so many of us.

I'm curious about other people's stories of movement and stasis--the kind that was dictated by parents, the kind they've later chosen themselves.  If you've got a reflection about your experience, please comment!

In other news, thanks to Curtis Sittenfeld for plugging the Nebraska Summer Writers' Conference on p. 2 of the NYTimes Book Review.

I loved this article about gray whales and their interactions with humans in yesterday's NYTimes Magazine.  (The first part is awful--and all too politically predictable.  Keep reading.)

The average height difference between male and female romantic partners is 8%.  This is "also, it turns out, the downward angle at which most models are photographed."  Qué freaky!

Many thanks to David Pruett!  He wrote in to share this addition to our conversation about writing by hand:
 

Poet W.S. Merwin was interviewed on Bill Moyers' show on PBS a couple weeks back, and mentioned writing by hand!

W.S. MERWIN: I can't imagine ever writing anything of any kind on a machine. I never tried to write either poetry or prose on a typewriter.  I like to do it on useless paper, scrap paper, because it's of no importance.  If I put a nice new sheet of white paper down in front of myself and took up a new, nicely sharpened anything, it would be instant inhibition, I think. "So now what?" I would think and I would sit there — so now what? — for quite a long time. But if it's something, if I need somewhere to write it down it will be on the back of an envelope, or something like that. Then it's okay. It's just to keep it there so I can find out where it goes from there.

(the whole interview video & transcript is at www.pbs.org/moyers -- click on the "Archive" link to get to older shows. bye!)