I wrote last January of feeling in between, as if we had pushed the button and were waiting for the elevator to take us to a new floor in our lives. So many of those changes did happen — Q was accepted by one of her top-choice colleges; my wife and I both took on new jobs; and M decided not to return to Los Angeles and in the meantime pursue music and performing while he figures out how to better navigate the world he’s been thrown into.
And we also did end up moving.
We had lived in the same neighborhood and building for over 20 years. Even now it seems wild to say — the longest time my wife or I had lived anywhere, long enough for two children to arrive and leave childhood. We stayed because we were comfortable, or comfortable enough. We might have stayed a little longer, but the owner was deep into converting the building from rental units to luxury coops, and renters had become a barrier to bigger money. When the option to renew our lease came up this year, we were given the choice between paying an offensive amount or finding a new place, packing up, and moving out in a few weeks. The choice was easy.
Following through on that choice wasn’t. I really can’t recommend not moving for two decades and then trying to pull it off in about a month.1 We set our move date for the day after Christmas, and we had just a few weeks to go through 20 years of accumulation to decide what was worth carrying to someplace else. It turned out that something like a good half of our stuff wasn’t worth carrying. M & Q, our son and daughter, are 20 and 18, ages occupied by the present and near future and largely immune to nostalgia. Q no longer wanted the dolls she stitched clothes for or worn children’s books or her self-portraits assigned by every elementary-school teacher. M donated bags of clothes that were his early experimentation with fashion that he now so effortlessly executes, along with his baseball and tennis and chess trophies and all the equipment used on the way to earning them. My wife and I went through years of documents and notes, so many pieces of paper for accounts long closed, student loans chipped away at until paid in full, printed articles now accessible anytime in PDF, itineraries and receipts for trips so old that we booked them over the phone. I finally tossed years of teaching documents, including evaluations from students who now could easily have their own kids in college. I couldn’t remember why I kept all that stuff for so long other than I never had to sit in front of those boxes and ask myself if they sparked joy.
Even though joy sparked less as we came closer to our move, we did end up carrying (or had the movers carry), most of our books. We have a lot of them — several lifetimes of words — but still we kept them because we love them as objects and how they sustain the possibilities of our better selves. And for our kids. Q, now studying English literature in college, has begun building her own library and future moving calamity. Though M thinks of himself and is thought of by others as a musician, he’s pretty bookish too and has been reading his way through our library, especially classics and Nobel winners. Recently he has been working through my collection of novels by South African writers such as J.M. Coetzee and Nadine Gordimer. I wrote my undergraduate thesis on Gordimer’s work, and I almost studied abroad in Johannesburg until the political violence there at the time nudged me toward New York instead.
M found her 1958 novel A World of Strangers good enough to hype on Instagram, which encouraged me to reread it for the first time in probably 25 years. A few pages in, and its story came rushing back: The novel is told from the perspective of Toby Hood, a young Englishman who comes to Africa for the first time to run the Johannesburg branch office of Aden Parrot, his family’s British publishing house. His background and connections open doors into the English upper-class minority who see Africa as inhospitable and brutal but lucrative, and Toby also forges friendships with Blacks and Indians who often appear at the periphery of the ruling minority’s lives. Throughout the novel he moves between these worlds that the white-dominated South African government has erected strict laws to keep separate. Tragedies and failed relationships lead him to realize that he is at best a tourist in these racial hierarchies and that the society is such that he could never find a home in either.
Gordimer’s writing was as beautiful and surprising as I remember, and I was reintroduced to the feeling (one I also have with Nabokov and Marianne Moore) that she has already worked through all the thoughts I could possibly have about pretty much anything. I was again astonished by how in simply taking us through a room full of people listening to music and drinking at a party she captures the ways in which social structures are mapped and deeply affect all forms of life. And the book is built upon so many powerful moments of transition between worlds, such as when Toby is driven from a party in the white part of town to one just beginning in a Black neighborhood:
It was nearly one o’clock in the morning and all life was withdrawn from the streets in the white suburbs through which we drove, and the town. We followed tram-car tracks, we skirted the sharp corners of darker, meaner streets; the car took me along as the world whirls and turns through space: I had neither recognition nor volition in its progress. The street-lights ended. We went down, into the dark. There were shapes, darker against the darkness; there was the moon, half-grown, spreading a thin, luminous paint on planes that reflected her. A graveyard of broken cars and broken porcelain; an old horse sleeping, tethered, on a bare patch; mute shops patched about with signs you could not read; small, closed houses whose windows were barred with tip strips against the street; a solitary man stooping to pick up something the day had left; a sudden hysterical gabble behind a rickety fence, where a fowl had started up.
Rereading the copy from my college days also meant coming into contact with my young self; old annotations let me see what lodged in my 20-year-old thinking like a splinter. I became acquainted with Gordimer (and Coetzee and others) through an amazing professor’s course on commonwealth British literature. Why, though, did her work resonate so deeply with me that I submitted applications to leave Kansas to study in South Africa or New York?
I’m sure I told myself then that I needed to make a difference, and I was looking for a difference to make. I also wanted to be a writer and thinker, which is to say that I believed that I had some thoughts worth saying if only I could experience what it’s like to be within moments that called us to action.
No doubt those motives were real and true, but three decades of distance lets me see that I likewise felt like I didn’t quite fit in their current world, which sent me looking for passageways into others. I can also see another Gordimer insight more clearly that no matter how much of the old life you donate or discard or leave behind, you can’t help but bring some of it into the new, can’t help but see the new through the lens of the old. Moving away from Kansas has let me to see where I am now and where I’m from in ways I wouldn’t have otherwise, but I still have something like Toby’s sense of how being able to move between worlds can leave you outside of all of them.
As our moving day approached, we asked M and Q what they would miss most about the old apartment and the neighborhood in which their childhood came and went. We thought they might mention the beautiful parks, or the playground where they constructed wildernesses, or the bagel place that we went to most weekends, often with one of them on my shoulders. But Q, already excited to go “back home” to her college dorm room, said she wouldn’t really miss anything; M said the best part of the neighborhood was the availability of electric Citi Bikes that he could take elsewhere. Yep, it was definitely time to go.
The new apartment is cold. Our building in which we celebrated flip of the calendar this year was built in the late seventies and has lots of older windows that let in much light but also too much January. The year to come will again be filled with change as both M and Q continue to move between our home and theirs, school and work, adolescence and adulthood.
For the past 20 years or so I’ve been thinking about a new year from the edge of the Hudson River. Time to move on. Happy 2024, everyone. Thank you for reading, and I hope that you’ll stick around (and encourage others to join) as we continue to talk to ourselves.
NYC real esate is Kafkaesque and resistant to all reason. I’ll spare you the details of our stressful search that did, amazingly, work out.
I too moved last August after 20 years of memories that included 3 boys. I'm on to bigger and better things now that they have all moved on with their lives. It is very hard leaving a life after 20 years, and your children moving on all in the same short time period. Change can be hard, but very necessary for us to grow as human beings. Now my life envolves 22 4th graders and a new life in a brand new apartment learning how to navigate single life again.
This season of our lives are over, but the memories will continue to live on. I wish you well on your new journey. It is bittersweet isn't it?