Moving Day

A short story written in the first person.

My family moved a lot.  I mean a LOT.  Beginning with the 6th grade, I was in a different school every year all the way through my graduation from high school.  Sometimes it was tough being a new kid.  Other times, we would move to a town where from the day we arrived, we were treated in a very welcome manner; as if we’d always lived there.  

We were living in Lexington, Nebraska when my brother, sister and I were delivered the news.  We were moving again.  We’d arrived in Lexington just a year earlier during the summer of 1973.  In the year or so that followed, the three of us kids had grown to love that town.  In Lex we were town kids. Once a kid in a town like Lexington sort of warmed up to it, it became home, and the three of us were nuts about the place.

None of us could understand why my dad wanted us to move away.  Lex was so perfect.  It was perfect for each of us in our own way.  I had a group of friends that were the best and my girlfriend, wow.  Her name was Sonia and we were not only boyfriend and girlfriend, but were kindred spirits as well.  Sonia was a cheerleader and was about the prettiest thing I’d ever seen.  She was so fun to be with, too.  I remember feeling so lucky to be the one she chose.  She could’ve had any guy in that school; any of them.  She picked me and because of that, I was on top of the world.  I was 13 and I’d been through a number of girlfriends by that time; there in Lex and in the towns we’d left along the way.  Most of the others were the type of girlfriend you might exchange ID bracelets, but with whom you would never really develop any kind of a relationship.  You’d pass one another in the halls at school and say “hi” and you’d get that incredible puppy love feeling whenever you were around them, but you never really got to know them.  My relationship with Sonia was different than all of that.

Sonia and I actually DID things together.  We really enjoyed each others company.  We laughed, we talked, we hung out.  We spent a lot of time together, alone as just the two of us and as a group with our other friends.  I have so many memories of the times we were together.  

One particular time she and I were at the swimming pool in Lex and she needed to go home to get something.  She lived close by and I went along with her.  When we got there, no one was home.  She asked me to come in while she grabbed whatever it was she’d needed.  Somehow, we ended up in her kitchen where she showed me a large bottle of whiskey her folks kept in a certain cabinet.  One thing led to another and the two of us began taking turns as we tipped the bottle and drew swigs of whiskey straight into our bellies.  Neither of us had really ever tasted whiskey before.  It was tough choking it down, but we were determined.  We consumed about three or four large swigs each before realizing we were going to drink so much it may be noticed by her folks.  I believe it was me that came up with the clever idea to add some water to the bottle in an effort to snuff the level back up to where it had been.  We did that, but before any water was added, we each took one last big pull from the jug.

  

By the time we got back to the pool area, we were HAMMERED.  We ran around, we tackled each other, we laughed uncontrollably, we danced in the park.  It was so fun and we were so loaded.  Sonia and I were a perfect match.  It was good to be so young and to have been able to spend the time with her that I did.  We did many other things together and I could go on and on about it telling of our adventures, but suffice it to say, we grew more and more close each time we were together.  Getting to see Sonia was the reason I got out of bed everyday.

Moving was going to be hard.  Not only did I have Sonia in my life, but I had some friends that had become like brothers to me.  I can’t really explain how it would happen, but as we moved from place to place (almost every 12 months), I would go from the “new kid” who knew no one to a being a kid who was a completely involved part of the school as if I’d always been there.  In most of the places we lived, this would happen in a very short amount of time.  I didn’t really think about it back then, but now, in retrospect, I see how unusual it all was; how could I go from knowing no one, to knowing practically every kid in the school within months?  I worked really hard at it.  I put a great deal of effort into really getting to know almost every kid.  There were other new students in many of the towns we would land in, but most of them stayed on the sidelines and never really assimilated.  I saw that happen and knew that doing nothing and staying on the outside looking in wasn’t for me.  I would develop good, meaningful friendships with kids who laughed at the same things I did or were interested in the same things I was.  I would focus on reaching out to this kid or telling my latest joke to that kid as a way to sort of get to know each one of them.  I was not really a particularly good student, but man did I ever love being in school. 

Sometimes it was a real challenge.  Almost every town would have a kid who didn’t like me or who became jealous if I had a sudden up-tick in schoolyard status.  Whenever this would happen, winning THAT kid over would become my focus.  I would do everything I could think of short of kowtowing to him just for his friendship.  Once I got beyond the brick walls of each new town, I would create a sort of niche for myself among my class.  If the town had clique groups, no problem.  As I became more and more known, I would become a sort of bridge between the different groups.  Forming these relationships was never a result of my being the best at anything or that I excelled in sports or even because I knew more about a subject.  Honing out a niche was something I sort of just refined along the way.  As time went on, I would cut out methods for getting along that didn’t seem to work and develop more deeply the ones that did.   Each time we would get to that peak, that point where everything friend-wise and girlfriend-wise would become really comfortable, the dreaded “M” word would rear its’ ugly head and we would pack up and move away again.  

I cannot completely explain how devastating it is, the sick feeling of being ripped out of your place in life and the knowledge that your whole world is about to change drastically.  If you have been through it, you know.  If you haven’t, you simply CAN’T know.  It was deafening, catastrophic and completely spirit crushing for a kid like me.  I wish I could say it became easier, but it never really did.  

We had moved quite a few times already by then.  My dad was finding his way in the cattle business and each time we would just get settled in, another opportunity for him would pop up.  Dad was a forward thinker.  He was a good dad, but to him, what happened yesterday was gone, tomorrow was where the action was.  We would just get to the point where we felt a PART of a town, like everyone knew us and we knew all of them and the M word would come out of its’ dark hiding place and completely annihilate everything.  As a little kid, I would cry for days after hearing this news.  I couldn’t understand the NEED for all of this moving.  Other kids families didn’t move all the time like this.  What was so different about us?  

The cattle business, that’s what was so different.  Dad was carving out a place for himself as a cattle buyer and his desire to be fully “in” was keeping us on the move.  He was doing all he could to put clothes on our backs and food on our table, I guess deep down I did know that. I just always wished he would have chosen something more stable.  The cattle business was just too hectic a pace for me.  My brother thrived in that world; going off to cattle sales with dad, driving out into some pasture to look at ridiculously boring heifers, being in rodeos, all of it.  I, on the other hand, felt no connection.  None whatsoever.  Beginning at a very early age, when we lived on a farm near Wallace, Nebraska, and again just outside a town named McCook, Nebraska, I was asked to do chores.  I did them, but always dreamt of being a city or a town kid as I dumped the bucket of grain in for a horse, or slopped hogs or held the bottle while a bum lamb sucked every last drop from the n****e.  I didn’t HATE the life, I just knew it wasn’t for me.  In Lexington, my dad had somehow taken a position that allowed us to be in town...ahhh, perfect, town was my comfortable place.  Now, he was asking us to go back to that life and move to a ranch in the middle of nowhere.  The cattle business was about to defeat me again, just when I’d thought I had gotten out ahead of it.

“Malta where?”  I remember asking once my whining stopped.  “Montana?  Where the heck is that?”  It may as well have been Siberia to me.  Once we’d arrived, and winter set in, I kind of remember wishing it HAD been Siberia.  It was probably warmer there.  We got our hands on a Montana map and located the town.  At first, I was amazed that Montana was only two states away.  I am a huge geography buff now, but back then, I couldn’t have told you much about anywhere else besides Nebraska, Kansas and Colorado.  This Montana business came as a real shock to my system.  “OK, so it’s been right there the whole time?  Just two states over and up a bit?  You gotta be kidding me.”

Once you understand the inevitability of an impending move, you kind of go into an “I could give a rip about anything” mode.  At least that’s how I approached it.  This method NEVER worked and NEVER changed anyones mind about moving, but it was all I had in my nearly empty bag of tricks so it is what I went with.  I was at everyone’s complete mercy and had zero say in any of it.  It really knocks the wind out of your sails when you are being forced to do something so life changing like moving away from a place you love.  You want to put your foot down, HARD, because you are completely unwilling to go along, but you realize that you have no say in the decision.  You become catatonic, despondent and lose any abilities you previously had in getting along with others in your household.  I would pick fights with my brother, my sister, my mom.  At first, I would just sort of “check out” mentally, then that state would mutate into full scale anger.  I would just get fighting mad, mad at the whole world.  This time would be no different.

Usually, my parents would wait until the end of a school year to move us to the next place, but for some reason, we needed to get to this Malta place right away.  During that final two weeks of school in Lex before we left, my angry teenage attitude reared its ugly head on many fronts. I didn’t turn in any homework, I was excessively disruptive in all my classes and had it out with one of my teachers right in front of an entire English class.  It got to where I just simply didn’t care.  “What were they going to do?  Kick me out?  I’d be long gone before they even had the suspension paperwork drawn up.”  Nothing mattered.  My world was imploding.  I was TICKED that I had to leave.  I was ticked at my dad, and my mom for going along with all of this Montana crap and my teachers for not halting their normal routine to declare a sort of “Goodbye to Todd Day” or something.  Sheese!  Didn’t they know I would probably never get to see any of them again?  Where are the banners?  The cake and ice cream?  The Brass Band?  Clueless ingrates.

It was November of my ninth grade year when we left Lexington.  Before my family was loaded up and ready to pull the big U-Haul truck out of our driveway, I ducked out and snuck over to the junior high to see my friends one last time.  We didn’t have recess in junior high, but our lunch hour had been a full hour.  It only took a few minutes to eat, then we could all go out onto the campus area and hang out, play tetherball, horse around, whatever.  I arrived at the school just before the bell rang and saw my group all standing together.  I was smoking a cigarette.  There was no smoking on school grounds.  I didn’t care.  I walked up to my best buds to say my final goodbyes.  We had a math teacher named Mr Kennedy.  He had always been a favorite of mine.  He was the monitor of the area we all hung out in after lunch.  He saw me and he saw my cigarette.  I believe he also saw the lost look on my face as I approached my peeps.  He said nothing.  He just turned his back.  

The goodbyes were tough.  I have to tell you it was everything I could do to not burst into tears right there.  Once I said goodbye to my pals, it was time to do likewise with Sonia.  I don’t remember exactly what we said to one another that day, I’m sure it was words that included promises of letters, phone calls and even, maybe, seeing each other again one day soon.  Sonia couldn’t have known, she’d lived in Lex most of her life right there in the same house.  I knew though.  I knew that we would probably never see each other again after today; after right now.  I couldn’t tell her, even though I knew it to be true.  We were alike in so many ways and there wasn’t a subject we couldn’t discuss, but the “Just Passin’ Through” sign that hung around my neck was mine alone to bear.  

“Sure we’ll write, sure we’ll be in touch, sure we’ll see each other again soon.”  Her tears were flowing, I was on the verge. This was so unfair.  Between the two of us, only one knew the truth.

Our hug was long.  I wondered, while in the middle of that embrace, how I would ever have a life that was this perfect again.  Our feelings for each other were mutual and I knew she was thinking the same thing.  I already missed her something fierce and I hadn’t even left her yet.  The school bell rang.  It was time to go, but I wanted to just stand there and hold her a little longer.  I knew it had to be quick though, I’d left a town or two already.  You just turn, and go.  I turned, flicked my cigarette hard and began my walk back home without looking back.  I wept like a little child for many blocks.  I’d been down this road before, yes, but this would be so much different.  I knew that the big difference was because I really loved her.  How does a person just walk away from someone who is their whole entire world?  I was doing just that and it hurt like hell.  It was ripping me apart with every step I took.  This was going to be the hardest thing I would have done in my life to date.  I wanted to turn and run back, but I knew that wouldn’t change anything and it would only make a crappy situation worse.  Attempting to change the direction of things now was futile.  I walked the remaining blocks in a state of intense self pity with my head down and my shoulders slouched.  I only sobered up when I saw the massive truck in our driveway and remembered that I’d left in the middle of packing stuff in my bedroom.  There was my dad carrying an end table toward the open U-Haul.  “Where the hell have you been?  C’mon now let’s get this show on the road.  I want to make it to Cheyenne today.”

  

How could I tell him?  How could I say to him that the last town was difficult to leave, and the last one before that, and the one before that?  But THIS one, this one was hardest of all.  When you’re thirteen, you can’t always articulate what you are feeling; at least I couldn’t.  I was FEELING these things, but I couldn’t VOICE them.  My heart was literally broken and somewhere, fifteen odd blocks away in an old junior high building, the love of my life’s heart was broken too.  How could a man like him ever understand where I’d just been or what I had to do just there?  How could he know anything about the devastating effect his decision to leave this town would have on both of US?  I felt completely defeated.  I remember throwing out a “Ya, Ya, Ya” to my dad and waving him off.  On any other day, that action would have started something physical.  Dad wasn’t abusive in any way, but he wouldn’t tolerate disrespect.  For some unknown reason, he let it slide.  I went inside and got my head into the moving game.  “So again,” I thought as I crammed underwear into a box, “Malta where?”

Author's Note

Please feel free to leave a review.

Reviews

[JayG]

Well, you did ask…

You say this a story told in first person, but it’s not. It’s a report, narrated in first person, which is a far different thing. Stories happen, and they do so in real-time, not in overview. They’re emotion, not fact-based, and character, not author-centric. A well written story will make the scene seem to be happening as it's read, so realistically that if someone throws a bottle at the protagonist the reader will duck. And none of the writing skills we were given in school can do that.

In this, someone with no emotion in their voice is talking about past events, primarily in overview, not making the reader live the story with the protagonist as their avatar. But that’s what reader’s want. Who reads history books and reports for fun?

When you read this you perform it, adding emotion to the narrator’s voice, and using expression, gesture, and body language. For you, who already know the story, it works as it should. But a reader has no clue of how you'd perform it. And they don't know what a line says till AFTER they read it. So they can't guess. Have the computer read it to you and you’ll hear how different what the reader gets is from what you do as you read.

Fiction for the page is vastly different in technique from the skill our teachers called writing. The writing we learned is meant to help us with the kind of things employers need from us: reports, essays, and letters, all of which are meant to inform. But fiction’s goal is to provide entertainment by giving the reader an emotional experience—an approach to writing our teachers never mentioned. Why? Because Fiction-Writing is a profession, and professional knowledge is acquired in addition to our school-day skills.

It might be nice if we learned those skills by reading fiction, but we don’t, any more than we learn to be a chef by eating.

Check the local library’s fiction-writing section. It’s filled with books on the subject. If you're meant to write the learning will be fun.

Jay Greenstein
https://jaygreenstein.wordpress.com/category/the-craft-of-writing/the-grumpy-old-writing-coach/

[ToddK]

Such a good review, Jay. I get it. I was a little unclear on how to define it so I called it a short story as told in the first person. But none of that matters. What I believed to be compelling and interesting, even emotionally engaging was little more than a report. This story could be rewritten and it COULD be worth a readers time. I'm going to work on that. Very good. Thank you.

[ToddK]

Jay Greenstein,
I have another on here I call Continental Trailways. I would really appreciate your input on that one. It has a much different perspective.....

[JayG]

I've looked at the other stories, and here's the thing, as Mark Twain put it: “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.” And like everyone else, you've spent years perfecting a skill you thought universal, not knowing another approach exists—as I did when I came to writing.

It's not a matter of talent, or how well you write. It's that, as they say, if the only tool you own is a hammer everything looks like a nail. Since the day you began to read, you've chosen fiction that was created with the skills of fiction writing. We don't see the decision-points, or even know they exist, because art conceals art. So we no more pick up the tricks of fiction by reading it than we learn the skills of a chef by eating. But...you expect the result of those tools being used...as others expect it in your work. And that's the best argument I know of for doing a bit of digging into the skills the pros take for granted.

We all share that misunderstanding when we leave school, so who's to tell us? Over 95% of what appears on the online forums s writing samples suffers the same problem, so you have a LOT of company.

Follow that link at the bottom of my post to my Wordpress Writing articles. Many of them were written for one of my publisher's newsletter to hopeful writers. They won't teach you to write—they're not meant for that—but they can show you some of the many ways fiction's methodology differs from the skills you worked so hard to perfect in school.

And if it seems worth pursuing the subject, you can download the best book I've found to date on the nuts-and-bolts issues of creating scenes that sing to the reader: Dwight Swain's, Techniques of the Selling Writer. It's free at the link below.
https://ru.b-ok2.org/book/2640776/e749ea

“Good writing is supposed to evoke sensation in the reader. Not the fact that it’s raining, but the feeling of being rained upon.”
~ E. L. Doctorow

[ToddK]

Man this is good stuff. Thank you.