Midlife Meditation

It begins: toasting our first house together, June 26, 2012. I've just entered undiscovered country. On the day I was born in San Jose, California, I was already getting ready to move: my father, then an American Baptist minister, was candidating for a new position up the coast in Fort Bragg. Five weeks later, we moved there, and the die was cast: for the next fifty-five years, the longest I would keep an address would be the four years I was in high school. I can't pin it all on my father's profession (although switching to Methodist, as he did in 1964, locked him into their peculiar practice of itinerant ministry); from college until Amy and I moved into our current home, the longest I kept an address was three years. Note the word "until" in the last sentence, because as of today, I've set a new personal record. We moved into this house four years and a day ago. For the first two years, we were renters, but then our property manager infor...

Three years and two months. That's how long I've lived at 6420 NW Starflower Drive. That's a long time for me to have an address. In fact, it's a record for me: my previous record for holding one address as an adult was two years and ten months. You may be thinking that's a horribly itinerant way to live. The saving grace, you may also be thinking, is that the word "adult" in that paragraph means I had a more stable childhood. And you'd be right for thinking that--but not a lot. The longest I lived anywhere before college was four years. When I tell people this, their first response is typically "Army brat?" "Preacher's kid" is my reply. And that does explain all that moving around in my childhood, an average of every three years: my father was an American Baptist, and then a United Methodist, pastor. As an American Baptist, his job was subject to the whims of his church council and the personalities that ran it. After...

Milderson Manor? Mark-Amy Acres? Milsh-Mark Manse? First things first: we closed. It took a solid hour of signing, dating, and initialing documents, many of them near duplicates of each other because, for some arcane titular reason, we had to break the purchase into two different mortgages; and then, called back from lunch, another hour because the bank rejected some of the dates we had scrawled as unacceptably sloppy; but finally, at around 3 p.m. yesterday, we became the proud owners of 6420 NW Starflower Drive. So here I am, married, mortgaged, joined at the wallet as I haven't been with anyone in fifteen years, and even then only for a few weeks, as that house purchase came at the very end of my short, troubled second marriage, and I was bought right back out of it by my ex as soon as we separated. Buying a house with my wife and actually getting to live in it with her is a whole new experience for me. There will be many more new experiences associated with t...