Midlife Meditation

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...

This little bungalow on Northeast 74th Avenue was just right for me when I moved into it. My ever-changing life had just taken a hard turn in a direction not to my choosing, but it was hardly the first time something like that had happened. In this case, I'd had two enormous transitions hit me simultaneously: my children were being moved to Idaho Falls, and my contract at a Catholic school in Vancouver had been canceled for looking into other jobs closer to home. Ironically, I found two jobs to take the place of that one: a church music position in Vancouver; and a 0.8 FTE music teaching job in Hood River. The 90 minutes of commuting I'd been doing was about to get much longer. This neighborhood was a good compromise between the two jobs, half an hour from the church, an hour from the school. It still meant crazy driving--there was no avoiding that--but it was close to both I-84 and I-205, so I generally had clear sailing the entire long way to work, whichever direction I w...