A Moving Story

The eight-year itch...

There is this pattern in our marriage that we didn’t notice until it had repeated itself a number of times. Duh, I suppose the repetition is what makes it a pattern, isn’t it?

Every eight years, we reinvent ourselves. We lived for eight years in New York City, eight years in Hong Kong and 10 years in Maryland – that was a two-year deviation to accommodate our son’s education.  

Then, we immediately resumed the eight-year cycle in Washington, before retiring to Santa Fe. I suppose we expected to die there, but when we found ourselves alive and well eight years after we arrived, we decided it was time to leave the Wild West behind and start a new eight-year clock ticking.

This itch to move doesn’t just wash over us overnight, and it isn’t even always our idea. I didn’t wake up one day in Manhattan and say, “Gosh, sweetie, I’ve got the strangest urge to move 12,000 miles to Hong Kong, how about you?” No, that one was on my employer, Reuters. So was our subsequent Stateside relocation to the DC, area eight years later.

You can see where this is going. Eight, eight, ten, eight, eight… Our deal is just like the seven-year itch, but it’s one year longer and it is driven by a healthy sense of adventure, and not by extramarital peccadillos.

We had felt this most recent move coming for a few months. We dearly loved Santa Fe, but there were things that we missed. Our old urban lifestyle beckoned. The chance to be boulevardiers again, to walk out our front door and stroll to restaurants and bars.

Imagine, being able to buy a tube of toothpaste without driving for miles down the dusty high road from the Santa Fe Ski Basin, which happened to be the only way to get to a toothpaste store or anything else, for that matter.

We had grown somewhat weary of Santa Fe’s dried-up river beds in an endless, soul-roasting drought, punctuated by raging wildfires every summer. The high-altitude, howling coyote, cowboy cantina, breakfast burrito, salt-rimmed margarita life had been a hoot, but now it was time to saddle up.

Where should our next stop be? The answer to that was surprising. See, I spent my first 25 years of life in Indianapolis, including the first two years of our marriage, and I pretty much hated that city. So did Barbara, back in the old days.

But 40-some years later she had begun making regular visits to see a favorite cousin in Indy, and then she would return to Santa Fe and tell me how much nicer it was than the horrid place we fled back in 1973. There were now fine restaurants, nice neighborhoods, tall buildings and smart people. There was even a Kurt Vonnegut Museum, for Lord’s sake, and nobody else has one of those.

I did some online research, and casually mentioned to Barbara that we could really get a lot for our money in Indy. She didn’t immediately demand a divorce, so it seemed worth considering.

In the summer of 2020, amid a global pandemic, eight years almost to the day after first arriving in Santa Fe, we bought an Indy house online. We loaded up our pets, drove 1,274 miles through red states where face masks were ridiculed, and unpacked.

Home again, home again, jiggety jig.

Here we were, living around geese and ducks and water, in a house that is actually on the National Registry of Historic Places.

I strongly recommend that National Registry thing, if you can swing it. After decades of having to take on major home improvement projects, I’m now living in a protected historic district, where I’m not even permitted to change a doorknob without asking the White House for special permission.

“I’d love to get to that chore, honey, but rules is rules, and we have to safeguard our history. After all, President Millard Fillmore may have touched this very doorknob.”

Perhaps most exciting, our new home is located on a scenic canal, with foliage that turns brilliant colors in the autumn. We have plenty of time to appreciate it, what with me not being able to do any of those home improvements.

(The green life. A blue heron gazes at the canal just yards from our home.)

When we began to tell people we were leaving Santa Fe, two separate friends, both of them originally from St. Louis, independently warned us that we were now going to be Hoosiers. That is what people from Indiana are called, and it turns out it’s a pejorative word in Missouri.

I was sure our friends must have got it wrong, but a quick Google search led me to online topics such as:

Why is Hoosier an insult in St Louis?

Why do people in Missouri call people Hoosiers?

Is Hoosier derogatory?

Should Hoosiers be rounded up and forced into wood-chippers?

Okay, maybe I tweaked that last one just a little, but the other three are genuine, and there are plenty more where they came from.

“In St. Louis, Missouri, the word Hoosier is used in a fashion similar to ‘hick’ or ‘white trash,’” one website informed me matter-of-factly. Ouch.

Our immediate problem was that we were going to be driving right through St. Louis on our way from Santa Fe to Indy, so we had to practice telling people we were actually on our way to a new life in Vermont. “Montpelier is very nice this time of year,” I would say with a straight face. “How about that Bernie Sanders?” Barbara would add.

Thanks to our careful planning, we got safely through Missouri without encountering Hoosier-hunting mobs.

A few days after we moved into our Indianapolis home, some lovely new neighbors had a backyard party to welcome us. One couple we met there told us they had moved to Indy a few years earlier from St. Louis, and they liked it, but they had told their family back in Missouri that they were moving to Arkansas. I’m thinking this must be what witness protection feels like.

Barbara had been spot-on in her assessment. Indianapolis was now smarter, prettier, friendlier, more progressive, and tastier than when we lived there before.

Strangely, despite the city having roughly a million residents, I seemed to know most of them. Within hours of telling only a couple of old Indianapolis friends that we were moving back, the ghosts of my youth appeared, in large numbers and with long memories.

On a single evening I found myself in our new living room having drinks with the sister of a girl I had dated for years, another woman whose brother and I had each seriously dated someone in high school, and the woman who had been my date to my graduation dance.

You can see how this might be a little too cozy for some people, but Barbara just seemed bemused. Sure, these other women dodged a bullet and she hadn’t, but it was too late for her to do anything about it now.

Our new neighborhood is wonderful for walking, festooned as it is with charming homes. You can cover five scenic miles without even noticing. One day, as we walked past a Tudor Revival masterpiece, I casually mentioned that I had dated a girl who lived there.

After a few yards of pensive silence, Barbara gestured toward another stately home. “Did you ever date someone who lived there? she asked.

“No.” 

“Maybe we should put a plaque on it.”  

It seems like everybody’s a comedian these days. It must be the Kurt Vonnegut influence.