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Theories of Moving
The new apartment is cold.
For some time now we’ve felt lodged between, as if we had pushed the elevator button to take us to a new floor in our lives and are still waiting for it to arrive. But in the past year so many changes did happen — our daughter Q was accepted by one of her top-choice colleges; my wife and I both switched jobs; and our son M decided not to return to his college in Los Angeles, dedicating himself instead to being an actual rock star on New York City stages 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 from nonexistence 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 our apartment 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 packing up and moving out in a few weeks. The choice was easy, or easy enough.
Following through on that choice wasn’t. I really can’t recommend living in the same place for two decades and then trying to relocate in about a month. We set our move date for the day after Christmas, which left us 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, in no small part because M & Q 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 portfolio of 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…
