Composure Under Fire

So, I just finished a session on learning how to answer questions from a potentially hostile audience. It's a good thing I was given two chances, because I totally bombed the first time...think deer in headlights! I supposedly redeemed myself on the second round...at least, I felt better about it.

The last month has been a whirlwind. On Friday, we find out where we spend the next 2 years of our lives...or, sadly, where I will spend the next 2 years of my life, while Sam, Pete and Elise stay safe. God, I hope that's not the case. Yes, Khartoum comes with a nice pay bump, but would it be worth it....? To miss Sam on his zoom skates, to miss Pete's first step, first words? To miss Elise holding my hand at night in bed?

We packed out on a rainy Monday in March. The biggest trailer (80') I've ever seen in my life pulled up in front of our house and hauled away all of our worldly possessions and placed them into a storage hangar. Carl, our effervescent truck driver, described how, in a blinding snow storm, he pulled his entire rig through the garage doors, whereupon the snow instantly melted off the truck and a team of 5 unloaded its entire contents in under fifteen minutes. Had his stories stopped there it would have been a long day. Thankfully, they didn't. Pete kicked and cooed in my arms as I watched them pack our plates, my comics, Elise's backdrops, things we thought were important, but when we unpack them months or years from now, I'm pretty sure we will have forgotten we even owned these things.

Elise and I made the mistake of going back to tidy up one last time before going to bed. We were to pull out early the next morning, en route to a brief stop over in Sumter. The house was even more empty than the day I had moved in. Then, it was merely potential, a container we would--over the next 6 years--fill with our memories, our lives, our boys, our dust bunnies, laughter and tears. We withstood hurricanes in this place.

It didn't start off that way. Initially, I joked that I had just bought Kitty a new townhouse because he was the only one who stayed there. Elise and I slept on the floor on a futon mattress in a room that would one day be Sam's room, though we couldn't have contemplated that then.

Our footsteps echoed on the wood floors. I spent forty-five minutes hauling trash bags to the dumpster. When I got back, I went upstairs to look for Elise and found her in our bathroom crying. I cried, too. It was only then that I feared leaving so many memories behind. I clutched my knees and Elise held me and we held each other. I couldn't stop picturing Sam lying in the alcove between the master bedroom and the bath, in front of my closet, propped on two pillows, under a blanket we called his "morning bed" a place where he took a mid-morning 'break' with a cup of milk while myself or Elise showered and dressed and shaved, getting ready for the day.

Everything that was important we took with us. This will continue for as long as we stay on this journey. We left nothing behind except a gift to another family that will, hopefully, take as good of care of our house as we did and fill it with their own memories and wonder and dust bunnies and tears. And hope that it will be as good to them as it was to us.

We stopped in Sumter. We ate at a Waffle House in SC. Sam charmed the wait staff (as usual). We drove to Washington, pulling a trailer behind a Jetta. We moved into a 22-story apartment building overlooking TWO construction sites (Sam wakes up every morning to check the progress of the dump trucks and bulldozers moving bright orange dirt and cranes swinging through the sky)! We researched 100 places to live across the globe. We don't sleep well. Sleep will come.

I bring Elise coffee and Sam donuts surreptitiously deposited on the door step like a Publishers Clearinghouse sweepstake, because it's all I know how to do, the only thing I can control.