On The Move.

I just sent my better half a phone pic of a mini mustard bottle. It is the international (maybe even intergalatical) symbol of room service. He hasn’t messaged me back and I can only assume that he is jealous.

TNT keeps going out on my TV but I can still hear the desperation of the Cavs. I got some pop and apples at a grocer called Harris Teeter and my checker-outer guy had a limey accent. It was ok with me but the frazzled momish lady holding three gallons of ice cream was so confused that when he told her he was waiting on a price check that she said, “I’m sorry, you are confusing me.”

Today reminded me that we are conditioned from birth to anticipate a transformational moment with consumerist fervor. I think of a transformational moment as a defining event that says, “I was this, and now I am that.” Today I woke up a Michigan resident and by nightfall I am (shopping at Harris Teeter) claiming Tennessee as my home.

I blame movies or fairy tales or new country or old punch lines or Casey Kasem – who knows really - but whatever it is – It seems like we expect a lot from these namable/giftable moments, but rarely is it a moment that makes things happen. A decision maybe, an eight hour car ride maybe, but not one thing.

More to the point, it seems we try to commemorate events like graduation and moving and births and weddings and suicides with gifts “so you will remember the day forever.”

For example: the untimely gift of a flower in a glass vase (full of water) given to me by my mother when I was loading my car this morning.

She told me it was so I would have something to hold flowers in my new home. A sweet and unpractical gesture since I wasn’t even able to pack a tootsie roll piggy bank and a certain bottle of shampoo because it was too breakable – this move is a 700-mile move light. So I had to leave the flower and the water and the vase and drive away with the horrible guilt that you can only get from being home and getting odd gifts from your family. 

Believe me, save your gifts – or make them edible - I will never forget these moments.

“You can never run away, never. The only way out is in.” - Lola in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (audiobook I just finished on my ride)