I Miss You When I Blink: Essays(53)

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There was one other thing people said a lot: “How’d you do it?”

John heard this less than I did, but I heard it many, many times. Always in hushed tones, in conversations that began with someone pulling me aside—like they were about to ask me for the number of my weed dealer. These friends and acquaintances were the ones who got giddy when they found out what we were doing. “I’ve been thinking about moving to ______ for years!” they’d say. Or, “We talk about it all the time. How’d you finally decide to go?” And, “Was it hard to sell your house?” As it turns out, change appeals to lots of people. “Tell me,” they’d ask, “do you think I could do it, too?”

“Build your room,” I always said.





And Then the Dog Died


In moving, as in life, there are so many things you think you can control and so few that you actually can.

This is how I envisioned our family’s final night as Atlanta residents: We’d eat at our favorite pizza place, sit out on our back porch until dark, and then drift off to sleep in our rooms one last time.

This is what actually happened: Just before dinner on that muggy June evening, Eleanor Roosevelt, the younger of our two beagles, suffered the rupture of an infected anal gland, requiring John to pack her off to the emergency vet while I stayed home with both children and our other hound, Phoebe, while fielding questions such as, “Can a dog die of an exploded butt?” Our night was shot, to the tune of $350 and a shaved dog-bottom. Eleanor was just fine when she and John finally got home around midnight, but our picture-perfect sunset farewell to our city did not happen. We followed the moving truck over the Georgia-Tennessee border the next day a little more frazzled than we’d intended to be, Eleanor Roosevelt banging her plastic cone against the back of my seat the whole way, and her big sister, Phoebe, growling her displeasure with the noise. None of this was quite as we’d expected.



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One night several months earlier, John whispered from the pillow next to me, “But where will we be buried?”

Moving meant sorting through lots of questions, like, did we want a house or a condo? Would we live in town or out in the country? And—if you’re John and this is how your mind works, I guess—where should our earthly remains be placed if we were to die in our new city?

“Wait, you want to be buried?” I said. “I thought you wanted to be cremated.”

“I don’t know, now we’re going to Nashville—maybe there’s somewhere there I’d rather be.”

“Technically, you wouldn’t rather anything. You’d be dead.”

“But where would my friends go for my funeral?”

We stayed on this topic for several minutes before I started getting frustrated.

“Do we have to know where our bodies will go after we die to know where we want to live right now?” I asked.

If figuring out what step to take next meant we immediately had to figure out every step afterward, too, then taking the next step would be impossible. I was tired of needing to know all the answers. I wanted just enough answers. (Also, I truly do not care what anybody does with my body after I’m dead. Dress it up in a sequined jumpsuit and fly it from a flagpole if you want. I won’t need it anymore.)

“Let’s look at life in chunks,” I said. “Right now, we just need to answer the questions relevant to this next chunk. When we get to that chunk, we’ll figure out the chunk after that.”

“Okay, fine,” John said. “Chunks.”

Then we spent ten minutes giggling over the word chunks, which sounds really funny when you whisper it repeatedly.

Breaking the news to the kids that our family would be moving away from the only place they’d ever called home gave me a new respect for my mother and all the times she had to do the same thing for me.

When we first had even the tiniest inkling that a move might be a possibility, I started taking our kids with me on jaunts to Nashville—a day here, an overnight there. They got to hang out at the bookstore and read all the free books they could fit into their heads while I was in meetings with authors and booksellers. In the afternoons, I handed them each a dollar and sent them down the sidewalk to Fox’s Donut Den. By the time the move had begun to look like a reality, we had successfully brainwashed them enough that when I casually mentioned, “We’re going to try living in Nashville for a while,” my son responded, “Nashville? I love Nashville!”

“Books and donuts!” my daughter said.

Telling them was easier than I’d thought, but it didn’t quell my uncertainty as I thought it might. I often had days that spring when I thought, What the hell are we doing? I told myself that if it didn’t work out, we could always move back.

I held on to that thought as I watched hulking men in matching blue shirts wrap protective plastic around our kitchen table, our sofa, and our mattresses and load them into the moving truck. Part of my brain wanted to be absolutely positive we were doing the right thing; the other part knew there was no way to be sure about anything.



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I read somewhere that children need to know they can rely on some things to stay the same, even when a big transition comes along. So I put a lot of thought into creating a sense of consistency in order to manage how much change and disorder our kids would experience. Now, of course, I can see that this concept makes as much sense as a “birth plan.”