a week after that another moving van pulled up to it. A young family lives next door now, very nice, two little boys, six and eight. They’re wonderful children, polite and charming and oftentimes funny, but for me the whole family is like being offered a sumptuous dinner when you’ve no appetite at all.
Lately, I’ve been thinking I need to move, too. When? I ask myself sometimes, and I answer in the same way I answered Penny: something will tell me when.
Well, maybe that has just happened: maybe something is telling me that now is the time. Getting off the plane on my way home from making the speech in Atlanta, I have one of those moments that feels like life backing up to you without the warning beeps, and then hitting you smack in the middle of your chest. I realize what it is: I don’t want to go home. Not to that house, not to that street. The thought of pulling into the driveway, sliding the key into the lock, offers not the comfort of familiarity but the ache of abandonment.
On the plane, I sat next to a man with whom I had a great deal in common. We both liked anchovies and we were born in the same month in the same year. We liked Little League baseball, we loved dogs but traveled too much to have one. Our hair was the same salt-and-pepper color. The most salient thing we had in common was that we both had jobs motivating people. But whereas I wrote self-help books and gave talks, he was a psychologist who flew around the country to various businesses, doing team building with employees. He enjoyed his work, and he had been remarkably successful. He told me that at one time he had owned four homes, including an apartment in Paris. Now, though, he was coming back from having done his last job. He was quitting the business, and he and his wife were going to live in the one place he had left—he’d sold all the others. They were going to live in a small cabin, located on Burntside Lake in northern Minnesota, near the Boundary Waters.
“Retiring, huh?” I said.
He looked over at me. “I don’t call it that. I guess I don’t even think of it like that. I see where all this success has led me. Now I want to see what it’s kept me from.”
“Huh,” I said. And then I asked him, “Are you at all scared?”
He tossed some peanuts into his mouth, leaned in closer to me, and said, “Terrified.”
We both laughed, but then he said, “I also haven’t felt this alive in years.”
I sit in one of the empty gate areas to call a cab. When the dispatcher asks where I’m going and I give him my address, my gut begins to ache. Well, I’ve said it often enough to others: there are times when you have to hurt badly in order to move. Otherwise, you’ll stay in a place you’ve outgrown.
When I get out to the curb, the cab is there. The driver stashes my bag in the trunk, and I think he looks angry. Sure enough, as we pull away from the curb, he catches my eyes in the rearview and in an accent I can’t quite identify yells, “You know what? I’ll tell you something: People are rude!”
“They certainly can be,” I say.
“For one hour, I been waiting for a man who say he’s coming right out, that’s what he tell the starter, ‘No, I have no baggage; I am coming out now.’ One hour I wait, he doesn’t come. Then the starter tell me, ‘He went to baggage claim; he’s coming now.’
“I say, ‘No.’ I say, ‘I’m not take him.’ Instead, I take you.”
From the radio, I hear the faint strains of “September in the Rain.”
“Is that Dinah Washington?” I ask, leaning forward.
The man, whose name is Khaled, has settled down somewhat; he readjusts his shoulders and increases the volume slightly.
“Yes, Dinah Washington, I have to listen to her because she make me calm down from the rude people.”
I lean back in the seat, cross my arms, and stare out the window. “I wish there was a place where you could sit at a little table and still listen to songs like that,” I say. “You know. White tablecloth, little lamp lit low, Rob Roys and Brandy Alexanders.”
“Those places are all gone, now.”
“I know they are.”
We fall silent until we pull up in front