Looking around his room, my dad said, “It wouldn’t take more than 15 minutes to pack this all up and go home.”
He knew what he was talking about. He began packing and leaving the fall he went to college a couple hours away from home. Once his parents had helped him arrange his room, they left to drive home. Family lore says he arrived home before his parents. No explanation. He did not return to that college. He enrolled in another school in a city where he could hop the train home every weekend.
That pretty much summarizes my dad. He could pack up and leave at a moment’s notice. And, he did. A couple times, he wanted live in the Wild West that he read about in Zane Grey’s books. He wanted desert life with its sand, cacti, wind and clear sky. Twice, he and my mom packed the station wagon with their five children, clothes, basic household goods and a lunch box – and left for Arizona. Twice, we saw the desert, the Grand Canyon or the big Jack-O-Lope. Twice, we turned around and went back home to upstate New York.
During my eighth grade year of school, we did it again. Only this time Dad made connections with friends in Casa Grande, found a job in a factory manufacturing airplane parts and rented a house with furniture. Mom began talking with Realtors.
The Arizona school year ended before New York kids even began studying for final exams. Five half grown farm kids brooded in the middle of a city with no chores to do. We missed our cousins, our grandparents, our classmates and farm life. We said so often.
One morning, we wandered into the kitchen for breakfast and found our equally homesick mom packing boxes. “What’s going on?” we asked.
“Your dad said ‘if you want to go back, have this all packed up by the time I get home.’”
It took us more than 15 minutes to do it, but the car and trailer were loaded when he came home from work and we left.
He never said that again. He just practiced it frequently enough that he attended our high school graduations in three states. After we graduated, he would pack and leave so quickly that we each called Grandma at least once to ask, “Where are my parents?” For instance, following a family crisis, he insisted he must “go West now.” Mom quit her job and packed. They left within hours.
After my mom died, my dad packed and moved more times than I can recall. He moved across the country between New York, Arizona, California and Arkansas. The day his legs failed him, Dad landed in Arkansas in a wheelchair in a nursing home. With his diminishing awareness, he never understood ‘why’ we would not yield to his demand to “Go Home” or that Home no longer existed. The old home place had changed hands. Family members had moved away or to their final resting place. Still, Dad looked restlessly around his room and said, “It wouldn’t take but about 15 minutes to pack this all up.”
Easy to pack. Nearly impossible to drive more than an hour with a tall, heavyset man who could not get himself in or out of wheelchairs, vehicles, bathrooms or hotel rooms. Even finding and applying for a room in a residential care unit “near home” required more than 15 minutes.
So he stayed until he joined his home folks in a place where no one packs up and leaves with 15 minutes notice.