Alakazam!
“Take a good look,” my father said as we pulled out of our driveway late one night in December of 1973. “We’ll never be here again.”
I didn’t look. He said those words so often that by age thirteen I tended to ignore them pending verification.
The words had been true about the city of Chicago. They had also been true about not only the Mackinac Bridge, but also the entire Upper Peninsula of Michigan to which it provided ingress. Dad, a former amateur rally-car driver, had a penchant for taking the family on day trips to places five or more hours from our home in Battle Creek. If on a Friday I saw him happily drawing on a map with markers and performing fuel calculations with mechanical pencil and slide rule, I knew that we would spend Saturday in the car.
The all-day round trips would cause him to compress the sightseeing at our destinations into a blurred frenzy of glancing at buildings and pieces of land and water. Viewed at rally speeds and with abrupt cornering, they were a LeRoy Neiman-esque pastiche of surface textures and colors lacking all context, though the sight of historical markers whizzing by reassured us that there was, for others, context. The homeward drives were nonstop, in service of Dad’s self-imposed sporting goal of reaching home by midnight.
I didn’t mind hearing Dad foreswear return rally-style visits to faraway places. When I was very young, though, it was alarming when he said that we would never again visit nearby places like the Cut Rate Grocery store. I would worry for a week as our food supplies dwindled and my new comic books went stale. Then, contra verba patris mei, we would go back to the Cut Rate.
Until I learned how to doubt, I was relieved but also confused by our return to the store. Dad generally spoke only truth. We had, as promised, not returned to Chicago and the Mackinac Bridge and other distant and scarcely-seen places. How was it that we were going back to Cut Rate Grocery?
The same with Bill Knapp’s Restaurant, where we ate dinner once or twice a month but to which, I kept hearing, we were perpetually never going back. When Dad told us to take a good look as we pulled out of that parking lot, I would mash my face against the car window, absorbing what I thought was my final glimpse of the lights shining from within the long white building with green shutters. Was I never again to hear the recording of Bing Crosby singing Happy Birthday, or, in season, White Christmas, his voice caressing my ears as I applied salt and ketchup and tartar sauce, each in merry measure, to my basket of the best fried shrimp and French fries I would ever taste? Dense and delicious chocolate cake, I hardly knew ye…
Two or three weeks later, against all odds but seemingly inevitably—I did say I was confused—back to Bill Knapp’s we would go.
Maybe Dad was kidding. I can take a joke, but only when I know it’s a joke. His delivery of the same words—jocular at times, often neutral, sometimes suitable for a dramatic reading of The Cask of Amontillado—was no clue. A less literal-minded boy might have responded, “Oh, Dad, you big kidder, you! You know we’ll be back! Chicago was great! Can’t wait to go back…to Mackinac! I love sharp turns on two wheels! Who needs bathroom breaks? I’m with you: groceries and comic books are for losers! I was only pretending to love Bing Crosby! Good riddance to all that! Ha ha!” But I, worrier that I was, did not thusly josh. I grew progressively more dour at the mere prospect of joy-killing announcements emanating from the driver’s seat.
The circumstances of our departure from home in December 1973 might have justified a last look with no prompting from Dad. We were leaving at midnight, following by six hours the mover’s truck full of our belongings that had chugged and growled out of the neighborhood before heading toward Atlanta. I had my electric typewriter and the cream of my book collection beside me. I knew that we were moving four states away. After five years in Battle Creek, a good look was in order.
I didn’t look, though. I was too engrossed in my Tarzan book, its pages lit by flashlight.
What would I have seen if I had taken that last good look at our house as we departed for what turned out to be the last time? A flat, abstract painting—Moonlit Study in Shades of Grey #1. The sloping front yard, snow unmarred by sled tracks since we had spent the last few days packing for the move. The white house, blue-grey at night. Dark smudge of pine trees where the back yard ended. A vast cemetery beyond the trees, not visible from the street but ever-present in a child’s mind’s eye.
Given any other clue at all—a facial expression or a revelatory tone of voice—I might have understood Dad to mean, “Family, join with me in regarding the view of this place that is more than a place. It may be grey and abstract now, but let your mind render it as it was at other times. See us moving about there in daylight. Imagine! Remember the good times we had, in seasons warm and seasons cold. Sledding in winter. Lawn darts in summer to determine who—parents or child—would wash the dinner dishes. Sparklers at dusk. Trick or treat. It is well that it is a blank slate now, all the better to let you project each of those memories in turn—or all of them at once—onto it. Join me in doing this. Thus do I convey my love for this life through which we move together.”
I know it’s a stretch, but that could have been what he meant by “take a good look, etcetera.” Concision doesn’t necessarily imply cruelty.
We moved often when I was a child. I have a chicken-or-egg question which will remain unanswered because my dad passed away some years ago. The question is whether the frequent household moves caused him to sense and then compulsively announce the impermanence of all other places and experiences, major and minor, or if the moves were themselves a symptom of his own pathological rejection of permanence. He did, after all, compel the moves by seeking jobs in other states. Family lore is that he chased promotion and higher pay. He never achieved either in any significant way, yet still he (we) moved.
Perhaps he felt dissatisfaction and blamed it on his circumstances and, so, fled. I would like to know whether he ever realized that one may create, and recreate, and recreate again, the same circumstances no matter where one goes. Too late to ask him that question, too. Run to ground in Atlanta and later beset with chronic illness—a circumstance that even he knew one could not flee by moving away—he seemed fairly happy until the end. That impression, not an answer but my retroactive comforting hope for him, will have to suffice.
As I grew, I didn’t need reminders, for I sensed the impermanence of things better than Dad ever did. Better is the wrong word. Try this: I am radically aware that everything ends, that we eventually leave. When I do something—anything—I have mentally seen not only the likely end of it, but far into the aftermath when I am once again home, relaxed and comfortably not doing whatever it was that I was doing when I started thinking about just getting to the end of it, and also about leaving—possibly never to return.
Just so you know, that comfortable aftermath also ends eventually. Life is last looks and final departures all the way down.
Ancient Persians were the first to write, “This too shall pass.” Western thinkers adopted the idea and began to sprinkle it about in their works. Amateurs all. Try working it into everyday conversation, as did Dad. Or, like me, try making it your first waking thought or, better yet, the topic of your dreams and your default response to everything, good or bad.
I am not unduly proud of the radical centering of impermanence in my worldview. I know that I stand on the shoulders of giants. One giant, anyway—a giant of awareness, whose prophecies, self-fulfilling or not, were in any case always correct. His was an easy call, if not a particularly uplifting one.
On that night in 1973, with hours of travel ahead of us, my eyes were fixed on my book and my mind was fixed on Tarzan. We soon reached the highway and sped into the night, leaving snowflakes spinning in our wake as surely as we left everything else behind, whether or not we had taken a good look.
Boing!