The Big Move

You never stay in the same place forever, and every move, whether by choice or by circumstance, leaves a mark.

Absent a money chest falling from the heavens, Patrick is locked into his house until his children leave for college. He's in a great neighborhood, lucked into buying a place when prices were normal and interest rates were criminally low, and managed to put up a pool in his backyard.

Rob, on the other hand, has been where many are these days: stuck. At the age where, if you've had a successful career, you "should" be able to buy a place, especially if you're sharing it with a partner. But "should" these days isn't what it used to be, and you need luck—or money.

Or both?

As Rob prepares to move, he talks to Patrick about the process of moving, what it's been like to move in the past, and lessons from old moves.

Rob: Knock on wood, we’re going to be moving to a new home in the next month or so. It’s our first move in almost ten years, meaning we’ve lived in our condo for longer than anywhere else in our adult lives. Moving was a regular feature of our twenties and early thirties, and we never expected when we rented our condo in 2016 that our wandering days were behind us. The stability has been nice, but my God are we out of practice. By the time we moved here, we were pretty much able to book movers and have the entire thing done over the course of an afternoon. Now, I’ll be stunned if it doesn’t take us two or three days just to get our stuff into the new place.

Sometimes I start to panic thinking about the fact that this is the Big One. Barring hugely unforeseen circumstances, this is the last move prior to the life changes that come with old age. The thought of not having to deal with this again is causing me to vibrate with joy, and yet there’s a part of me that’s almost perplexed by the idea. I’ve always had moving or home-buying at the back of my mind. I’ve been in this condo for a long time, but it was never the destination. I’m struggling to know how to describe what feels so strange about this. It’s like you always have some murky impression of the future you intend and you spend a lot of time and organize a lot of your life around bringing it closer. Then suddenly the fog burns away and you are dealing with the concrete reality of your life. But a sense of possibility and time are exchanged for it. Your home isn’t waiting for you out there “someday.” It’s here. This is where you’re going to live. This is how the story turned out.

The best way I can describe how life feels right now is that at any moment the soundtrack might be the bittersweet bliss of “This Must Be the Place” or the slightly baffled panic of “Once in a Lifetime” but the thing I can’t do is stop the music. At any moment of the day, David Byrne might start singing at me about love and death, happiness and regret. Oh, you need to go get the groceries? By chance do you find yourself at the wheel of a large automobile? Shame if you started wondering where that highway goes to and asking, “My God, what have I done?”

Dave, I’m just trying to close on this place and buy some frozen pizzas. Give me a fucking break, man.

Patrick: With only a few exceptions, we moved every single year that we lived in both San Francisco and Los Angeles throughout my 20s. Part of that was because we didn’t have any money, so the moment one of us would switch jobs or get a pay raise and we suddenly didn’t have to drink malt liquor before going out to avoid paying for drinks at the bar, we’d move elsewhere. Plus, though it went mostly unsaid at the time, we both knew California was not where we were going to end up. Both of us wanted kids, both of us wanted to be closer to family. It wasn’t clear at the time that we’d be doing that together, but that created a permission structure where every year, we just made peace with boxing up our shit, convincing some friends to swing by in exchange for pizza and beer, and making the trek to a new crappy apartment in a neighborhood that was unfamiliar to us. It didn’t seem hard because I knew later in life, it actually would be really hard, so while I have no belongings and attachments, why not see as much of the world as I can?

The one time we used actual movers was going from San Francisco back to Chicago, where our continued squeamishness over spending money did bite me in the ass a little bit. We had this extremely cool strandup arcade machine that was technically a Bust a Move/Puzzle Bobble machine, that game with the cute dinosaurs where you match colored balloons and, if done in great enough numbers, send them to the other player. It’s awesome. At an arcade festival south of San Francisco, my wife and I rented a hotel room at the place the event was attached to. I joked about getting an arcade machine, but my wife balked at spending the money. Plus, we’d driven there in a tiny car. How the hell would we get the machine back?

Several drinks into the night, though, my wife became transfixed by this Puzzle Bobble machine. She does not play many video games but she is good at games like Tetris. She lined up to play and proceeded to absolutely wrecking shop. I’m sure everyone has a memory of the older kid at the Mortal Kombat or Street Fighter II machine taking advantage of the young kids stepping up, never losing and never giving up their spot. This was my wife in Puzzle Bobble, except she was drunk and tearing apart all these other adults.

It ruled! Great memory. But it’s at this point she notices the price of the machine is, I don’t know, let’s say $600. She recalled how a friend of ours is an arcade collector and offered to A) negotiate the price down and B) find a way to make it back to our apartment in San Francisco. Looking me in the eye, thinking about the next Miller Lite, she gave me a simple request: “Put in the call and see if we can get that thing.”