The pull to leave and the pull to stay

While many merely try to keep themselves together in an uncertain economy, here’s a man attempting to molt, to move away, to perform a five-member family makeover.


He’s already snapped the chalk line from A to B, from Massachusetts to Montana, from hardpan to greener pastures. But before cutting his way westward, he has to sell his house first.


Maybe this, a tavern with testosterone on tap, is no place to talk of alienation and dreams that are no cinch. Maybe it’d be better if we were around a kitchen table that he hopes to dismantle soon and load onto a truck, a kitchen table scuffed up by the silverware of a feeding family.




But anyway, here we are tucked into a booth in a tavern where deals are being made or undone, conversations lurch from surety bonds to bail bonds, and guys at the bar talk trash about Derek Jeter's gender preference.


I rub my eyes. Kent rubs his hands.


His house has been on the market, officially, for two hours. We order a couple of pints. We clink glasses and contemplate the wild braid of superior resistance that tethers some of us to the ground beneath our feet and pulls others across long distances, like free-range tribes of old, roaming, wily and foraging for a future.


His soul has felt the pull, its reflected light blocked by the orb of an oppressive mortgage payment and dried-up job prospects. The corners in his life no longer are weighted down with commitments, a feeling equally euphoric and frightening. He envisions hoisting it all – everything that’s meaningful -- like a sacred icon in a Rosary procession, then placing it all down carefully, elsewhere, far away and intact, in the name of a father, and his family and the Holy Spirit. Amen.


Patrons are tucking Reubens into their countenances. Canoe-topped out-of-towner cars are doing a conga line down Main Street on their way to the hills. Kent has another set of hills in mind, in Montana -- for family reasons  (he wants his three daughters to grow up knowing their grandparents); for political reasons (he's decidedly right of center ... picture “Right,” then take about 30 steps further to the right); and for political reasons (did I already say that?).


“Montana is not a miniature socialist/communist state with high taxes where personal freedoms are dwindling year by year,” he says. “Plus, it's drop-dead gorgeous, and a person can still have some elbow room. There are so many zoning laws here. You know I can't even have chickens? How crazy is that? We live in the so-called 'country' and I can't have chickens?”


Chicken sandwiches will have to suffice until the house sells, a chicken parm and a chicken club, made from chickens whose molting days are long come.


"Any takers on the house yet?" I ask.


“Shut up,” he says.


He wants to buy five to 10 acres. He wants his young daughters to have horses. He and his wife home school, and in Montana home schoolers aren’t looked upon with suspicion. Kent says he'll look for work doing anything -- construction, buffing floors, whatever.


Families with young children begin entering the joint. The men at the bar yield to the changing demographic and behave themselves.


“So you’re going to be another friend moving away,” I say.


“Yup.”


“If the house sells.”


“Yup.”


“I hope it all works out as you hope it will, just as long as what you hope doesn’t include joining a militia.”


I don’t want him to go. I feel like an Australian shepherd these days trying to round up my wayward pack, protect them and guard them and demand from them time and attention. Friends keep leaving – for greener pastures whose residents may well be dreaming of greener pastures in places whose residents may well be dreaming of greener pastures. And all the while, the greenest pasture may well be a kitchen table scuffed up by the silverware of a feeding family, provided you can keep them fed.


“I’m not joining Facebook,” I tell him.


“Neither am I.”


“If you get to Montana and join Facebook, you’ll destroy the romance and heroics of your new life.” It’d be like the Apollo 11 moon landing broadcast in high-definition color rather than in the mysterious monotone of a grainy signal.


“I’m not joining Facebook.”


“Good. Send me presents.”


“Nope.”


“Jerk.”


“Yup.”


We're both whupped. Our respective braids are tugging at us. All the words in our repertoire wish to go home and bed down and dream in foreign languages.


A portrait of Babe Ruth hangs over our table. Babe, another man with a rebellious streak, once said, “I swing big, with everything I've got. I hit big, or I miss big.”


Kent's swinging with everything he's got. If he connects, it’ll be big. If he connects, like Babe, I suppose he’ll find himself rounding a bend and heading for home.