I almost remember

My family moved to Buffalo, NY when I was 10.

My father was a professor teaching at the University of Puget Sound in Washington State. He was offered a job teaching in Buffalo and so we moved. It was really all quite inconsequential to me. I was 10 and as long as my family was together it didn’t matter. When you are small the whole world is contained to a very few people and a very few sets of walls.

My mother thought it would be good to drive from Washington to Buffalo. She thought that it would be a nice opportunity for the family to see the country. Somehow driving across the country with three children in a wood-paneled station wagon is one of those ideas that really is better on paper. But my mother bought a map of the United States and plotted her course and we were off. She gave the children the opportunity to voice their opinion about sights we wanted to see, but I was the oldest at 10, my younger sister was 7 and my baby sister was only 2. I had no idea what was in between Washington and New York. So, I just sat with my mother at the kitchen table and nodded as she asked me if I thought going through Utah was a good idea. Seemed like a good idea at the time. It was my mother’s idea, and that inherently made it good.

Packing was a horrible thing. My father wanted everything done in a system. He was one of those people who would write his name on everything and make sure the door was locked three times. He also was the type to read the section in the paper with all the really tiny writing on it and, from behind the paper in his reading chair make gruff noises when he got to the part of the tiny writing that told him if he was making money…or losing it. (Those grunts were louder and generally more intense.) Every so often he would call me and show me a tiny little number. “Nikki, do you know what this is?” As with my mother and the map, I generally just nodded. “This is a stock and the paper tells me if it is doing well or if I should switch stocks.” I appreciate my father trying to teach me about stocks and finances in general. But his explanation about what a stock was, wasn’t exactly the kind of explanation that a 10 year old needs. After the initial explanation about stocks, I was always afraid to ask again. So, as with my mother and her rout across America, when my father showed me the tiny writing, I just nodded.

His system to packing was simple. All like things in the same box. Socks should go with other socks, pants together, toys with one another. Simple theory I suppose. Because I was the oldest I was in charge of explaining this theory to my sister. She, naturally, was skeptical of anything that came out of my mouth and always thought I was trying to get her into trouble. I have no idea what that would be. I’m certain that it had nothing to do with the time that I had her smell and then drink a whole spoon full of vanilla. Honestly, I wanted to know what it tasted like too – I just didn’t want to taste it.

So I explained this great system to my sister and she followed along with it for a while. I think her socks made it all into the same box. After she successfully packed her socks, I figured that she had the hang of it and didn’t need supervision. I went outside.

My mother went into check on my sister after a few hours and her packing had gone from the ‘like things in the same box’ theory to the ‘protect all of the stuffed animals’ theory. Kristen had gently placed two of her stuffed animals together in a box (two so they would not get lonely and probably because we were learning about Noah and the Arc in Sunday School), and then lovingly mashed around them a protective layering of whatever she could find; clothes, pants, sheets, and pillows. (Her favorite animals got the pillows.)

It wasn’t that this theory didn’t work. Technically, everything made it into a box. Additionally, she had written on the side of each box the names of the two animals contained within. She had about run out of both boxes and animals by the time my mother discovered her. And in that situation what do you do? Kristen was only 7, and it is hard to tell a 7 year old that the original plan for the animals was a big plastic bag. My mother decided to just tape the boxes before my father discovered that there were animals in with the pants.

It is better in some cases to let sleeping animals lie...in boxes...with pants.