The GeekHiker

For those interested, this is the last of the backposts.

I’m sitting at the airport, staring out at the tarmac, and thinking about the old house.  I feel like I’m missing something, but not the house itself.  What, then?

I spent only about six years at that house, but they were formative years.  Those years in high school, where you start to figure out who you really are.  At that time in your life where you think that figuring out who you really are is an attainable goal, rather than simply a journey.

My first girlfriend and I hung out at that house.  We left for my senior ball from the house.  And no, I didn’t get laid that night.

I remember writing my first (extremely cheesy) screenplay in the family room, back when I had dreams of making movies.

I remember coming home on hot summer days and stepping inside the front door, the entryway lined with marble tile and cooling the feet instantly.

I remember the floor heating system, and on cold winter days in Sacramento, sitting on top with the hot air running up my back.  The room didn’t get warm, but you sure felt great.

I remember sitting in the dining room, watching the squirrels run back and forth on the power lines and argue with each other.

I remember the meals after my grandparent’s funerals.  I was in San Francisco at the time, and had to come up for my Father’s Mother’s funeral.  A week later, my Mom’s Father passed away, and up I came again.

No one said all the memories had to be good ones, now did they?

Despite the flood of memories, I really didn’t think about the house, the structure itself, all that much.

What’s missing, I think, is the sense of “home” now.  My parents have moved into a smaller place, two bedrooms.  My bedroom in the old house had become a storage room long ago, but they always kept a bed and nightstands in there, so when I came up over the years there was a place to stay.

In the new house, the second room will be an office.  They’re talking about getting a Murphy bed for the wall, but the idea of having a room is gone.  Of course, being in my thirties, I really don’t have much of a problem with that.  Still…

Someone I know has a home that they grew up in.  She looks forward to inheriting the house one day and, perhaps, raising her children there.  When she speaks of it, you can hear the powerful attachment she has for the place in her voice.

My life feels much more transient.  I’ve never owned a house.  We went through a few before I left for college, and since then it’s been a series of apartments.

Hell, the closest thing that I’ve had to long-term living since then was a crappy studio in Palms that I lived in for years.  The one I left shortly after the rat moved in.

So, in some ways, I’m undeniably jealous of her, and that sense of “home” that she has with the house she speaks of so fondly.  Whatever sense of it I might have had with the old house has been eliminated.

My parents have their little house to live out the next few years of their retirement in.  Certainly, I’m welcome to visit, but there’s no home to go back to.

Hell, according to the rules of their new housing development, guests can only stay a maximum of 60 days.

So there it is.

I don’t miss the structure.  It’s a house, it’s no longer in the family, and that’s that.

The memories, well the house merely served as a trigger.

So, in the end, what I think it is is something I wasn’t expecting.  There’s no “home” to go back to anymore.  Well, at least not for longer than 60 days.

That’s depressing as hell.

TUESDAY

I’ve been feeling antsy since I’ve been here, needing to get outdoors.  So this morning I decided to go for a walk, about five miles or so, around the golf courses and nature reserves of this place.  And I was a bit shocked at what I found:

An Egret in the bushes.  He later took off and flew over my head, but I couldn’t get a shot.

California Quail.  What you don’t see (they’re never in sight for long) was his mate and the group of baby quail hiding in the bushes below.

Jack Rabbit in the open field.

Valley Oak woodland.

There were also geese and their offspring, squirrels, and hawks flying overhead.  I can’t say how well the wildlife corridors may be surviving between the various housing developments here, but on the surface at least, the combination of mid-to-high density housing and the original oak valley seems to be working.

And it’s a hell of a lot better than anything I’ve seen down south, even in the newer developments in the burgeoning inland empire, where everything is being paved over with a solid layer of concrete.

Plus, I got outdoors into some nature, which I desperately needed.

The early afternoon was spent going through boxes of old stuff.  I found a Rubik’s Cube, old Erector sets, Legos and Star Wars toy2, even Weebles (“they wobble but they don’t fall down”).  Yes, I feel old.

The remainder of the day was spent taking Mom out to see Pirates (no real review, but let’s just say Rush seems to be having the most fun), a Mexican dinner with some fantastic carne asada, and an evening playing Sorry!  Altogether, a pleasant time as a family.

Still, there’s something forming in the back of my mind about the old house, and it’s not a pleasant feeling, either.  Maybe I’m just tired tonight, but I just can’t seem to put my finger on it yet…

MONDAY

It took a couple of days, but we’ve found the running joke.

This morning, my father decided he wanted to place the artificial Christmas Tree box in the rafters of the garage.  Now, an artificial tree isn’t that heavy, maybe fifty pounds, but the damn thing is bulky.  A big, square box.

Sadly, Dad doesn’t own a Tommy Lift.

We tried lifting it up.  We tried using rope over the cross braces as a pulley.  Lord help us, we even tried sliding the ting up an extension ladder.

Eventually, after a good solid (and rather silly & exhausting hour) of trying to figure out how to do it, we just stuck the box in the corner of the garage.  Of course, for the rest of the day, whenever the question arose of where to place something, “how about up in the rafters?” was the immediate response.

Most of the morning entailed re-arranging the garage, moving boxes from one end to the other and organizing tools.  Plus, we had to move large cabinets affixed to one wall and affix them to another (suspended off the garage floor).

I know, sound like an absolute blast, doesn’t it?

The afternoon was spent with my 93-year-old grandmother, who we drove over to the new house for the first time.

I didn’t see Grandma at Christmas, since she was with my Uncle’s family, so it’s probably been around a year or so since I’d seen her last.  All the things my Mom had been telling me about her in the last few months were true: she’s become rather more paranoid, and at the same time quite stubborn.

She’s also grown quite hard of hearing, having refused to ever try hearing aids many years ago when she first started loosing her hearing.  I wish I could say that makes for a humorous turn of events, but really it’s just frustrating since having to yell, and then repeat at an even louder volume several times, anything you say becomes tiring.

Don’t get me wrong, I love my Grandmother dearly.  Without doubt, that’s what makes it all the more sad.  Especially when you try to start a conversation with “so, what’s on your mind?” and the response is “oh, this crazy world”, said in a voice that clearly reflects the belief that the weight of the world rests upon her 4’9″ 85 lb. shoulders.

*sigh*

At least tomorrow should be more relaxing.  This morning I heard a red tail cry and make a low sweep over the houses.  Hopefully I’ll walk into the local oak woodland and see more tomorrow.

SUNDAY 

4506.

For twenty years, those were the numbers that represented home.  Today was the last time that I’ll ever pull up to that house and those numbers, knowing there was family waiting for me inside.

I only took a few photographs of the house, as my Mom had photographed it extensively before it was all packed into boxes.  The numbers are such a simple thing, but they seem evocative to me, somehow.

We started today by venturing out for some necessities: food, certain housewares, etc.  Unfortunately, the closest, most convenient place to do this was… the Wal-Mart SuperCenter.

I’ve never been in one, and, well, good God Almighty, I’ve never seen such a thing.

As was said of Bryce Canyon, it would be a hell of a place to loose a cow.

Seriously, it’s huge.  The Romanian Army could fit inside.  Hell, I’ve been through small towns that could fit inside.  That department in the corner over there?  Yeah, that’s just Liechtenstein.

I’m not a huge fan of Wal-Mart, their business practices, cutthroat international push for low cost labor, lack of affordable employee heath care, etc.; but this trip isn’t about that, so I’m not going to go into it here.

That said, this place was amazingly humongous.  And it had everything.  At low, low prices of course.

The errands done, it was off to the old house.  The last trip, which involved checking for any last minute items, vacuuming, sweeping the garage, saying goodbye to the neighbors.

And saying goodbye.

Memories, of course, came flooding back in the process.

I stood in my old bedroom, empty now, staring at the pale blue walls.  It seemed smaller than I ever remembered it being in my life.

On the brass recessed handle for the closet door I saw the ding that I accidentally hammered into it when we first moved in.

The long shelf under the window where I displayed the models I built as a kid.

I remembered the long hours doing homework at the desk in the corner.  Working on AP history papers, putting together projects, struggling with Algebra and Chemistry assignments, reading a novel by some old, dead guy (as I thought of it at the time).

I remembered my first birthday in the house when we moved in 20 years ago, staying up late at night listening to music on the cassette WalkMan my parents had given me.

The first tape?  Why, the Star Wars soundtrack, of course.

I walked into the backyard and looked at the redwood trellis my Dad and I built when I was in high school.  60 feet long, built with 2×2’s running the entire length.  Underneath, 20 feet of redwood deck we built too.

I’ll really, really miss those structures, I think, since they were something that Dad & I built together, one hot Sacramento summer so many years ago.

I remembered taking pictures under the trees in the backyard with my high school friends, before I left for San Francisco.  Me and my fellow geeks, including my girlfriend at the time.  The girlfriend who would end up dumping me for one of the other guys in the group (one of my best friends), but only after thoroughly messing with my head.  C’est la vie.

I remembered biking back and forth to school and learning how to drive on the local streets.  The parking lot nearby that that girlfriend and I used to make out in, in the back of the Toyota Corolla I would later own.

Heh, the back seat.  How quaint and old-fashioned.

And, as I walked around the outside, I remembered my first summer home from college, when I couldn’t find a summer job, so Dad paid me to paint the house.  Which hadn’t been painted in 30 years at the time and needed to be stripped first and then painted.  In 100 degree plus Sacramento heat.

Needless to say, by the next summer, I had me a damn job.

But as I write this tonight, I don’t know that I miss the house itself.  The memories that were triggered, sure, but the house, not so much.

Perhaps I’m just tired from having spent the rest of the day helping my parents re-arrange stuff, but as for missing the building, I’m mentally shrugging my shoulders.

Or maybe it just hasn’t sunk in yet.

Being without internet until my return Wednesday, I’ve been writing daily posts into a text file, which I’ll back-post over the next few days.  This will either be an interesting experiment in journaling, or have the net effect of boring the hell out of everybody…

SATURDAY

It’s 11:00 at night as I write this.  I’ve been up since 4:30 this morning to catch a flight here.  My mind is toast.

The first thing I learned today is this: when bringing a laptop onto an airplane, it has to be placed in it’s own separate bin.  I had no idea.

Of course, the security folks were only too happy to inform me… as well as to stop the belt, back it up, send me back past several unhappy fellow passengers to fetch another bin, and give me a little “how could you not know, you idiot” attitude to boot.

So consider this a friendly PSA: put your laptop in its own bin, or you will be made to feel like a 90-lb jr. high school weakling being pushed up against a locker and tormented for wearing the corduroy pants that your Mom dressed you in in.

Not that that’s the voice of experience, or anything.

*cough*

So, uh, anyway…

When I booked the tickets a few weeks ago, the thought was that I’d be helping The Parentage pack & move.  The whole rushed nature of this thing (literally, they put the house on the market at the end of April) pushed the move date to today.  I taxied from Sacramento International (they have a plane that goes all the way to Mexico!) to their house to find the truck already there and the house already half empty.

This whole thing has been entirely too fast to process.  Isn’t it weird that some of the biggest, most expensive decisions we make in life (renting an apartment, buying a house) seem to be those we have to make the quickest?  Sure, I can spend an hour or two in the grocery store picking between catsup & ketchup, but if you aren’t willing to sign the rental contract for an apartment the instant it’s offered, you might lose the place to someone else.

The rest of the day involved shuttle trips back & forth between the old house and the new one, moving furniture, moving boxes.  And more boxes.  And yet more boxes.

So, what about the new house?

The new house is in a community limited to those 55 and older, though it’s not, technically, a retirement community.  The primary reason behind the purchase: size.  The Parentage wanted a smaller house, which in this day and age is hard to find since everybody seems to want a mini-mansion, and home-builders are only to happy to oblige.

It’s a newer house, better insulation, new appliances, quieter neighborhood, even ceiling fans.  It’s quite nice, at least first-impression wise.

The biggest thing I notice is that it’s out in the boonies north of Sac.  Land that 10 years ago was oak savanna.  It’s new suburbia.  Tract housing and malls.  And golf courses.  Lots and lots of golf courses.

Oh, God, my parents have moved to retirement golf course suburban hell.

On the plus side, the city or county are at least forcing the developers to make some effort to preserve at least some of the oak woodlands out there.  And some of the creeks are salmon runs, so they are being careful to preserve that habitat.

And this first evening, after everything was 98% in the house, I watched a hawk cicle overhead and cruise to a landing at the top of a tall Valley Oak.

Seeing something like that, it can’t be all bad, right?

Of course, tomorrow, we make the last trip to the old house…

Did I mention there were a lot of boxes today?

This weekend, I’m off to the Big Tomato.  My parents have sold their house, and I’m flying up to help them move.

Sadly, this means that the GeekHiker won’t be doing any hiking or camping over the weekend.  And since my Father won’t have his internet connection in the new place turned on until Tuesday (probably late Tuesday, as members of the GeekHiker’s family always seem to be the last stop on the service guy’s route), I won’t have any computer access either.

Good God, no hiking and no geeking?  Whatever shall I do?

I might actually have to open a *gasp* book.

Plus, there will be no carefully crafted hastily thrown-together posts for a few days.  Sorry, kids.

All kidding aside, I actually like books.  They’re much easier to curl up with than a laptop.  My current read?  An 800 page history of the Transcontinental Railroad.

Now that I’ve typed that, of course, I suddenly feel like an old man reading musty old books.  No, really, I’m in my thirties.  Really.  Now get off my lawn, dag-nab-it.

But I digress.

The house that they’re moving out of was one of two houses that define my childhood.  There was a duplex somewhere before that, but it exists only in small fragments in my visual memory.  The first house was out in the suburbs, new construction in the late 70’s.  It was white stucco with dark green trim… not in a good way.  It was uuuugly.

My parents hated the house.  They didn’t like the layout, the location, everything.  For example, when you walked into the front door, the first thing you saw was… a closet door.  What I remember is that the front door faced east, and during certain times of the year, the sun would shine through the little peephole lens and make a perfectly circular rainbow on the closet door.

Unlike my parents, I have fond memories of the house.  The backyard was an easement from the local utility (some power lines ran across it, which explains my slight glow when the lights are out).  It was just shy of 1/3 of an acre, most of it just a big grassy lawn.  There was a jungle gym my dad put in and a garden my parents tried to grow.  The 1/3 acre was up a slight (i.e. 20 foot high) hill from the house that my parents planted with iceplant.  I have, shall we say, less than fond of memories of weeding that hill on many a Saturday morning.

After all, there were cartoons to be watched, dammit!

For the little GeekHiker, that backyard was a paradise.  It was the corridors of the Death Star where I, as Han Solo, chased stormtroopers.  It was the halls of some ancient temple where a 3-foot tall Indiana Jones hunted for ancient artifacts.

My Dad even gave me a 6-foot length of rope for a whip.  I used it complete with “whit-kaa” sound effects and tried to swing across imaginary crevasses with the rope over the jungle gym bars.  It’s a wonder I didn’t kill myself.

In hot summers I would run through the sprinklers.  We never had a pool, despite my begging for one my whole childhood.

When I was in Jr. High, we moved into a house closer to the city.  and since Jr. High is a time of so many changes anyway, it serves as the perfect divider between my childhood years and my teen years.

I primarily remember this house as the house I came back “home” to.  It was where I returned for weekends in college, holidays over the years, that sort of thing.  It was a good house for entertaining, with a big living room to sit in and a formal dining room for family dinners.  It was a warm place.

It’s a very nice house, and I hope my parents have sold it to a very nice family.  But with three bedrooms, it’s far too large for my parents at this point, so moving to a smaller house only makes sense.

I don’t know that I’ve quite grasped it, though.  In fact, I think I’m just thinking of this as a simple trip back home to visit the folks.  After all, it’s just a house, right?

Or will I feel different when I arrive Saturday morning and find the house empty?

Which is why this is only Part One…