Possessions

I never realized how little I had until my family packed up overnight and left town. I was a senior in high school, and it was in late October. We snuck out of town, avoiding creditors I supposed, and moved 1,000 miles away. The six of us (my step-father, mother, sister, brother, large German Shepard, and me) packed into a Vega towing a small U-Haul trailer. That was it, that is all we had. The Vega was valiant, but I think the Ozarks did it in. It burned up a few weeks after we reached Oklahoma.

I was devastated when we left - we had been in the town for two years, easily three times longer than any other house I had lived in. I had made friends, and as my luck would have it, just acquired my first girlfriend. All that disappeared in a day - even after two years, nothing was certain, nothing was predictable. We moved to Oklahoma City where one of my step-father's old drinking buddies had become a manager of a furniture store. I never knew exactly what function my step-father was to serve at the store, other than slipping stuff out the back door.

I spent two months in Oklahoma City. Shortly after Christmas, I packed a suitcase and hitchhiked back to Indiana with my step-father's blessing. The contents of that suitcase remain with me to this day (two yearbooks and a small box I kept my girlfriend's letters in), and nothing else from my childhood.

I finished high school with my friends and eventually ended up back in Oklahoma near my family, as college was very inexpensive there. Without noticing, I did start to collect things - books. Before I realized it, I had hundreds of them. They are the one possessions I did not give away over the years, although my two daughters have inherited many of them in the past year. Some people I guess look at old photos, clothes, toys, etc. to define the stages of their lives. I look at these books. I see how my interests have changed, how I have matured, and the one durable thing in my life - thoughts and ideas. In hindsight though, photos might have been easier for someone who continued to move often and far.