Stuck in Motion

My memory is rather sketchy before my teens, and even then it's somewhat of a blur, but I remember one day in Olathe, Kansas, back in 1977 when my mother called me and my brother in to the living room saying that she and dad had something to tell us. We hopped up on the couch like little troopers falling into formation.

I remember hoping that they were going to tell us that we'd be going to Worlds of Fun, or that we might be taking a drive to go and visit grandma. My brother was four years old so he was probably thinking about an afternoon snack. Well, that or he was establishing the proof of Fermat's last theorem and wondering why modern mathematicians, those amateurs, were finding it so hard to grasp.

"Kids, we're moving to Italy."

I really don't remember much after that, only the CliffsNotes™ really.

"When will we be coming back?"

"We won't."

By the time we boarded the plane for the first leg of the long flight to Rome in the fall of 1977 we had already lived in Illinois, Ohio, Florida, Kentucky, Missouri, and Kansas. I was seven years old. I was a missionary's kid.

Rome was, and still is, one of the most breathtakingly beautiful cities on Earth. I remember being able to see the dome of St. Peter's cathedral from the roof of our apartment building on clear days. There were a lot of clear days.

I began learning Italian from the kids in our neighborhood there. I used to lose all of my marbles to them in the playground, but it was fun anyway. We grew relatively close with the kids of one of the other missionary families there. They were our new family, if only for our first year there.

My parents had been sent to Rome for an intensive year of language training before being transfered down south to Naples to do what I can only classify as cleanup work. I remember the day we reopened the abandoned church in Torre Annunziata: the dust, the dirt, the vandalized yet overly used non-functioning glorified outhouse of a water closet in the back courtyard. I remember the smell; the flies.

I remember us holding what amounted to mock church services for nearly a year, for a congregation of five, which consisted of my mother, my father, my brother, myself, and a 72 year old man whose reason for attending was because he was rebelling against his Catholic upbringing.

Things were better in Ottaviano. The church there was less of a half-hearted act of desperation. When they finally managed to get one open in downtown Naples things were actually looking up.

I did have friends there. Of course, by the time I had actually begun to experience an interest in girls it was time to go back to the States on furlough. Dad had to go do another fund-raising tour, so I had to say good-bye to Federica, Maria, and Ilaria, assuring them that our furlough was only supposed to last one year, and that I would be back if everything went according to plan.

From Rome, then Naples, we moved to my mother's hometown in southern Ohio. That's where I learned the meaning of reverse culture shock. The cars were huge and so were the people, but the town itself could have been squeezed into our apartment complex in Fuorigrotta. No one spoke more than one language, and the language they did speak was foreign to me. I still have no idea how the word, you'uns, came to be adopted as an acceptable replacement for the second person plural pronoun.

I had been attending an international school with a body of 130 friendly and culturally diverse students ranging from kindergarten through the 12th grade, and now all of a sudden I was in a middle school with several hundred 6th, 7th, and 8th graders with no clue that there was anything on the other side of the tracks, let alone the ocean. There were fights, there was smoking and drinking in the bathrooms, there was so much noise. I watched a girl punch another girl so hard my first week there that she knocked out one of her teeth. I hated every single minute of it.

And my parents wondered why my grades suffered a marked decline.

A month or so before the furlough was done mom and dad called us into the living room.

"We're not going back to Italy. We're moving to France."

I remember my first thoughts going to Fede. I had never had the chance to tell her. I might have been very young, but I knew what I felt.

I never saw her again.

France. Yes, we were going to be missionaries to (insert emphatic pause here) France.

By the time we boarded the plane to Paris in the fall of 1982 we had added four more residences, two in Italy, and two in my mother's home town, to our ever-increasing list of places we would never call home.

I discovered when I got there that there was such a thing as reverse reverse culture shock, rcs² if you will.

France was, and still is, one of the most richly beautiful countries on Earth, and Paris, oh Paris, she will draw you in until you can't help but fall madly in love with her. God, I miss her! No matter how many towns we lived in outside of the banlieue she was always the closest thing I ever had to a home.

I remember when we were living in Villennes-sur-Seine, after already having lived in three other communities: Voisins-le-Bretonneux, Buc, and Feucherolles, that on the occasional clear night we could see the Eiffel Tower in the distance from the end of our street. I remember watching dozens of fireworks displays all across the Parisian basin on every 14th of July. I remember the stairs. 180 of them from the end of our street down the edge of the basin and into Villennes where I used to catch the train into Paris. I remember climbing back up those stairs. I think I'm still a bit achy from that experience.

But the view... it was utterly breathtaking.

I had a lot of good friends there, and had great fun making music with Ben, Ciaran, and Peter. I'll never forget the spontaneous mosh pit that erupted when we played our punked out version of OMD's Enola Gay at the concert they held at the Lycée International. That was amazing!

I felt like I came into my own when I joined the heavy metal band, Enforcer (not to be confused with the current band with the same name), as their lead singer and lyricist. They were the most phenomenal musicians I had ever met. The music was flawless, revolutionary, and bolder than a raging pit bull. Every note was composed, carefully charted, and rehearsed repeatedly until perfect, but the energy of the songs was addictive. We practiced as if we had an audience of thousands. We had management, a growing fan base, radio exposure, and were the featured headliners at a festival put on by Hard Force Magazine, a French metal publication at the time.

I was right where I wanted to be, but once again the church called me away. This time to college. Every good MK had to go to one of our denomination's colleges and choose a path that would have the word, missionary, a hyphen, and any other random career designator in its title. I was going to our college in Nashville to learn all about the music business. I had to say good-bye to Manu, Fabien, Eric, and Philippe, and, of course, Clarissa, Isabelle, and Corinna.

I will never forget the day I told the guys I was leaving, and I will never forget when they said they'd come with me.

Regrets? What do you think?

Nashville. Enter rcs³. I went from the city of lights to a glorified oxymoron themed highway rest area. (Country Music, just to be perfectly clear.) I remember trying to find a polite and inoffensive way of answering the college questionnaire when it asked if I thought I might have trouble adjusting to a large city.

Needless to say, having left the only place I ever considered calling home, the band that I loved so much and knew would have succeeded had I stayed, and the closest friends I had ever had, I was not exactly pleased to be there.

I didn't last long. After two semesters, three dorm rooms, and a short scholastic hiatus, I ended up moving back to that little town in Ohio to stay with my grandparents while I "got on my feet." Getting on my feet consisted of marrying a total stranger just so that I could get out of my grandfather's house only 9 months after I got there.

The story gets quite long and toilsome starting there, and I will definitely cover it in excruciating detail some day, but I don't want to stray too far down that rabbit trail right now.

Between my marriage in 1990 and the most welcome divorce in 1998 I lived in two different towns in Ohio, one in Kansas, two locations in West Virginia, and six in and around Atlanta, Georgia, accounting for, at the very least, rcs⁴, rcs⁵, and rcs⁶.

Single and in debt up to my eyeballs after severing all ties with my ex I needed a drastic change. I got in shape and enlisted in the US Army.

I shipped out to Fort Leonard Wood in January of 2000. Make that rcs⁷. It wasn't all bad there. I might have been one of the oldest guys there, a buck private at the age of 30, but I was outperforming quite a few of the younger recruits. Also, one day while I was on KP, I had the chance to speak with that beautiful Hawaiian girl I had noticed on day one of reception; that same girl whose name I had brought up when one of the guys had asked me if there was any female in our platoon who may have caught my eye. I remember mentioning how much I liked her disposition; that she was very attractive but so cool-headed and down to Earth.

I remember her energy and enthusiasm. She was so alive. And she was smart. Very smart. I could already tell that conversation with her was going to be better than any time I had ever spent with another woman, yes, ANY time.

When we found out we were headed to the same training unit there was a tangible sense of excitement in the air around us. I can still feel it as I reminisce.

If there's any one thing I got right in my life, it's that I married her. God, I love her.

Hey, it's my rabbit trail. Deal with it.

Since 2000 we've lived in California for three years, Germany for five, and now, thanks to the Army Priority Placement Program, the armpit of hell, central Louisiana. Make that rcs⁸, rcs⁹, and rcs¹⁰.

Side note for any DoD civilians: the PPP can bite you in the keister. Avoid it if you can.

I've tallied as many of the individual moves as I can remember, and I'm averaging just shy of one move per year of my life. I'm 39 and I've moved 38 times. I'm stuck in motion!

I've never had a home. Paris may be the closest thing I've ever had to one, but I haven't been back for more than a long weekend since 1989. I don't even know what it would be like to have one. I struggle to comprehend how people can stay in one location for their entire lives and not go completely insane. But then of course I'm reminded that my incessant moves have had such a profound effect on my psyche that there's actually a pseudo-clinical term for the way I'm wired: Third Culture Kid.

There are so many similarities between the "symptom" lists of TCK and Asperger Syndrome that I am not quite sure which label best suits me. I've often suspected AS, if not for my social awkwardness as a youngster, for those pinpointed obsessions I've mentioned in earlier posts. However, AS requires quite a bit of testing and analysis to come to a satisfactory diagnosis, while TCK, heck, I became one of those when I experienced rcs¹. What I do know, however, is that both of the lists describe me to a T.

I don't know if I'll ever be able to stop moving, or if I'll ever know what it's like to have a home, but it's OK... now. I'm going to have to choose to be OK with it because it's the only life I've ever known.