It was August 1985 in Columbus, Ohio. I was in Ohio for my grandfather’s funeral. and the night before I was going to return to my home in St. Louis, I went with my sisters and my brother to the movies.
It wasn’t a great movie, but I enjoyed it. In fact, there are few movies that affect me emotionally as much as the Brat Pack tour de force “St. Elmo’s Fire.”
I have written before that one of the more unique things about my life is that I have lived in four different states for at least 10 years each. I don’t know of anyone else who can say that. I lived in California for 21 years (1949-50 and 1990-2010), nearly 18 in Virginia (1963-76 and 1978-81) and Ohio for 10 (1953-63), and I live now in Georgia going on 14 years.
Virginia is the one that breaks my heart. There are few places where more good things and bad things happened to me between the ages of 13 and 31, from marriage to divorce, failure in school and war with my parents and all sorts of other tsuris. It was the first place I fell in love, the place I met all of my closest friends and the place I first accomplished anything special.
My first marriage began and ended in Virginia, and two more of the most significant male-female relationships of the first half of my life took place there as well. One was the first — in 1970 — and the other was 10 years later and helped me survive the heartbreak of the end of my marriage. Neither ended well, but ironically both women are dear friends of mine all these years later.
With both my parents gone, I don’t get up to Virginia all that much anymore. I was up there two or three times a couple of years back when we were cleaning out my mother’s house to sell it, but my last visit was a 24-hour up and back in January 2022.
Both our children work for the State Department, although in different ways. Pauline is overseas at various postings most of the time. The only times she has been in Virginia have been every few years for foreign language training, but this time she’s going directly from three years in Tunisia to two years in Germany.
Virgile and his wife Sterling did tours in Greece, Mexico and Paraguay, but they decided they didn’t want to do that anymore and they work out of State Department headquarters in Foggy Bottom now. They bought a house out in Prince William County, Va., last year and are happily settled as Virginians.
We’re thinking of doing something I never dreamed I would do. Nicole and I are both in our mid 70s now and the words “assisted living” are starting to sound more and more reasonable. My wife is the youngest of four siblings and the other three are all in their 80s. I’m the oldest of five children, so the only reference I have is ancestors. My father left us before my third birthday, so I have no idea how long he lived. My maternal grandfather lived to be 89, which is pretty good. My grandfather on the other side died in his early 50s, but it was in an automobile accident.
It would doubtless be cheaper to do assisted living here, but we have no relatives and only one or two friends here in Georgia. In Virginia we would have our son, two of my siblings and a number of old friends. We aren’t rich, but we could probably manage either place if we had to.
If we do move to Virginia, I think it might be best to live farther out from Washington than I lived before, maybe even as far out as Culpeper or Winchester. Not just because of the cost of living, but because it would mean going in closer when we wanted but not being faced with two decades of good and bad memories day after day.
These are the ones that break my heart.
Of course almost all of this stuff is hone now.
Except in my heart.