Moving to Massachusetts

Sometimes you just feel like telling a story.

This is the story of how I moved from Indianapolis, IN to Amherst, MA in the hot August sunshine in 1999, ten months and two weeks after my father died.

But who’s counting? 

It is also the story of what happened after. And a wee bit of what happened before.

And it’s a story I like to revisit when I need to ground myself in gratitude, balance, and our capacity for problem-solving and resilience.

In the U-Haul parked in front of the house my friends and I lovingly called the “Rookwood Café,” on Rookwood Avenue, just steps from Butler’s famous Hinkle Fieldhouse, I clamored over boxes in the back. It was like I was on stage, sitting above the area where my mother and my friends handed me items to tuck away for the drive. 

My t-shirt rode up, revealing the tattoo I’d gotten several months earlier, a small orange flower on my right hip, a celebration of my grad school acceptance. 

My mother, who was never supposed to see it, gasped, “Oh my god!” 

Without thinking, I swore. Loudly. “Shit!” 

Awkward silence. 

My mother said: “Your father and I gave you a beautiful body to mutilate!” 

That sounds a lot worse than it was. In reality, she was laughing and after a moment, everyone else was, too.

That night someone turned the hazards on because I’d left the door unlocked, so in the morning we had to jumpstart the truck. An inauspicious start.

I recently used the word “auspicious” on a phone call and the person on the other end laughed and said they’d never heard that word spoken aloud before. That’s not auspicious but it was entertaining. 

Anyway, the motorcade from Indianapolis was me and my cat in the U-Haul, my dear friend Jason following in my car, and behind him, a friend of a friend who was driving to Long Island. She’d go with us through an overnight stop in PA and then we’d part ways. Jason and I had walkie-talkies. None of us had a cell phone. What can I say? We were so last-century. I mean, it was the last century. 

Everything went ok across Ohio. My cat and I listened to Haydn’s Lord Nelson Mass on repeat, interspersed with Tori Amos, Ani Defranco, They Might Be Giants, Counting Crows.

We stopped at a roadside hotel in PA like every other roadside hotel in existence. It was unremarkable. Just by reading these three sentences you already know what it was like. 

The next day, when we stopped for gas, I  thoughtlessly rested my wallet on the top of the cab. 

You also already know where this is going.

As we drove away I remember thinking “Something isn’t right.” 

After we got on the highway, I realized: I didn’t have my wallet.

The next exit was 20 miles away. 

“SHIT.”

On the walkie-talking to Jason: “I lost my wallet, I have to go back.”

Twenty miles later we found a restaurant. They got a booth. I took my car keys, relocated the cat, drove back. 

Nothing.

Believe me when I say this: I was freaking out. 

Without my wallet, without the $80 in cash I’d so carefully folded inside, we had no money. In the middle of PA. With a truck. And my sweetheart cat, a little black purr machine with a white speck on her chest. Little Ida Mae, short for “I don’t know what to name this cat. Maybe someone else does.” 

Three months before, my aunt and cousins in Indy found a tiny kitten alone near the speedway on the night before the Indy 500. They are animal rescuers. They brought her home. 

When I visited a few days later; she immediately curled her fluffiness up under my chin and went to sleep. My aunt said, “That’s your cat.” I said, “If she can live here for three months, I’ll take her to Massachusetts with me.”

Two months later on vacation with family at Dale Hollow Lake, I asked my aunt what her name was. 

“We call her Erin’s cat.” 

An uncle asked me what I was going to call her. I said, “I don’t know.” He said, “Why don’t you call her that?” I thought about it. I don’t know. I-dunno. Ida. I liked it.

Later a friend called her Ida Mae. I liked it. So I made it fit the theme. 

Why Mae and not May? I don’t know. I liked it. 

So there we were: me (freaking out), and Jason and Ida Mae at a payphone in a diner off the Pennsylvania Turnpike at least an hour behind schedule with no money. 

Jason made a collect call and a friend wired him $200. Many thank you’s resounded, tears. I called my landlord, who I’d never met, of the apartment I’d never seen, to say we’d be late. A lot late. How did I make that call? I don’t remember. I must have called collect. I am fairly sure I called; I remember when we arrived the garage was open so we could walk through to my door. 

We drove through Hartford well after dark. If you’ve never driven through Hartford, it’s something else. The various highways snake around like spaghetti. 

Jason on the walkie-talkie: “What the hell is this place! Are we in the fun house?!’ 

We got to my basement studio after 11. We unloaded as far as Ida’s needs and the two mattresses that would later be stacked to make my bed. I set an early alarm to meet my new landlords. 

The next morning, something I’d never considered: no one would take an out-of-state check. I had no bank card. So in order to sign my lease, I needed a bank account. 

I took my passport for ID and my checkbook and went to the only bank I knew of in Amherst and opened a bank account. I went back to my landlord: “I swear I have money.” Thankfully, they agreed to wait until my initial deposit cleared to cash my first check. What can I say? It was still the 90s, if barely. Things were different. 

Jason stayed for a few days to help me get settled, then I drove him to the airport in Hartford. 

I cried the whole way back to Amherst. Unable to cope with more unpacking, I slept until dusk. 

I awoke and spontaneously decided I couldn’t stay there, so Ida and I drove to visit friends, my Dad’s best friend and his wife in Rhode Island, unannounced. It was dark when I got there and I stood in the yard and called up to an open, lit upstairs window. Thankfully, they were home, awake, and happy to see me.

It was on that trip that I learned about Ida Lewis, the lighthouse keeper. I really liked that her name was Ida, like my cat. I like these kinds of connections. Cat Ida was definitely a safe port in the storm of my soul, so to speak. It gave her name another dimension. Made her powerful. 

This was only the beginning of my early misadventures in MA. Within the next month, the following occurred:

*I lost a contact lens. These were the days when you’d wear one pair for a year, so I didn’t have a spare. I had to order one from my eye doctor and have it shipped. No matter. I could wear my glasses.

*I broke my glasses. 

*I learned the carpet in the apartment was flea-infested when I put my hand down on the lightly spotted carpet and the spots floated up, swirled around my hand and wrist. I found a vet who told me a lot of weird things about my cat: “black cats like to think they are mysterious.”

*My rent check cleared. Then a banking error resulted in me not having access to my new account–or any money, those damn out-of-state checks!– for another week. Sigh.

*Ida and I drove to Boston to visit a college friend in grad school there; he called her Ida Mae. We stayed up half the night playing The Legend of Zelda. My car, which I’d bought from my Dad when I was in college and called The Dadmobile, died on the Mass Pike coming back. We got towed all the way back to Amherst at night; the tow truck driver sat against the wall in the garage outside my apartment while I found a phone book and figured out where to take The Dadmobile for repair. 

*My computer died in my first week of classes. With The Dadmobile at the car hospital, I hauled my giant hard drive on the bus to the closest repair place across the bridge in Northampton. It was so huge and heavy and cumbersome I could barely lift it. I put it in the biggest duffle bag I owned, a bag I could have crawled into myself, which made my attempts at getting it on the bus even more comical. The bus driver felt so bad for me he stopped right in front of the repair place. 

That’s a lot to go wrong. 

A lot went right, though. 

I stepped into the classroom as an instructor with autonomy for the first time. 

I made new friends. I discovered Antonio’s pizza. I looked at grad school syllabuses and decided I could do it. I practiced. A lot. 

There was a lot to be grateful for: a challenging program with faculty who wanted us to learn and grow (and work. Hard.). New friends who looked out for each other, who walked each other around campus when there was a spate of daytime assaults. A job I loved. My sweet Ida who was always happy to see me. A free public transportation system I could take to class. A small but comfortable place to live that I could afford. The fun of exploring a new area.

Music, music everywhere.

And one day, after The Dadmobile got a clean bill of health and my computer worked and I was all unpacked and Ida and I were deloused and my glasses were fixed and my contact lenses were in my eyes and my bank account was open for business and I was earning money and learning things and breathing the fresh air outside my basement apartment door, I got a small package in the mail. Return address PA.

My wallet. 

Everything was inside. Even the $80 cash I’d brought to get me and Jason and Ida from Indianapolis to Amherst on two long, hot days in August. 

A truck driver found it at the gas station. They turned it in. 

I sat on the beige carpet of that little studio, my computer set up on a cart near the door and hooked up to my landline for late-90s dial-up service, a little black ball of fluff bumping her head against my knee, purring her brains out. 

I ran my figures over the embroidery around my cloth wallet, felt the solidness of its contents. Stunned. Grateful. 

Thank you, Truck Driver.