Moving Differently
by Paul McGoldrick
Moving residences is hardly something new to me. My first move was when I was only four years old, moving to London with my parents and three siblings (the youngest of whom was only a few months old). I vaguely remember the boat on the trip across the Irish Sea but I didn't have to pack for myself… The house my parents rented in London had extensive bomb damage from the war but my father had a wonderful ability to get rather higher in the repair queue than most people and I had a wonderful first summer "helping" the builders in the repair work.
We moved again when I was eleven, to our first family-owned house which cost GBP3,375 -- and would probably be worth GBP500,000 now -- and my father made me bike the five miles to the new house the day before closing to ensure it was still there before the house insurance kicked in.
Since then moving has been a continuous part of my life, whether between jobs in the UK or to living in Nigeria, the Netherlands, Saudi Arabia and the United States, plus a lot of travel to dozens of other countries; there was even a period in my life when I had a bag packed at the corner of my desk, ready to go any time of the day anywhere in the world as a result of a single phone request.
But all those international moves, all that travel, had one common thread -- none of it involved moving furniture. Yes, I have moved with furniture, but only within the same country. Now that is going to change.
The rest of my family has now moved across the northern border of the United States to Canada. After the paperwork is finalized I will join them -- with most of the baggage we have collected over a decade-and-a-half. Most, rather than all, because a profitable garage sale plus donations to a worthy cause have at least reduced the space needed in a moving van by a couple of dozen cubic feet -- sorry, I now need to say a cubic metre. And that little spelling change is also a real problem for a Brit who has tried to get used to US English for nearly twenty-five years and now has to revert to Canadian English, a language that is somewhere in between the two. They have "zed" for "z," for example, but they have the Americanisms of apartment instead of flat; elevator instead of lift; hood instead of bonnet; trunk instead of boot, etc.
The result is that I am going to be living two language lives: Canadian English in my daily life and American English at the keyboard. I'm going to be one really confused person!
Why the move? Education for our daughter. Her elementary school in a small city on the Oregon coast has been a safe, warm environment with teachers who care and where we would be told of any odd happenings at school before she even got off the bus. The junior high -- which is actually now a school "within" the physical location of the high school -- and the high school itself have been grossly underfunded by the state and have dumbed down. Graduation requirements have been eased, the emphasis is on sports, and our child deserves better.
There are better secondary schools in Oregon, but most are in cities or next to cities which are incredibly snobby with extraordinarily expensive housing. And the private schools all have a religious leaning. Yes, there would be the option of returning to California, for example, but from what we see and what we hear from a friend who is a high school teacher in Marin County, the problems of financing public schools are no better there. Things aren't helped, of course, by politically-motivated federal programs like No Child Left Behind that are touted but not funded.
I'm rather looking forward to this move, baggage and all.
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