Every Spring I get restless.
I blame my Mom.
In my memory, she’s a free spirited woman.
Though in reaching an age a decade older than she was when she died, I look back and wonder…
Why did she want to wander so much?
Pine Bluff was our base of operations.
Her car broke down on the way to California and she had to call my Papaw for help.
Which turned into living in one of his rent houses and getting a job and finding ways to make it work.
She was from Warrior Alabama, a place we got to visit once.
A place she never wanted to go back to, because her mom died of cancer when she was a kid, and her Dad died in a bus crash a few years later.
Which left her and her three sisters without a family and bounced from aunts and uncles for years.
Wandering was almost a learned trait.
And who doesn’t want to travel and explore and search for something better when you’re twenty-three.
That’s how old she was when we puttered out of Jackson in a ten year old Volkswagen Beetle Bug, the front truck packed with clothes.
The back seat packed with my brother and me.
And landed in a place I’ve always called home.
Even if we moved away and back at least every other year.
It was not a stable childhood.
And that’s too young for a single mom to be doing stuff on her own.
Like heading to California where I would have ended up a much different person than I am today.
I think.
Or breaking down in Texas, which probably would have had the same results.
I’d be a cowboy or worse…
A Cowboy’s fan.
Just kidding.
Arkansas doesn’t have a pro team for anything, so we’re Cowboy fans by default.
Until we learn to love better teams that won’t leave you broken hearted in every play off.
We could have stayed in Birmingham, a city that draws a lot of parallels with Pine Bluff.
Or grown up in a suburb of Atlanta, where we stayed with her sister for six months.
I might have called Warren AR home or Kingsland or Rison or Natchitoches LA.
Jackson MS was a place we moved back too because she wanted us closer to our Dad so we could see him more.
Then he moved to Tampa FL chasing some rock and roll dream or drugs or tail.
Probably all three.
Which is why she didn’t follow him and we were back in Pine Bluff before a sojourn in Columbia MS, followed by another grade in the Bluff again.
Or half a grade.
I can’t tell you the names of any kid I knew in those schools, but I can tell you a lot of names from 1st to 4th grade at Forrest Park Elementary.
Tony, my first sleep over.
John Hubanks, my first best friend.
Scott and Frank and Brenna and Krissy.
Shonda, my first girlfriend and the standard by which I measured a lot of future GF’s.
Sure, it was third/fourth grade but the ladies had to know how to climb trees, catch frogs and ride bikes all over town.
Plus Mamaw thought she was sweet because she had manners.
My first kiss.
And the names of so many more from a city I was in and out of until 7th grade.
All of them were my friends, and some of them I still keep up with on Facebook.
Maybe I didn’t make friends in other states because I knew that soon enough, something would happen and we would move back.
And I know all of that moving made me part of the kind of man I am today.
Both good.
And bad.
I can go anywhere and fit in. I can handle chaos and instability like a champ.
I’m not afraid to try and fail. I’m not scared of too many situations.
But also maybe…
I’m not the most stable person as a friend.
I’m the kind of friend you can call at two am to come pick you up and drive you home, or pull you out of a ditch.
I’m probably also the kind of friend who knows a few secret spots by the river where we can get rid of dead bodies.
Or maybe I’m just trying to convince myself that I’m reliable because so much is unstable right now.
The world needs things we can rely on more than ever, and yet, my upbringing taught me that “you are not a tree.”
Pioneer training, I joked about it once.
But most pioneers don’t get fame or glory or even mentions in history.
Most pioneers get shot full of arrows.
Everyone knows this.
Which is why so many people take that Spring Fever and turn it to other tasks.
Like yards, and flowers and OnlyFans accounts.
Other adventures as implied.
Do you think being restless is just a sign of boredom?
Or could it just be hard wired into some of us, like accents?
What’s the cure?
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One very different childhood - it's something to think about