It is funny when you move. It is not the people that are integral in your life that you realize you are going to miss. Because they’ll still be in your life. Maybe in a different way depending on how far you are moving. But still you can call them. You can e-mail them. Or Facebook or Twitter. You can still keep in touch. But when you move all of the sudden you become misty and nostalgic about the people who are integral in your life that you didn’t even realize were integral. I have absolutely no reason to call or e-mail the man who owns the gas station by my house. But I’ve seen him at least twice a week for nearly 5 years. At least twice. I’ve had a 60-mile a day round trip commute for a little more than a year and a half so we are very good customers. He is from Pakistan although he’s kind of nervous to tell you where he is from when you ask him. I can’t say that I blame him. He lives in a town that doesn’t exactly have a reputation for being a center of diversity or sadly sometimes acceptance. He has six kids and we joke often about his wife being ready for the kids to go back to school in the summer and over the winter break. He gives them a hard time about school and tells them to do well so that they don’t have to work in a gas station when they grow up. One of his sons works there sometimes at night and on the weekends. He gives me a hard time with my ID if I buy a case of beer on a the way home on Friday evening. There is a third man who works there on the nights when the son doesn’t. We call him the short one. I am not exactly sure where he is from, but he doesn’t speak English very comfortably. But he tries very hard. And if he finds that you are patient with him, he will talk your ear off. He appreciates it. Once he told me a story about a lady who thought he was calling her a bitch when he was giving her the total of her purchase. When he first started he asked me if I knew of any classes that he could take to learn English better. I found him one at the library. They ask about my family and if they haven’t seen me in a while they ask where I’ve been. “How’s the gang?” the owner will ask me in the mornings. They tell me when my husband was in last. They know my cars, my patterns, where are I work, how long I’ve been there, what kind of cheap, domestic 3.2 I consume when I forgot to hit the liquor store in enough time to have a cold beer waiting at home on Friday evening. They don’t have pay-at-the pump, but I go there because I like them. I enjoy the conversation. And they don’t enforce the pay before you pump with me. They wave at me when I pass them driving through town. And now I won’t see them very often and have little reason to have a relationship with them other than our 5-year history of morning chats over my credit card transaction. It occurs to me now that I don’t even know their names.
My parents made my sister change schools when she was a freshman in junior high. She was not happy. Like not happy in the way that Evander Holyfield was not happy when Mike Tyson bit off his ear. Or not happy in the way the Bella was not happy when Edward left her. Whatever paints the picture of a really hurt and sad person most colorfully for you. On her last day at the school she had gone to since kindergarten my Dad told her that she’d still get to see her friends. She told him it wasn’t her friends she would miss. It was all those other people. I totally get it.
It’s the guy in the grocery store. It’s the daycare workers that you trusted with your kids every day. It’s the lady who served you breakfast every Saturday morning for 5 years. It’s the old man who waved at you when you passed his house during your morning commute. It’s all those people that make up this background to your life that are all of the sudden replaced by strangers … where all the strangers before had become familiar.
linzwriter
