We never had a housekeeper until I was 17. I’m not sure why, when there was just one of us kids left, there was a housekeeper at that point. She was a friend of my uncle, I think. He kind of knew everyone in town. My dad seemed to know people in other cities, but not so much people in our own town. But there this woman was in our house as I packed up a suitcase.
It was a big yellow vinyl soft sided piece of luggage. The suitcase had one big strap that came over and buckled to a shiny nickle buckle. I wasn’t quite sure what to put in there, and it seemed unreal that I was even doing this. The housekeeper asked, jokingly, if I was running away from home. I laughed and said I was. And I was. That my mother knew where I was going should not have been any surprise. What was surprising was that she was running away too.
That’s how I found myself living with a 60 year old Methodist minister in an old Nashville neighborhood. Having lived in suburbia all my life, it was a thrill to be so close to city life. It was also a little bit lonely in the way that the characters in Edward Hopper’s “Nighthawks” look lonely. Maybe that’s because 2am or 17 years old is a time for contemplating what you might be doing next without any real notion for how it is going to happen.
So as I stared into my coffee up and took another drag off my Camel cigarette, I started to read the paper splayed out on the counter. There was a column that seemed to betray the social contract of Nashville, a contract that said “this is all perfectly normal.” It’s not normal. Nothing ever is, and how it is not normal is what we love about it. Whatever “it” is. Which in this case was, I think, adulthood. Maturity. Something for which I had longed for years, but in the early stages was not panning out like I thought it would. Some how, I would have to find the secret to Keeping Up.