ARRIVAL IN VIRGINIA

Dear Caelan,

Your grandmother and I moved from Shreveport to Memphis in December, 1967 when her company, Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance, asked her to transfer to a larger agency. Her unhappiness there, brought on by racism exhibited by her co-workers when Dr. King was murdered and ignorance exhibited when she served them bacon broiled around olives and they unanimously ate the bacon and left the olives, led to a request for another transfer, which took us to Norfolk. It was the summer before seventh grade for me.

My father assisted us with the move, arriving in Memphis to help with the packing and the drive to Virginia. Though they remained friends, your grandparents divorced when I was three, and I've never seen any indication that they erred in doing so. After two days of stress and bickering, we arrived at a hotel on Chesapeake Bay, where we would stay until the movers arrived with our possessions at a house my mother had found and rented on a previous visit.

If you look up "aggravation" in a dictionary, it ought to read, "...that state of mind brought on when one realizes that he or she is brighter than one or both of his or her parents." Though I had been to the Gulf of Mexico at Grand Isle, Louisiana, I had never seen the Atlantic Ocean when we arrived on the Virginia coast, and was eager to do so. Your grandmother's always simplistic grasp of geography prevented her from being able to differentiate Chesapeake Bay from the Atlantic Ocean. They are, after all, both bodies of salt water with Virginia shores.

We ate dinner that night at a restaurant next door to the Bayside Hotel, after which my mother couldn't wait to show "the ocean" to me and Nanette(the poodle that survived Memphis, not to be confused with Pixie, the poodle who did not survive Memphis). She put on an odd, fluffy, zebra stripe tam she'd bought for beach walks, ran out to the bay, and began to shout, "Trey, Trey, here it is! The Atlantic Ocean! Aren't you excited?"

I knew that it was not the "angry Atlantic" at all, but merely a bay, closely akin to my old friend the Gulf of Mexico, but with smaller shellfish. Knowing how fruitless it would be to explain this to my mother; knowing even from my limited experience with him that my father would threaten disciplinary action if I disagreed with her about which body of water we were on, I kept my mouth shut. But aggravation is that state of mind brought on when one realizes that he or she is brighter than one or both of his or her parents," and I was not altogether displeased when a flock of seagulls, oddly incited by my mother's new tam, attacked her and drove us all back into the restaurant.

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