I was planning to move from Chicago to Georgia. Here’s why this conservative changed his mind
The day after Christmas, I was at a party at my parents’ house in Chicago in their backyard where it was snowing lightly, and I was listening to my father speak about how he planned to move to Savannah in a year or two, that he really wanted to take advantage of the cheaper housing costs in the South and take his skills to work there.
I had heard this story many times before, from various family members. And I remember thinking that I was glad that he wasn’t leaving. I was glad he was planning to stay.
Over the weekend, I got a phone call from him. He was sad. He told me he was ready to move. He wanted to be near his family. He needed to be near his son and his friends.
He was ready to move and I realized that I was ready to let the idea of moving away from Chicago be over. But it’s hard not to want to move away from Chicago if you are still in Chicago. And I was glad that he was ready to move because, truthfully, he had never been much of a family person, and his son, now almost 13, was a real joy to him and to me.
As I listened to him talk about his plans, and he spoke of his plans about living in a neighborhood where he was going to work, and he spoke of his plans about having a kitchen in his house and a car to drive so he could be near the grocery store and have a place to park his car for his son if his son didn’t want to drive, my heart was in a puddle.
I remembered when I worked with my dad in Chicago and was with him at the end of the day, after he had done everything he could to try to get what he wanted, the only thing that mattered to him was that he was done with the task that brought him joy at the end of the day. And so he would say to me, “There’s no point in saying it now because I’ll have nothing more to say to you tomorrow. Go home.”
It
