In the last 5 weeks or so, my life has changed in most extreme ways. The ways are easy enough to say or write: ‘got married’ ‘went on honeymoon’ ‘stayed at parent’s house for 2 weeks’ ‘moved 1000 away from home’ ‘left all friends and relatives behind’ ‘know basically nobody at new place.’ That is pretty much where is stands now. And I did it all in less than 30 days. It might be easiest to recount this time in my life by hitting the high notes. I hope to come back sometime later and flesh out the more interesting parts with more vivid detail, but at the moment I just want to lay it all out there.

Wedding Day

After 5+ days of bachelor week, it was time to make the ceremony. I would like to say that everyone I wanted to be there was there, but that isn’t true. I will say the wedding party came together nicely, and we had some good times at the rehearsal dinner. We had some folks missing from the reception, and that is okay, because we had a lot of people there. We were truly blessed to have as many friends there as we did. Both mine and Meghan’s biggest regret about the reception is that we did not spend nearly as much time with everyone as we wanted to. The whole wedding and reception felt over in about 5 seconds. Some of the day is a blur, some is not. Emotions seemed to be running high that day. I could barely keep it together as I watched Meghan approach the altar. My dad cried a few “tears of joy” during his prayer and held it together enough to get through the ceremony. I am thankful for everything my parents did and continue to do for us. Obviously the day didn’t end for me as we left the reception, but it did for all of you.

Honeymoon

We took off from RDU and made delayed time to the nation of Miami. After being accepted entry into the country, we had to wait about 6 hours to board the plane to Jamaica. After arriving in Jamaica, we had to wait close to an hour to gain entry into that country. We were interrogated concerning our reason for being there, which was the same as every other white person in line from Europe and the Americas: we want to take a $20 taxi ride past your third-world slums and spend the week in a $250-a-night luxury beach resort, where we will spend upwards of $80-$100 a day on food. I would like to think that our going to the country helps the people there in some way. We tried to buy things from Jamaican-owned stores, but many of the stores in downtown Montego Bay were owned by persons from India and Pakistan. The local food establishments were probably locally-owned, and we went to two where we were the only non-Jamaicans there. We also stopped by the Jamaican Bobsled Café, and got our pictures taken inside one of the bobsleds. We also bought a “hand-made” Jamaican basket and wooden bowl.

The beaches are certainly lovely and the people by and large could not have been nicer. We probably spend upwards of $100 on taxi rides during the week. Maybe more. Petrol is 83 Jamaican dollars a litre. This amounts to about $4.50 a gallon. Not worth 20$ to go 8 kilometers, but close I suppose. I hadn’t seen real poverty since I went to Mexico back in 1996 (not counting my trips through Camden, NJ) but I did see it in Jamaica. I am not sure if going to a luxury resort helps in any way, but I would like to think that since the resort we went to was family-owned, more of the money may be actually staying in Jamaica. They seem to have low staff turn-over there, which must mean the jobs are good. I asked the man that took us sailing and snorkeling at a reef if he though us coming to the resort was helping people in Jamaica. He told me yes. He told us quite a bit about his life, his farm, and his family. In many ways he is in much better shape than me; he claimed to be by and large self-sufficient, growing a lot of his own food and making his own herbal remedies with plants he find at the resort. He used a ladder to climb a tree and get some coconuts for us to try. I don’t think Meghan we expecting the milk to be as watery or bitter. But a coconut will keep you alive in a pinch. We got to try some of the coconut flesh. We set out from the hotel at 5:30 in the morning. During the trip we lost an hour, then arrived in Lynchburg at around 9:30 in the evening. Travel is a modern miracle.

Kinston

Meghan had no desire to spent two weeks in my apartment in Lynchburg, and the more I thought about it, I realized it would be a good time to hang out with my family before we moved 1000 miles away. We had already moved her stuff to a lovely storage unit on Park street, so we loaded up my truck and a U-Haul trailer with some belongings and headed to NC. We spent the next two weeks hanging out with my family and seeing some friends from back home. Kinston hasn’t changed too much since I left 7 years ago, but I found I gained a new appreciation for staying at home with my family. I hadn’t spend more than 4 consecutive days there in several years. Maybe as many as 5. Many of our days consisted of getting up, getting ready, and then spending the afternoon on the wireless internet network at my house. My mom, both of my sister, Meghan, and I all had laptops and we would sit in the living room and do whatever it was that we do online. Not a bad way to spend some time together.

We were able to do some sight-seeing as well. We toured the crystal coast, specifically Bogue Banks: Beaufort, Morehead City, Fort Macon, Atlantic Beach, Pine Knoll Shores, Salter Path, Indian Beach, Emerald Isle. Meghan and I were also able to travel out to Ocracoke Island, on the southern outer banks. We took a two-hour ferry ride to and from the mainland and spent a night at the Harbor Island Inn. We snuck in a Kinston Indians game for good measure. When we left Kinston, it was hard be believe two weeks had already gone by, and it was hard to believe within 4 days we would be in the state of Illinois, hopefully.

The Move

We spent a couple of days packing up my apartment. I attempted to take only the necessities, including 8 or so boxes of books. Most everything outside of my small personal effects and clothes were left behind, including a extra-long couch and a brown chair that an ex-girlfriend had given me. They are now all in the care of Fred, of Fred’s 12 Dollars and More Store, Motto: “Everything Under the Sun.” If you need any of these items, you can find them there. After some adventures with Meghan’s couch and the second U-haul trailer rental of the month, we began packing the storage unit and my apartment’s contents. I had a lot of help from some good friends. We decided to leave Lynchburg in the late afternoon and make it to Beckley, West Virginia. As we were leaving Lynchburg, I felt no sadness. For sure, I was probably too busy thinking about the road ahead and its many dangers. I just had no pain in my heart for the place. For sure, Lynchburg has been good to me, and I have gained almost everything I have now because of my time there, but I had a overwhelming feelings that the time had passed. Almost everything I once wanted to stay for is gone now. Save for a few friends left behind, the Burg is in many respects a shell of what it once was. I miss my friends, and I miss the time I had in Lynchburg, but I can’t seem to miss the place. I am sure that will change at some point, but that is just where I am now.

On the west side of Roanoke, we ran into some storms. Maybe it was just the Burg giving its best shot at keeping us around. It should have tried harder. We came close to hydroplaning and fishtailing, but we did not. My friend Ryan Rosewell was along for the journey to help me keep my sanity and help with the move. It was a good way to go out after spending the last 2 and a half years together in an office for 20+ hours a week. We jammed to Foo Fighters and tried to make it past the rain and Appalachian mountains. I probably used as much fuel as a aircraft carrier during that part of the trip.

We woke up early at the Econo Lodge Beckley and hit the road. I had serious doubts that we would make it to Wheaton before the rental office for our apartment complex closed for the evening. Even though we were gaining an hour and crossing into central time, it would be close. We could start doing around 60 MPH after getting through the foothills and into Ohio. Luckily we weren’t in that state for very long. We cruised through Ohio, into Indiana and $3.79 gas. We cruised past corn fields and soy bean fields and $2.99 E85 ethanol. We cruised into Illinois with about an hour and forty-five minute cushion before the rental office closed. Paid some tolls, didn’t hit traffic until the final 2 mile stretch of 355 Interstate. We arrived at Briarbrook Apartments, Wheaton, IL, without making a single wrong turn during the entire trip. That’s not to say we didn’t come close a couple of times, but we never had to turn around a single time.

Wheaton

Orientation to a new place can take a while. And as anyone who has heard me talk about living up here has already heard, the price of living takes a little getting used to. In fact, I am not sure I can ever adjust to rent prices here. They are astronomically high. I heard a guy talk about paying $1600 a month with a straight face. Where I am from, that will get you a five-bedroom house with a pool and money left over to pay the utilities. Yes, a mortgage payment. But I suppose that is the cost of going into debt for school up here. By and large, I could not be happier with our place. We have a duck pond in the back yard, and some immigrant workers are putting a new roof on as a write this. Their air-compressor lets me know they are working.

The apartment is newly remodeled; in fact, we are the first people to live in it since the remodel. The neighborhood is quiet enough, and it appears most people would just assume be left alone. One advantage to living here is that while commodities have gone through the roof, they are still basically the same price here as anywhere else. So we pay basically the same for most things as we did in the Burg, but we are making more money. Of which, any extra will be spent on rent. But we are also poor teachers and students. We will make it work. Hopefully. Another advantage: if I wanted to, I could get up from my chair and be in the heart of downtown Chicago within an hour, thanks to the commuter train. It is about a 10 minute drive from our home, right beside Wheaton College campus. I have used the train twice so far, once to take my mom and sisters into the city the day after we got here, the second the next day when Ryan and I met his brother in Chicago and went up to Wrigleyville to be around the stadium during a Cubs game. I had thought about trying to go to a game during these few weeks before schools starts for Meghan and I, but I have been told that the only way to get tickets is to know someone with season tickets. The guy we bought our bed from told me he was number 22,000 something on the waiting list for season tickets. Something tells me he would take out a second mortgage to get them.

In the last two weeks or so since we got here, I have purchased with gift-card money 3 pieces of living room furniture from Target, put them together; two bookshelves from Big Lots, put them together; a desk from Office Max, put it together. The latter took two days and something approaching 5 hours of work. But I am using it now to hold my laptop computer to write these words, so it is all worth it now. I would have predicted that leaving all semblance of home to move 1000 miles to an expensive, scary city in which I know no other persons may bring about some sense of isolation. To top it off, I usually pride myself in knowing my way around, where I am at the moment in relation to other places and things, and the like. I know none of those things yet. However, I am not troubled by it, for whatever reason. Part of me knows that I will have something of a built-in peer group in my cohort from school, since there will be only a maximum of 20 persons and we will by and large be taking the same classes, etc. Part of me knows that Meghan will be getting to know people from her work as well. Additionally, part of me, as well as the rest of me, is married now, and I just don’t seem to care about hanging out the way I used to. I just don’t have a lot of motivation these days to make a ton a new friends. Meghan and I have been getting along fairly well, watching movies and catching up on season 4 of ’Lost.’ I have also found some time to get some reading done, and I hope to get through James Frey’s “A Thousand Little Pieces,” Homer Hickam’s “Rocketboys,” and Dave Eggers’ “A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius” before I have to go back to school in two weeks or so.

Impressions

A thought I keep coming back to is that ‘we did it.’ I have no idea how, or what I would need to do where I faced with a similar situation in the future, but somehow we did it. Starting with Spring 2007, there were so many things that were completely out of my control that fell into place. (1) Internship for Liberty MA. I had no idea where to start looking, and I had been told that often it takes 3 semesters to get the hours for the internship completed. I had to get mine done in 2 if I wanted to move on to a doctoral program. (2) Doctoral Programs. I had started looking and thinking seriously about this during thanksgiving of 2006. I knew that I wanted to start Fall 2008, and it would be going up against the wire to get my MA done by then. I began filling out applications before starting my internship, having no idea if I would be able to complete my hours. Additionally, I didn’t even know if I would get in to any programs. Even when planning my interview trips, I had no idea if I would get in or if I would finish my internship on time; I could have been totally wasting my time and money with the trips. (3) Marriage. I knew that we had a small window of time to this, because Meghan didn’t finish her school year until mid-June, and we would need at least a few weeks between the wedding and the start of the school year of Fall 2008 to move and for Meghan to find a job.

Cut to February 2008. The first weekend of the month, I interviewed at Regent University. I asked a bunch of semi-controversial questions to my interviewers and also told them that on a scale of 1 to 10, my excitement about going to the school was a 7. I was wait-listed at Regent. The second weekend of the month, I got engaged. The third weekend of the month, I took a trip to Wheaton and interviewed with the faculty. I asked some semi-controversial questions during a group interview about their internship placement. I toured Chicago alone in 17 degree weather. The forth weekend was my weekend off. The fifth weekend of the month, I flew with my dad to Portland, OR, to interview at George Fox University. The day before leaving, I received an email from Wheaton College Graduate School informing me that I had been accepted into their program. At Fox, I did ask one or two controversial questions to a professor there that used to teach at Wheaton. I was accepted into their program three days after returning to Lynchburg. I chose to accept the offer at Wheaton, and it was uncomfortable to turn down the other offer. I was later informed by Regent that I was not accepted into their program.

Cut to April 2008. I finished my internship hours. I have no idea how this happened. Meghan applied to a school in Wheaton, She sent her application on a Tuesday, and on Thursday received a call from the administrator. On Friday she had a phone interview, 10 days later we were flying to Chicago for a face-to-face interview. She received the job 2 weeks and 3 days after sending her application.

During this entire time, we were planning the wedding. We wanted to do it at Sweet Briar College, but all of the Saturday times has been reserved for the entire summer, probably years in advance. We were able to secure a Sunday, and we were married June, 29, 2008, with little to no major problems in planning or execution phases. In the meantime, we were able to move out of two apartments and take the belongings 1000 miles to NC and IL. Which gets us the beginning, middle, and end of this post.

All I have left to do is to complete 4 years of doctoral study followed by an application to a competitive internship placement, post-doc placement, and career. All of this against the backdrop of a failing world-wide economy, skyrocketing commodities prices, and general suffering and anguish. In the words of Sam Baker: “Pretty world; pretty roses.”