by David James
Going Gypsy
One Couple’s Adventure from Empty
Nest to No Nest at All
David and Veronica James
Skyhorse Publishing
Advance Praise for Going Gypsy
“Any parents who have gotten through the launching stage of life with their sense of adventure (and humor) intact deserve our attention. They got mine! If I could be on the road again—and I guess we really all can—this is how I’d do it. An empty nest just means the kids have learned to fly. How nice to know the parents can too!”—Lenore Skenazy, author of the book and blog Free-Range Kids
“It’s quite a talent to turn a midlife journey into compelling and amusing reading, and the authors of Going Gypsy clearly have that talent. There are as many smiles as miles in this unique travel memoir told in the voices of both halves of a newly nest-emptied couple. Veronica, especially, shares her internal struggle with genuine insight—after all, she’s been a very involved mother of three kids. Can a couple really just sell the nest and take off in an RV with hardly any plans? Seems so, and we lucky readers vicariously get to enjoy it all with them.”—Susan K. Perry, creativity blogger at PsychologyToday.com and author of Writing in Flow, Loving in Flow, and the empty-nest novel Kylie’s Heel
“Warm, funny, clever, and inspiring—makes you see the fun in being empty-nested, whether you take to the road like David and Veronica or stay at home and reinvent your life with the sense of adventure they found on their journey.”—Linda F. Burghardt, PhD, author of The Happy Empty Nest
“A thoroughly charming account of a romp across America and beyond by childhood sweethearts who discover life without children, rediscover the joy of thirty years together, and learn firsthand the magic of living with eyes wide open to the wonders of a new and independent life.”—Victoria Zackheim, editor of Faith: Essays by Believers, Agnostics, and Atheists
“As soon as I read the dedication I was ‘in,’ and the rest did not disappoint. I found myself chuckling at every turn. Loved the writing style as well.”—Rayya Elias, author of Harley Loco
Copyright © 2015 by David and Veronica James
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Skyhorse Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
James, David, 1959–
Going gypsy : one couple’s adventure from empty nest to no nest at all / David and Veronica James.
pages cm
Summary: “Ditching the minivan for an RV, one couple embarked on a journey to prove that an empty nest doesn’t have to be a syndrome” —Provided by publisher.
ISBN 978-1-62914-735-2 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. James, David, 1959- 2. James, Veronica, 1963- 3. Empty nesters—Travel—United States. 4. Recreational vehicle living—United States. 5. Travelers—United States—Biography. 6. Parent and adult child—United States. I. James, Veronica, 1963- II. Title.
E169.Z83J355 2015
910.92—dc23
[B]
2014014146
Cover design by Danielle Ceccolini
Cover photo credit Nick Coleman
ISBN: 978-1-62914-735-2
Ebook ISBN: 978-1-62914-965-3
Printed in the United States of America
This book is dedicated to our beautiful children, affectionately known as The Piglet, Decibel, and The Boy—our constant providers of entertainment, absurdity, exhaustion, energy, joy, jocularity, and love.
Table of Contents
Preface
1 Life after Kids
2 Fear Conquering
3 When Hurricanes Blow
4 Generic Midwestern Directional University
5 Sixteen Boxes
6 Empty Nest Egg
7 Fear Conquering and Writing a Will
8 Sardinia Has the Best Donkey
9 Sweat Equity
10 Fear Conquering and Snow Skiing
11 windycity420
12 BAMF
13 Mama Loves a Ball of Paint
14 We’re Too Old for This Crap
15 The Plan Is No Plans
16 Helicopter Mom, You Are Grounded
17 Home, Home on the Strange
18 A Little-Talked-About Sign of Aging
19 Help! There’s No One to Eat the Leftovers
20 The Blowup
21 THE Talk
22 Lessons Learned in a Walmart Parking Lot
23 Fear Conquering and White-Water Rafting
24 Balls to the Wall
25 50 @ 50
26 No Home for the Holidays
27 Grandchildish Behavior
28 Withdrawal
29 Now What?
30 Admitting I Have a Problem Is the First Step
31 Mexican Therapy
Epilogue
Photo Insert
Acknowledgments
About the Authors
Everything in this book actually happened. We do tend to remember, and therefore describe, some things more colorfully than others. Many of the names have been changed because we give ridiculous names to most everybody and everything in real life, so why stop here? The chronological order of a few events has been switched around a bit as well, only because we thought it would give the story a better flow.
Before there were late night crying babies, there was us.
Before there were 2 AM feedings, there was us.
Before there were dirty diaper changes, there was us.
Before there were drool-stained bibs, there was us.
Before there were kiss-it-and-make-it-better skinned knees, there was us.
Before there were school bus stop good-byes, there was us.
Before there were dance classes, there was us.
Before there were Little League games, there was us.
Before there were after-school minivan marathons, there was us.
Before there were junior high school crying jags, there was us.
Before there were prom dresses, there was us.
Before there were nervous-waiting-up-for-them-to-get-home late nights, there was us.
Before there were tuition bills, there was us.
Before there were graduations, there was us.
Now, there is us again.
Preface
When a twenty-two-year-old beanpole bass player with four years on the road under his belt, and all of the happy hedonism that goes along with that, meets an innocent eighteen-year-old Valley Girl who sneaked into a bar, the ensuing romance is likely to have a shelf life of exactly one night. But somehow that didn’t happen.
Even with the eagle-eyed clarity of hindsight, we can’t pinpoint the exact reason. It could be that we were all Shakespearean star-crossed. Could be we were both ready for a big change in our lives and just happened t
o collide. Could be we were just too dumb to know the odds; we certainly didn’t set out to defy them.
We are inclined to believe a fourth choice—all of the above. The one-night stand was going on in the next room with the roommate and the keyboard player while we fell into friendship instead of fake, temporary love.
But the road beckoned, and the band had to be back in Nashville, so that was that. Just two ships passing in the night. No one would ever know what might have been.
But that wasn’t that. Through the magic of pen, paper, envelopes, and stamps, they kept in touch. The Beanpole wrote to his new blue-eyed beach baby friend because something told him that couldn’t be that. A voice was whispering in her ear too, so The Valley Girl wrote back. Before long, an old-fashioned, long-distance romance developed, almost entirely through the US mail. She says she fell in love through those letters. The Beanpole was already there when he started writing.
A few months later, fate—and a good bit of specific action seeking a band working on the West Coast—brought The Beanpole back to California for a face-to-face reunion. With this open-ended employment in the Golden State, young love had time to take its course.
Our story took a less fairy tale–like turn from there. The gig fell apart. What followed was a two thousand mile trek back to Music City in a $200 land barge named The Sharkmobile that had no reverse and no air conditioning, then a brief cohabitation and a “We ought to get married,” “Okay,” engagement. The next thing we knew, we were in the middle of a folding chair–bedecked wedding in a tiny, windowless, tile-floored church basement. Not exactly the groundwork for happily-ever-after.
The odds of any marriage reaching ever-after are about fifty-fifty at best. Add to that a teenage bride and a road musician groom, then multiply that by being dead broke, and Veronica and I certainly seemed doomed. Good thing no one told us.
Before long we were calling our parents from a pay phone (our home phone had been shut off due to lack of funds) to tell them that they were about to become grandparents. I have often wondered what they must have been thinking.
Back when that beanpole bass player met The Valley Girl’s father, right before they ran off together, I remember being intrigued by the lack of any shotguns involved. But then, her dad did have an old hippie vibe about him. Old? He was a lot younger than we are now.
Even meeting my future mother-in-law went well. My new love wasn’t living at home, so I guess I wasn’t officially robbing the cradle, but still I expected to get grilled. Didn’t happen; Mom took right to me. Her stepfather didn’t say much at all.
By the time we were expecting their first grandchild, I had won over Stepdad, and we were joking that Mom liked me better than her own daughter.
As for us, few things can motivate reasonable human beings like the prospect of parenthood. We went with stunning velocity from laying around the love nest to up off our asses. Suddenly we were responsible for a life other than our own. We began to form tangible long-term goals.
In time, two more little ones arrived, and we learned that busting butt is what parents do. Find a way. A mother of three could start a company in her home because she learned how to make websites before most people had even heard of the Internet. A dad could successfully navigate a path in an occupation that regularly leaves the crushed carcasses of marriages and families in its wake.
Life’s twists and turns took us from Nashville to the Virgin Islands, always in search of the best situation for our family. In general, we met our goals but realized that they revolved around getting the kids raised and started on their own lives. That is the short story of how, after twenty-some-odd years, we found ourselves living on a tropical island in the Caribbean about to become childless again, and wondering what to do.
We didn’t have a clue, but somewhere in the recesses of our brains we must have known that the time had come to do something just for us. I know that sounds selfish, but any parent knows that once the kids arrive, there’s not a lot of room left for the “us” in a couple.
And our time arrived way ahead of schedule. Let’s just say that Veronica and I prove that even the best forms of birth control are only 99 percent effective, but in hindsight we wouldn’t have had it any other way. We had the stamina to survive three little ones back then, and now they’re full-grown and we’re still young enough to enjoy our new life together.
That was our answer. That was what to do. Rediscover that pre-kid couple who, thirty years ago, didn’t have enough time together. Because now, we had all the time in the world.
This is not a “how-to” book or a self-help manual. We would never presume that anyone should do things the way we have. It’s simply the story of our journey.
1
Life after Kids
By the time our youngest, The Boy, was finishing his senior year of high school, we had already sent his two older sisters successfully off into the world. We knew the drill. That’s not to say it was easy to see them go, but our pride in them and their desire to start their own lives far outweighed the melancholy. The Piglet and Decibel have both thrived outside the nest.
Perhaps I should give some explanation about those names. Our eldest, The Piglet, has just always been The Piglet. I don’t remember how it stuck; it may have been a Pooh thing. But even now, as a big-city journalist, she will answer to it. If she minds, she has never let on. Sometimes she even refers to herself as such.
Decibel, on the other hand, is self-explanatory. It’s a volume issue. She is loud and impossible to ignore . . . always has been, always will be.
Their leaving brought a flood of bittersweet emotions, hopes, and fears. But each time, there was the task of finishing up with younger siblings. We still had work to do.
This time it was different; there would just be us after The Boy took flight. We were ready to seriously ponder what our life after raising kids would be. This was an opportunity. A chance to celebrate, reconnect, and live a little, but we had yet to determine exactly how.
One lazy St. Croix Saturday morning, we were lingering in bed with the tropical sun streaming through our window. Veronica was reading a paperback, and I had laptop in lap and gears turning and grinding inside my pea brain. There may have been a small puff of smoke wafting out of my right ear. It had popped into my head to Google “empty nesters.”
I wanted to see if anyone else was looking at this stage of life from a point of view like ours. We’ve spent twenty-five years raising kids. Isn’t it great that they have grown up, moved out, and started their own lives? We’ll have our time to ourselves again.
After typing into the search box and hitting enter, I said, “Look at this, honey.”
The biggest item on the first page was an enormous ad for an Alzheimer’s patch.
Veronica’s response?
“Holy crap! What’s wrong with these people? We just finished raising our kids; we’re not dying.” Ah, she was engaged now. “Keep looking. Let’s see what we can find.”
So I did, with Veronica ditching her book to look over at my screen more and more. Soon my quest had become a joint effort. All we could find were websites that lamented how terrible it was that the kids weren’t around anymore. A lot of self-help, self-absorption, and self-pity.
Raising kids is hard work, and we couldn’t comprehend all of these people grieving the end of the task. Granted, continuation of the species is one of life’s most important activities. But unlike the other critters on earth, once we have finished the job of rearing the offspring, we’re able to have some fun. To accept a big pat on the back. Job well done.
The kids have grown into full-sized Homo sapiens fully capable of feeding themselves. The time had come to let them do their own hunting and gathering. When they get hungry enough, they will find food. But they have to learn to do it for themselves. Otherwise, they’ll end up like zoo animals. When tigers get fed every day, they never learn to hunt. If they’re released into the wild, they starve.
Personally, we taught our l
ittle cubs that if they get really hungry, they can always kill and eat a bag of ramen noodles. They’ve gotten pretty good at it too.
But we had barely evolved into full-grown human beings ourselves when Veronica and I started having babies. While many people our age were still in school, we were raising kids. Veronica transformed from child to mother while I figured out that Daddy better get off his rump roast and bring home the bacon. For my work, that meant hitting the highway. As a general rule, we musicians have to go to the people—they don’t come to us.
As with almost everyone else of our generation, it took the combined incomes of both parents to bring home enough pork product to raise three kids. Because of the logistics of road work, the bulk of the child rearing landed on Veronica’s shoulders, so she, like so many other women, juggled work and mommying with the skill of a circus performer. She took on various jobs—waiting tables, delivering pizzas, even watching other people’s kids, all while tending to our ever-growing brood. Sometimes I could swear I heard calliope music.
Meanwhile I was away from home 250 to 300 days a year as a traveling troubadour in a never-ending hillbilly roadshow. And through it all, Veronica and I always tried to remember that a huge part of being good parents was being a good couple.
In a weird way, all of the travel may have helped our fledgling family. The money certainly didn’t hurt, but the constant emotional good-byes and happy homecomings managed to keep our relationship fresh. Sometimes absence does make the heart grow fonder.
Through the years we worked out our lots. I found ways to travel less and still keep the wolf from the door, while Veronica started a home-based web design business that allowed her to grow into her helicopter mommy self.
As our Spawn grew, the parenting became more of a joint venture. By the kids’ teenage years, we were both fully engaged. We had to be, because raising teenagers requires all hands on deck.
Having survived the terrible teens, we had any number of conflicting feelings, and these days even the smallest emotion or complaint must be labeled as a syndrome. It was right there on my computer screen, in bold type: empty nest syndrome.
