162: Moving

Ira Glass

Ben has been a construction worker, a public high school teacher, a bike messenger, a laborer, but he says the best job he ever had was as a mover. This was in New York. Part of it, he says, was that the actual work with so straightforward. Part of it was that every day he was entering all these other people's lives, and he never knew where he would end up. It was so personal somehow, especially when the people hired movers to pack everything for them.

Ira Glass

One of the moments that was always kind of interesting, he says, was when people's stuff was all loaded into the truck, everything they had accumulated in this world stuffed into this tiny space. It's a humbling thing for a person.

Ira Glass

We come into this world with nothing. We leave it with nothing. And on moving day we have nothing. It's an oddly naked moment, that day on which we make a transition from our old life and our old location to our new life and our new place, which is just one reason why everybody hates to move. Its freaky. It's freaky to go to something new. It's freaky to leave any place where you've been for a while. And the act of moving itself, it's a hardship.

Today on our program, we bring you three stories of people who did not want to move at all, but circumstance forced their hands. In Act One, an act that we call, Sleeping in Mommy and Daddy's Room, a family finds a way to move without moving by simply moving back into the house where the wife in the family grew up. In Act Two, Deal of a Lifetime, a woman buys a house from a man who simply does not move out ever. In Act Three, To a De-luxe Apartment in the Sky, a man makes a move, but it takes him eight years to do it.

Stick around. You're listening to This American Life from WBEZ Chicago and Public Radio International. I'm Ira Glass.

Ira Glass

Act One, Sleeping in Mommy and Daddy's Room. This is the story of people wanting to change and not wanting to change at all at the same time, of a house that gets built and a house that gets moved all in pursuit of not making a new home at all. Susan Burton tells the story.

Susan Burton

I went to Wayzata, Minnesota to meet Mimi Bendickson and watch three men move her childhood home. Wayzata is just west of Minneapolis. It's a wealthy suburb, hedges and horse stables. And as I drive over to Mimi's, I have a hard time imagining that any of the houses I'm passing could be uprooted. They're sewn into groomed lawns, penned in by giant trees.

So I'm startled when I near the top of the hill and see an enormous pink brick house in the middle of a pasture, clearly on its way somewhere. And though it's suspended 12 feet above the ground jacked up on wheels, there are still flowers in the fixtures next to the front door.

Susan Burton

This is Mimi.

Susan Burton

It's early in the day, just past 9:00, and Mimi's carrying a bakery box tied with red ribbon. The movers take a break, eat a doughnut, and the house looming over us, I chat with Larry, the head of the crew.

Susan Burton

This house is massive by moving standards. Most houses weight only 100, maybe 130 tons, Larry tells me.

The movers finish up breakfast, slip the doughnut box onto a steel beam underneath the front steps, and as their winches begin to whir, Mimi tells me the history of the house, which is stranger than you might think.

Mimi's parents first built this house in Southern Illinois. They lived there for several years, and then her father was transferred to Minneapolis. The family bought some land in Wayzata and decided to replicate the Illinois house exactly.

Susan Burton

This is Mimi's mother, Adrienne.

Susan Burton

And they lived happily ever after, for 25 years anyway, until certain small things began to bother them, little things about certain rooms. It's as if the house they were living in began to coexist in their minds with the second house, an imaginary house that was just slightly more perfect than the one they actually inhabited. And at some point, they decided they wanted to live in that other house. Here's Truck, Mimi's father.

Susan Burton

But they found it would be more expensive to renovate than to tear the house down and build another brand new. What to do? The thought of bulldozing the house was so upsetting that they could hardly talk about it. Mimi's mother, Adrienne.

Susan Burton

Then Mimi's husband suggested that the family move the house, that he, and Mimi, and their children could live in it. Since the structure was too big to take onto county roads, they would tug it onto an empty field elsewhere on the property, just a five-minute walk away from the original site, the site on which Mimi's parents will rebuild their old house, with subtle changes, this fall.

What about a house could mean so much to a family, mean so much that they'd build it three times, scoop it out of the ground, prop it on trailers, drag it through the pasture, carry it with them wherever they go? Architecturally, there isn't anything extraordinary about the house. Adrienne and Truck found the floor plan in a magazine. It's a pretty two-story with four bedrooms, a little formal looking. If, in the 1970s, you spent any time in a country club suburb, you drove your station wagon past a lot of houses like this. Adrienne offers one explanation for her attachment to the house.

Susan Burton

And at some level, the reason this family keeps remaking the same house is as simple as they're happy together in that home. They have fun there. This is not a family for whom Sunday dinner together is an obligation. They like being together. And they like being together around their house. When I suggest to Mimi that for many people, moving back into a childhood home might be painful, bittersweet, it's almost like she doesn't understand what I mean. Well, maybe if someone had died there, she says.

And there's one more reason why the house means so much. In the movie of this family's life, in the scene where the dying man says, Rosebud, the name Mimi's family would say is

Susan Burton

Truck's ancestors include some old money Minnesotans who owned a historic home called well, Highcroft, a 40,000 square foot mansion on Lake Minnetonka. Truck pages through a green leather album showing me photographs. The house had its own power plant, a commercial laundry on the first floor. It was torn down in the 1950s, the land sold off and divided up into separate plots just four miles from where the family lives now.

Everyone makes sure that I know about Highcroft, brings it up early in the conversation. The family clearly feels the story explains something about them.

Susan Burton

This is Mimi again.

Susan Burton

There was a choice about Highcroft, and the family believes it chose wrong. And this seems to be more painful than the absence itself. And what they fear is forgetting. Mimi tells me that once something is gone it's hard to remember it again, that already it's hard to imagine the big pink brick house on its old site. And building the same thing every time is a way of guarding against forgetting. It's almost as if the family thinks that if they live their lives in different rooms all of their memories would disappear.

Susan Burton

Why shouldn't you be able to hold onto what happens inside a room? Mimi's family simply takes to an extreme a feeling a lot of people have about homes they've lived in and moved away from. A house can inspire a kind of longing. But you can love a house maybe too much, which was something Mimi had to think about. Because she was essentially asking her husband, Mark, to move into her childhood home from his childhood home, which is where they live now.

Mimi and I drive out to Maple Plain. It's only 15 minutes from Wayzata, but more rural and more working class, low-slung warehouses, a beer distributor, a sign that says, chainsaw sale on now. We pass Mark's parents house-- the one he actually grew up in-- take a left and we're at Mark and Mimi's house, high on a bluff, looking around at miles of pretty plains and wetlands.

From here we can see where Mark's sister lives. She and the rest of his family helped him move this house here, put down the driveway, plant the grass. Mark's so easygoing that if he's upset about leaving this world he's put so much effort into constructing there's no way to tell.

Susan Burton

This is as much as I can ever get Mark to say about the move. As the three of us talk he seems reluctant to bring up anything that might upset anyone. He says he's looking forward to being in a better school district, closer to restaurants, to setting up his music studio, but Mimi notices something he's leaving out.

Susan Burton

This isn't the answer Mimi's looking for. And they go around on this until finally Mimi points out that Mark would've been happy to stay in their current house.

Susan Burton

Mimi starts to cry. And I turn off the tape recorder. And she looks out the window and says, it's hard to see somebody's dreams not be able to happen.

There are two parts to a move, what you take with you and what you leave behind. And the hardest thing for Mark isn't coming into Mimi's world, it's what he's giving up.

It's hard to imagine moving an entire house, and not many people do it. There aren't firm figures, but by one estimate, 10,000 structures of all kinds are moved each year. The guy moving Mimi's house, Larry Stubbs of Stubbs Building Movers, recently made the Guinness Book of World Records when he moved the Shubert Theatre in Minneapolis.

To move Mimi's childhood home, Larry started by digging a moat around the house, inserted jacks at the edges of the building, cracked it off its foundation, pumped it up into the air. Then he stuck a complicated network of support beams and wheeled dollies underneath. It took less than a week to pull the house close to its new site. Then Mark and his father got in excavators and dug a big hole, graded an incline down into it. The house gets rolled into the hole. A foundation is built under it. The support system is taken away.

As they pull the house into the hole, you can see the wheels turning under it. But its progress is so incremental, so graceful, that you can't actually perceive the move unless you go away for an hour and return, as Mimi and I do, to see the house turned at an angle rounding a bend, the doughnut box from this morning still sitting upon a beam

Mimi gets out her cell phone and calls friends and family, tells them to come over. It looks like today's the day Larry's going to finish, fix the house in its final spot. I climb up in a truck cab with a mover named Dave, who's winching a cable attached to the house around a giant spool.

Susan Burton

And all of a sudden it's in place, and we're not on a job site zigzagged by bulldozer tracks but in a front yard. Mimi's mother, Adrienne, arrives and stands before the house, right where the circular driveway will be, holding her granddaughter, Adie.

Susan Burton

Mimi and I climb up a ladder and through a hole poked into the floor of the mud room. I feel as if we're entering an exhibit, something mounted, a museum piece.

The interior of the house is so vintage 70s that it's a little spooky. I half expect one of the girls from the movie The Virgin Suicides to lean over the banister in a gauzy prom dress. We stand in the wood paneled family room talking about Mimi's plans to redecorate and her memories of the place.

Susan Burton

To Mimi, this is the central tension of the project. She's trying to preserve something, but change it at the same time. We finish the tour of the first floor and head upstairs.

Susan Burton

I tried to figure out a polite way to ask Mimi, won't it be a little odd to be sleeping with your husband in your parents bedroom? When I finally do, Mimi is surprisingly unfazed by the notion. It simply doesn't bother her that much. In fact, she said, she and Mark have a four poster bed just like her parents.

Mark comes inside with Adie and Mimi takes him to see the view from the kitchen windows. It's the moment in the move when a house officially changes hands and the new owners walk around whispering, exploring. And what's amazing is that Mimi can actually have this experience in this house, given the fact that she lived here for 18 years.

She tours the rooms looking for little reassurances, that it will feel normal here, that it wasn't a mistake to move the house. And what's most comforting to Mimi is that it feels a lot like what it was.

Susan Burton

Later in the evening, I sit in the yard and think about how F. Scott Fitzgerald set some of his short stories here, in the wealthy corners of Minnesota, amidst lake houses and broad lawns. The story Mimi's dad told me about his grandfather's last night at Highcroft has a plot that's pure Fitzgerald, someone riding away on a snowy night in a Pullman car taking a last look at the fine old mansion, the receding past.

In an actual Fitzgerald story, say Winter Dreams, that past would be lost forever. And at some point the protagonist, in that one a Minnesota golf caddy, would rub his eyes in a panic trying to conjure it up again, reinhabit that world, and be devastated by his inability to summon it back.

But Fitzgerald would have had to write Mimi's story as a fairy tale. She's done the thing that's impossible, packed the one thing you can't take with you. She's kept the past accessible for her whole family. They have all of the rooms, all of the years of their lives. They can literally step back into something a lot of people strain to recapture. And she's been able to do this because, unlike Fitzgerald's characters, unlike so many of us, she's never left home.

Ira Glass

Susan Burton.

Coming up, how to sell your home, make thousands and thousands of dollars, and never move out. That's right, a case study. That's in a minute from Public Radio International when our program continues.

[MUSIC - "YOU'D BE SO NICE TO COME HOME TO" BY THE AL COHN AND ZOOT SIMS QUINTET]

It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Each week on our program, of course, we choose a theme, bring you a variety of different stories on that theme. Today's program, how to move without really moving, stories of people who do not want change in their lives, but then events force them to change and how they try to hold onto what they already know and love despite that.

Ira Glass

We've arrived at Act Two of our program, Act Two, Deal of a Lifetime. The typical way that it goes when somebody moves is that they move into the new house or apartment and the old occupant moves out. Sarah Koenig has this story of a situation where the new mover moved in, but at that point the process came to a dead halt.

Sarah Koenig

My stepsister, Rue, wanted a house in Sag Harbor, New York badly. But the former fishing village is now the artsiest of the tourist towns that make up the Hamptons, and she couldn't really afford it. Then one day she found out about a lovely house on Main Street listed for two prices. The more expensive listing included a house, a shed, and a little garden. The cheaper listing included a house, a shed, a little garden, and Ned.

Sarah Koenig

The deal was this. Rue moved into her dream house at $110,000 discount. The catch was Ned, an elderly, sick man who sold the house cheap on one condition, that he never have to move out. Rue lives in the upstairs apartment. Ned lives in the more spacious downstairs, where he will stay until he dies.

Sarah Koenig

Unlike the mansions across the street, this house isn't big or fancy. It was built perhaps 100 years ago for the workers in the local watchcase factory. When she bought it, Rue was 36 and single. The idea that she could inhabit only two rooms of her new house didn't seem problematic. What she did not foresee was that in the space of a year, she would acquire a puppy, a husband and a baby.

She tries to focus on the deal's advantages. The cramped quarters have taught her to resolve fights with her husband rather than flee them, she says. And Rue, extravagantly messy in her youth, has now taken to watching Martha Stewart's TV show at 9:00 AM, and has learned helpful tips for maximizing space. Still, she can't deny that the population boom in her apartment has made Ned's downstairs look especially attractive.

Sarah Koenig

To Ned, who is 78, selling his house from under himself was an ingenious way to stay in a place he considers home. A pianist who made his living as an editor, Ned has spent his life getting money and then spending it all. By the time he put his house on the market he was sick and broke. He didn't have the will to move.

The Main Street house is the only one he's ever owned. It's crammed with antiques, and oriental rugs, and reminders of his elegant New Orleans upbringing. A large romantic portrait of him from 1951 hangs in the parlor. In the kitchen is a framed photograph of Stillwood, his grandmother's plantation house.

Sarah Koenig

Besides the house and its occasional ailments-- a leaky skylight and overflowing garbage can-- what unites these two households is the anticipation of Ned's death. Back when they first negotiated the deal nobody thought he would still be alive today.

Sarah Koenig

The contract that binds Ned and Rue has led them to live together separately. They don't consider each other family or even friends. They don't invite each other over for dinner or drop by each other's apartment for a chat. When they do talk, their conversation is almost exclusively about the house. Like considerate roommates, they try not to offend each other with their habits.

Sarah Koenig

In fact, Rue likes his playing. She's never told him so, but she finds it soothing when the music drifts into her bedroom when she and the baby are taking a nap. And he has never told her that he finds her presence upstairs comforting. Still there are complicated feelings on both sides.

Sarah Koenig

To maintain their relationship, Ned and Rue have developed a careful communication devoid of jokes about arsenic, for example, at least to each other. The result is a textbook defense of civil society, a housebound version of Robert's Rules of Order.

Sarah Koenig

Because of his upbringing, Ned comes to this position naturally. But it's remarkable to me that my stepsister, a 70s wild child still known to say things like virtue is a load of crap, has come to understand the power of polite restraint. In private, of course, away from Ned, she's unapologetic about what lurks beneath their relationship.

Sarah Koenig

Both Rue and Ned moved into this house hoping it would be the last place where they'd ever unpack. Ned got his wish. But if he survives for more than another year, a strong possibility, Rue will have to move out. Her two small rooms will become too small once her baby starts to crawl. For now though, Rue's proud that the five souls living under her roof are getting along so well. And when Ned finally does die, she says she'll be sad. Along with twinges of wickedness, it's a sadness she bought along with the house.

[PIANO PLAYING]

Ira Glass

Sarah Koenig.

[MUSIC - "LOVE NEST" BY HI LOS]

Ira Glass

Act Three, To a De-luxe Apartment in the Sky. One of the producers of This American Life, Blue Chevigny, used to have a job that was all about moving day and people who did not want to face that day. She worked for an agency in New York called Project Reachout, part of Goddard Riverside Community Center. They moved homeless mentally ill people into their own homes. With most of her clients it took years.

In April, she went back to New York to watch one of the guys who she knew and liked finally get into his own room.

Blue Chevigny

Back at my old job, George stood out from a lot of the other clients. He was immediately easy to relate to. He was more talkative, more expressive, more open with people. One of my old coworkers, Dave Dean, remembers being an intern seven years ago, walking into the basement where all the clients were hanging out, playing cards, not talking much, especially to him. He remembers meeting George.

Blue Chevigny

Other clients were capable of that kind of warmth after you knew them for a little while. But very few were so friendly from the start. At that time George was living on the street. Eight years went by before he was ready to move into his own place again. What took so long? For one thing, like a lot of mentally ill people, he didn't really mind living outside ever since the day he first became homeless two decades ago.

Blue Chevigny

Dave would see him in the park looking as out there as anyone you ever see on the streets of New York, in a white unitard, white shirt, white turban, and with gold chains around his neck. Dave and other workers would give him sandwiches, try to lure him back to Project Reachout where he had come for help in the past. It took a long, long time.

Blue Chevigny

What makes George's case different than a lot of the other people at Project Reachout is that he happens to respond really well to medication. Without it, he says, he's angry all the time.

Blue Chevigny

These days if you meet George he looks completely normal and great. He smiles all the time. He looks as if he takes time to put himself together every day. Dave says he looks like a college professor, a 48-year-old African American man with salt and pepper hair, dressing in nice suits or jackets, and looking all studious in eyeglasses. And today he's moving 40 blocks north to his own place.

Blue Chevigny

Dave helps George moved his stuff into a van along with Christina Caine, who coordinates housing for Project Reachout and moves everyone.

Moving a homeless person usually means carrying a few garbage bags of stuff. For George, it means the van is jam-packed. He has a portable stereo, a TV, and a VCR, things he's bought with disability checks. But the real reason we have to make seven trips up and down the stairs, three people carrying stuff, is his clothes.

Blue Chevigny

For the last year George has been living in a shelter where he doesn't have his own room, a place designed as transitional housing. At some point all of these clients have to move to permanent homes, and it's one of the trickiest parts of my old job. Moving day is what they're all working towards, but in many cases when that day comes, it's been like pulling teeth to get there.

Most schizophrenics share this quality with some homeowners, they don't like change. They've barely gotten used to the transitional shelter, and now they have to move. One of the guys I was closest to got so mad at me about moving that I gave him a little pep talk about it every day for months, while he just scowled at me, before he'd agree to go. He stayed in the shelter for two years. Christina is the one who now finds housing for these guys.

Blue Chevigny

Because of this, during the move the three of us keep up an ongoing patter of encouragement and positive reinforcement. We open the door to his new place.

Blue Chevigny

Even though we all know this, in our need to go on and on about how great the new place is, at some point we run low on material and find ourselves saying--

Blue Chevigny

And as we ride up in the elevator, George pines for his old room in the shelter.

Blue Chevigny

Once people have moved inside they sometimes really struggle. And it's all a bit unpredictable who'll do well and who won't. One guy we moved took six months to figure out how to ride the simple subway commute back and forth to his place each day. But George seems happy with his new room once everything's in it. And the facility is designed for people like him, homeless and mentally ill. The rent is a fixed percentage of his disability check-- about a third. There are staff people there to help him if he needs it. But it's really his own place.

Two weeks later I go back to visit George to see how he's doing. He goes back every day to Project Reachout to visit Dave, and get his meds, and to go to his day program.

Blue Chevigny

He talks at length about the unlimited metro card pass that he pays for once a month, the pass that lets him ride around the city on the subway and buses as much as he wants and visit his old buddies in the shelter, which he does nearly every day. The city seems full of possibilities.

After we finish talking, George walks me to the bus I'm taking to the airport. He says he's never flown in an airplane anywhere, but now that he knows what bus goes out there he thinks he'll go out and watch some planes take off some time. He asks me how I'm doing off in Chicago, a whole new city. I tell him things are good in some ways, not so good in others. I tell him I miss New York. He pats me on the arm. He says it takes some time to get used to things.

Ira Glass

Blue Chevigny.

Ira Glass

And producer Blue Chevigny spent a while trying to figure out what song it might be that he's singing so she could play it right after. And she came up with many possibilities. Here are just a few.

Ira Glass

This is Earth, Wind, & Fire's Got To Get You Into My Life. Or is it from Jesus Christ Superstar.

Ira Glass

Or perhaps Simon and Garfunkel?

Ira Glass

Or maybe Crosby, Stills & Nash?

Ira Glass

Lou Reed.

[MUSIC - "WALK ON THE WILD SIDE" BY LOU REED]

And of course our final pick, George Clinton.

Ira Glass

This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International.

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WBEZ management oversight by Torey Malatia who, you know, has his own radio show that he does back in his living room about which he says--

Ira Glass

I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life.

Announcer

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