PURELY SUBJECTIVE: MOVING DAY

How do people we care about slowly disappear from our lives?

The day of my wife’s bachelorette party, I moved out of my apartment and into a rented duplex that wasn’t in the best Oklahoma City neighborhood.

Really the only thing the duplex had going for it was its price, which wasn’t much more than my tiny apartment. There were trade-offs, though. My apartment was well-kept, if bland; the complex had a nice swimming pool that I used on a few occasions, and if anything went wrong, the manager was quick to send a handyman to make repairs. It also came with a refrigerator, oven and garbage disposal, so I didn’t have to buy those myself.

The duplex was bigger but lacking in all niceties. Whereas my old apartment had manicured shrubs, bushes and flowers outside, my new home brought the outdoors inside; vines and other plants had grown beneath the house, stretching their tendrils into the walls.

I first noticed a vine poking out of the wall near the bathroom mirror, but soon the green invasion broke through on several fronts. It was disturbing, like something from the darker parts of a fairy tale. I’d seen “Evil Dead;” it was easy to imagine the vines breaking through the house and wrapping around my legs, chest and arms.

Another oddity led my soonto-be wife and I to call our new dwelling “The Slant House.” Everything about it was slightly

off. None of the angles made sense, which called to mind Shirley Jackson’s novel “The Haunting of Hill House.”

Jackson wrote about a house that was itself insane, and if the duplex wasn’t criminally psychopathic, it was at least off its medications. In truth, the building was warped by age and neglect; the foundation, if it had one, must’ve been extraordinarily uneven. If we placed a pencil on the west end of the floor, it would immediately roll all the way to the east end, picking up speed as it went.

As for the safety of the neighborhood, well, I’ll let a couple incidents speak for themselves.

The first was when I was driving home for lunch in the middle of a work day.

As I turned onto our street, I saw a man being chased by a police officer.

The fleeing subject was racing toward me, and being a law-and-order sort of person, I drove my car up onto the sidewalk and part way into someone’s lawn to try to stop the man or at least slow him down.

He looked me in the eye with a look of betrayal, as if I’d invited him for tea but instead offered a cup of beetles, then lunged around my car and continued to run. I backed out and tried to follow him through the neighborhood, but he eluded both me and the sweaty police officer, who ended up bent over and gasping.

The second was when our property manager seemingly vanished. Eventually we spotted him outside another home and stopped to talk to him.

He hadn’t been around, he said, because he’d been shot for no apparent reason while standing outside his house in the neighborhood — just like he was doing now.

I have a hard time picturing him, but I remember huge glasses and pale skin. He’d nearly lost his leg in the attack, he said without drama, almost as if he were discussing the weather. “Today will be bright and sunny with temperatures in the upper 90s and a 20 percent chance of drive-by shootings.”

But I didn’t know any of that the day I moved into the duplex.

At that point, it was

a place of new beginnings, the epicenter of my upcoming life as a married man.

Neither Amy nor I wanted wild pre-marriage parties. I was in my mid-30s, and she was more mature than me despite being seven years younger.

We’d sown our oats over the years, even if they weren’t all that wild. The last thing I wanted was to be dragged to a tawdry strip club, where I’d mostly feel awkward and sorry for the dancers. So I rejected bachelor party attempts. Amy consented to attend a bachelorette party thrown for her by her best friend, but both were trustworthy women, and I had no reservations about her celebration. My party, as it were, included only two other people. Jesse and Chad were friends from the newspaper.

Both were probably a decade or more younger than me, but they were fun and funny, one from south Texas and the other from Detroit.

All day long we packed boxes at my apartment, our efforts accompanied by the grating sound of strapping tape guns. Jesse, who was nothing if not loud, laughed long and hard at every story we shared that day.

Chad, who always seemed to wear a grin, would laugh at Jesse’s laughing, and I’d have no choice but to give in.

What could’ve been drudgery turned into a

great day, even if it was not without its dangers.

At one point, Jesse lost his balance while descending the steps from my third-floor apartment.

He was carrying a stack of heavy boxes when gravity intervened, sending him plunging down the stairs and onto a landing. The landing was secured by a light metal railing, insufficient to stop a headlong rush.

Chad and I were certain Jesse was going to crash right through the railing and fall head first onto the concrete walkway below. It all took place in the space of about two seconds, but that was plenty of time for me to imagine the aftermath.

Somehow the railing held. Jesse had been applying his own brakes, and the barrier gave him just enough push-back to regain his balance. The possible tragedy turned into laughter, although we were all more careful after that. As dusk approached, we put the last of my possessions into a rented moving truck and proceeded from far northwest Oklahoma City to midtown.

When we pulled into the duplex driveway and came to a stop, I noticed a spider hanging down from the side view mirror nearest to me. The window was open. I’ve always been phobic about spiders; I’ve been bitten by more of them than anyone else I know.

One year I was bitten by a brown recluse during finals week in college and got blood poisoning; a red line traced directly from the wound up my arm and headed toward my chest.

The chairman of the art department, where I worked as a clerk, took one look at it and immediately hustled me off to a hospital. I had good reason to hate spiders.

When I pointed out the one hanging from the side view mirror, though, Jesse and Chad screamed like terrified children and fell all over each other trying to flee from the van. Absolutely ridiculous. So endearing.

By the time we finished unloading the moving truck, most of the light had gone out of the sky. The power hadn’t yet been turned on at the duplex, and we drank beverages pulled from an icy cooler.

My thoughts turned introspective, and in the safety of the dark we finally talked seriously about the changes coming my way in the weeks ahead, how grateful I was to them for their help and how we’d always be friends.

That was my most distinct thought.

Amy would have her bachelorette party to look back on.

I would have this day. Jesse and Chad would forever be linked to one of the most important days in my life. It wasn’t just any move. This one was a precursor to married life. If all went well, I’d never again live on my own. I’d always have my partner.

Chad, Jesse, The Slant House, Amy, a spider, a near-death, this hot night with cold drinks — all of these would become timeless in my memories. I’d always feel ties to my friends for the roles they played. It felt like forever.

The other day I talked with a pal who used to work at the newspaper. Jesse and Chad’s names came up, and I realized that I’d let those two people — so important in my thoughts — slip away from me.

Both left the newspaper years ago. One is now a teacher; the other is a spokesman for an energy company.

Are you still friends when years pass without a real conversation or a shared meal?

Does time inevitably create obstacles to lasting friendship? I thought about them and all the others I’d let disappear from my life.

I’ve said too many goodbyes and not enough hellos.

Nobody’s perfect. In ways we’re all like that duplex, twisted out of shape, neglected and strange. We see the past through an imperfect mirror, maybe one with a vine poking through the wall beside it, and we lose track of today and tomorrow. Yesterday’s easy.

Building new memories is hard. I hope Jesse and Chad read this.

It’ll be easier to reconnect with them if they do. Because what was true back then is true today: They’ll always be a part of my world.