Did I tell you the one about moving my family across the country during a global pandemic while also dodging protests in every major city we drove through? Brooklyn, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Columbus, Indianapolis, St. Louis, Tulsa, Oklahoma City. The world was burning with a righteous anger over the death of another black man in police custody and I was driving a moving truck across the country with my dog sleeping in the passenger seat. Nearly everything we own was packed into that truck while Saint Anne the wife followed close behind in a rented SUV with our two house fires strapped into the backseat.
There's a tsunami of news, posts, and information about what's happening right now and trying to stay informed is like drinking from a fire hose. Honestly I'd much rather get into the recent release of a project I got to be on, but that blog post can wait. I'll not get into the weeds about the reality of institutional racism and police violence, but those four Minneapolis police officers killed that man. We left Brooklyn just hours before the protests broke out not far from our home and it's crushing to not be there during this time.
The past week or so here in Oklahoma City has had the wife and me focused on family and trying to adjust to life outside New York. Most of our stuff is now neatly packed into a storage unit that's six times larger and nearly a third of the price of what we had in Brooklyn. With all that's going on I feel like we're approaching Inception levels of our lives still being somewhat on hold. We're staying with our parents for a season before deciding what's next and there's plenty of room to sorta sprawl out compared to our small New York apartment; our boys are loving time with their grandparents. We even bought a car which is pretty much a must have in living here. The salesman looked at us like we had horns growing our of our face when we told him we hadn't owned a car in the last 18+ months.
In the midst of trying to get the dust to settle in our own major life event, I still strongly feel like it's important to not let what's happening in the world pass us by. Anne and I had a conversation about racism and police brutality with our seven year old. We stuttered and stumbled in our attempt, but we did the thing. Anne was eloquent as always, but what was helpful for me was to sit down with him and go through some of the photos posted from the protests, especially the ones taken not too far from our Park Slope apartment. One of the major focuses of our move to New York was to make sure our family was around people and ideas that were different than ours. Different races, different faiths, different political beliefs. No question we'd have participated in the Brooklyn protests if we were there. Like the rest of this country, Oklahoma has to address and work through its own problems and history of racism. There have been protests and demonstrations across the state and I jumped at a chance to participate in a peaceful event this past Saturday here in Oklahoma City.
Again, it's wild to be here for now, especially without serious plans. Being back in Oklahoma is like being on another planet considering all we've been through in New York. Anne and our boys will be back in the classroom in a few months and I'll be spending a good deal of time commuting to NY and wherever else for work once it spins back up.