Boers: Leaving Home Produces Rush Of Vivid Memories

By Terry Boers-

(CBS) Ever since we moved during the first week of October, I've been hit with the same questions over and over.

How was the move? Are you settled in yet? Is there enough room? Isn't it difficult to leave a house that holds so many memories?

Let me give you abridged answers to the first three queries. Awful. Not quite yet. We downsized, but we're not exactly living in a minivan.

Now the last question is the tricky one.

You see, for many years ours was a vagabond marriage. In the first 17 years, from 1971 to 1988, we moved 10 times. That's right, 10 times. It's like we were a military family. Let me see if I can get this all straight.

We went from Steger to Park Forest back to Steger to Country Club Hills to Matteson to Birmingham, Mich., to Redford Mich., to Livonia, Mich., and back to Country Club Hills again for eight years, then to Orland Park for three red-hot months of summer and finally to Mokena in the fall of '88 when the house was done.

After suffering through one of the hottest summers on record (there was no air conditioning in the Orland sweatbox), I was in that new house for all of two days before I had to fly off to Seoul, South Korea, in September to cover the 1988 Summer Olympics for the Sun-Times.

Talk about difficult. I didn't know if I could hack it in Korea.

I mean, two days just wasn't enough time to get anything settled, meaning that for roughly the millionth time, I was counting on my wife to try to get our kids' lives stabilized, including two five-year-olds.

I felt the pangs of guilt I'd been getting for the better part of the last five years. I'd always thought of myself as an absentee father while covering the Bulls, but this was extreme. This time I was halfway around the world, putting my stuff away in one of the media housing units and in some kind of coma after the 17-hour flight and the bus ride from the airport that ate up almost three more hours.

Please, don't misunderstand here. I felt a great deal of pride that I'd been tapped to write the column, even if I was no match for the some of the terrific writers who'd preceded me, including the great John Schulian and the elegant Ron Rapoport. I did, however, have the feeling I wouldn't be annoying people with my column for too long, that eventually the tug of wanting to be home more would win.

Truth be told, I actually wound up having great fun in Korea. Tons of work, mind you, but a terrific time highlighted by the little trip I took with Rapoport to sample the local delicacy, dog. I believe I wrote that the dog was bad chow, but the baked Alaskan Wolfhound was a killer. Or something like that.

But let's get back to the old house and those memories just in case that creepy PETA woman in St. Charles, who did her best back then to make my life miserable, is still alive.

Getting back to the old house, I didn't think much about it in the first month we were gone. There was just too many things to worry about, too many things to put in place again, too many of life's incidentals that had to be done, including making sure our new address had been given to all who needed to record the change.

I even went to the DMV to make sure my driver's license reflected the correct address. Now I should be eligible for a citizenship award the next time I was stopped for speeding.

I'd also been back to the house any number of times to get this or that, and my mind never wandered for a second. I found what I was looking for, closed the garage door behind me as I'd been doing for 26 years and went back to our new place.

Then came that Sunday about a month ago.

We'd waited to put the house up for sale because there were so many things that needed to be fixed. You know the drill -- a hole here, some paint there, a little this, a little that. Such is the price of raising four rambunctious sons.

I was on a mission to check out how everything looked when I noticed the good-sized "For Sale" sign that had finally been placed in our side yard.

The visceral reaction I had was immediate. I pulled into the driveway and sat. And sat. And sat some more. It was a gut punch that jogged every memory. For the briefest moment, I thought I might even throw up. Thankfully, I didn't.

I finally got out of the car and stepped to the side of the house where we'd played countless Wiffle ball and football games, more than ever in the last 11 years as my grandkids grew old enough to participate.

And there had been a basketball hoop in the driveway, too, but the minute the last of my kids could beat me one-on-one, I took it down. Well, maybe not at that exact moment, but you get the drift.

I then swung around into the backyard where the swimming pool once was, remembering the sights and the sounds of the kids and how much they had loved it.

My only mistake that melancholy morning was going inside.

I took a seat in the living room where a pair of couches and chairs were the only furniture left in the house. It's the place for the last 25 years where we've had our Christmas mornings. God, the joy of those mornings is something special. And it got even better as the number of grandkids gradually grew to five and the party got considerably louder.

But other memories soon came flooding back, and they were hardly joyous. The images of some very precious family members lost and the deaths of the only two neighbors I really ever liked in the entire subdivision put tears in my eyes, something hardly uncommon for me as I get older.

I wish like hell those memories wouldn't still feel so raw, so difficult to process even years later. But your memories are your memories. You're not human if the things you hold so deep inside don't make you laugh and sometimes cry and even make you want to scream.

We get a chance to start a new Christmas chapter this week. The setting is much different, the space is more limited, but I know the results will be the same for those I love the most.

May it be the same for all of you and yours.

A longtime sportswriter for the Chicago Sun-Times, Terry Boers now co-hosts The Boers and Bernstein Show, which can be heard Monday-Friday from 1 p.m.-6 p.m. on 670 The Score.