They say your earliest experiences form your character. Too young to remember, my father and I breakfasted with the gypsies whose caravan we followed.

Strangers, accepted but not part of the tribe.

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My first memories are of driving across the plains at night. My mother’s mother was dying. Napping in the back seat while my uncle and mother pushed to get there in time. Portability is one of my virtues.

Consoling my mother in the funeral home. “If grandma is in heaven, why are you crying?” I was three.

I am an only child. My father is an only child. My mother’s brothers have children, but my closest cousin is 9 years my junior and lives half a continent away.

Stranger. Family, loved, but distant. In-between the adults and the kids on the rare occasion of a family reunion.

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Life in the barrio. The only English-only speaker on my block. My best friend five years my senior – hers the only bilingual family. We stayed for three years.

Stranger. Different race, different language, different foods on the table.

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Handed a box and told, “whatever you want to keep must fit in the box”. Mom decided what would happen to the rest of my toys and books, whether they’d be packed away while we housesat, if they’d be given away, if they’d come with us. We stayed a year in that home in the country.

Stranger. Different social class. I remember being invited to a birthday sleepover, up early watching the sunrise. An adult asking me if anything was wrong. Strange girl, watching the sky.

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Time to pack again, this time to go behind the Bamboo Curtain. “You can take 2 dolls and a few books”. Packed away my new birthday toys in grandma’s shed.

I was the only English speaking child in the province for six months. I was the first Caucasian child in Harbin since WWII. People walked backwards to stare. One of our neighbors enjoyed picking me up like a doll and laughed at my anger. I was so very strange that year, and it made me strange when I came home.

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My father and I came home ahead of my mom – she wanted to spend her birthday overseas. The toys, carefully packed away, had been destroyed by rats. Constant grandparents, lynchpin around which we moved. School a place that gradually made a place for my strange self.

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My parents switched my school after a year for an opportunity to work with computers. Sixth grade is not a good year to be the new kid, not when your body is starting to become strange, not when you have always been strange. There were no friends.

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In Junior High, everyone is strange. Seventh grade was a year of managing life as the strange girl on the outskirts. Eventually I made a friend. In eighth grade, my late birthday gave her reason to drop me. Wandering the blacktop alone, unwelcome in my former hangouts, I was adopted by another strange girl. When she disappeared, the other girl she’d adopted and I became friends. We were strange together, and that was good.

We had three years before her father moved her across the country. The same year two of my other friends moved away and my boyfriend disappeared for the summer and came back with his heart in shards. (His father had died). I was strange alone for a time, until I decided that my boyfriend and his lot of misfit friends were just going to have to keep me.

I’d been lonely long enough, I made other friends. I kept the ones who had moved, writing often.

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I worked hard, full-time school and a part time job and as much time with my boyfriend as the hours would allow. But I’d always been meant to go to four-year college, it’d never been questioned. Strange, smart girl. No matter my relationship status, I had a destiny or, perhaps, a checkbox.

I went to Santa Cruz, which is a strange place and beautiful. Alone again. Strange again. Coming in late, starting mid-way through when everyone else had already sorted out their tribes. Took Women’s Studies. Most of the other WS majors were lesbians or at least bi. Strange straight Christian girl.

Decided to live in the on-campus apartments themed for the barrio, thinking it would be like home. Strange white girl, didn’t come from the Projects, didn’t work with the math teacher they made the movie about. Strange girls aren’t wanted, strange girls stay lonely.

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Graduated. Got a crappy job. Married that boyfriend. Got a better job. Bought a house. Got that friend from junior high to move in with us. Other folks moved in, moved out. Had our first child.

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MIL died suddenly, four months after our son was born, after I’d stopped working. Two months later, husband lost his job. Six months later, we sold our house and moved into hers. Portable, that’s me.

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Stranger. I’m the strange girl, the one who isn’t from here, who isn’t like folks. I don’t do it right, whatever it is that everyone else is doing. Does my strange comes from my mind or my body or the paths that I’ve walked? I don’t know.

I’ve learned to observe and mimic, although I do so imperfectly. I pretend not to be so strange. I am actively bad at pretense, but it is what one does.

I learned to make friends and keep them. Sometimes they move away, but distance is temporary, as are all things. Not everyone is given a tribe, some of us have to make our own.

Maybe the gypsies taught me that.