You know what’s crazy? I’ll tell you what’s crazy!™
Moving.
Boxes and cardboard and tape equate to Callouses, back ache and heart ache.
They say few things in life are as stressful as moving. THEY are correct.
Moving is more stressful than pinning a coursage on your prom date’s strapless gown in front of her father, the pentacostal preacher.
I think about that as I scan kitchen cabinets filled with stacked dishes.
The entry way is filled with boxes, like peregrine tumbleweeds on a movie set of High Plains Drifter.
Depressing.
As I look out the window on this Saturday morning, the rain is pouring down. The sky is low in the sky and there is a funk that comes after the first week of Thanksgiving.
The turkey is gone and now buying and paying for Christmas looms on the horizon.
What is my credit card limit again?
Across the street, the neighbors have turned their residence into a Home Beautiful Magazine cover.
White lights on the lawn, in the windows, in the bushes. When did white lights become more fashionable than the Clark Griswold LSD look?
I hear the heater suddenly kick on. A tiny tornado cloud of dust rises off the hardwood and blazes across the room.
I make a mental note to wipe that up. Yeah right.
I see a PlayStation controller on the floor. It looks like a garden snake, hissing at me to make a decision.
“Am I junk? Should I be packed? How many Damn controllers do those kids need?”
There’s more game controllers in this house than the kids have friends. Unless the neighbor boy has become an octopus, I don’t see why we need so many PlayStation controllers?
Mental note to self: don’t let my kids play with octopus, and never move again.
Moving represents so much on so many levels.
There is the sheer physicality of the event. Lifting, walking, climbing, reaching.
Remember bend with your knees, not with your back. Someone should have told me that a flight of stairs ago.
Thank God I have yet to pack that bottle of Sammy Hagar Tequila.
But more than the physical anguish, there is the mental pain of the move, which is increasingly more difficult to quantify.
Editing memories, and throwing away a lifetime of experiences is hard to tabulate.
Going through a cabinet I find a stupid yellow flashlight. It should be easy to toss in the trash, right?
I remember buying it for my daughter at the check out line at Home Depot.
“Daddy can I have a flashlight?”
“Of course baby.”
It cost 3.99. It’s garbage. It’s scratched and there is a partially torn Snow White sticker on the handle.
I try and drop the stupid flash light in the 3 mil contractor bag, but I cannot.
The ominous black plastic sack is wide open, its mouth eagerly awaiting my decision.
To the contractor bag, a vessel with no conscious and no soul, this flash light is food. The contractor bag, mouth open like a starving walrus, wants me to drop the flash light in its waiting orifice. The bag is a trained aquatic performer with bad breath and I am the trainer at sea world dangling the trash like a bright yellow sardine.
But the flash light is stuck to my hand. It’s as if my palm is made of Velcro and I have accidentally reached into a basket of yarn. The magnetic attraction is overwhelming as yarn gathers onto my palm like a snow ball rolling down hill.
I stare at the flash light and remember my daughter running in the house as a child. The night is dark and the front door is slamming over and over as seemingly every neighborhood kid for 3 square blocks is rushing through my entry way.
“What are they doing?” I wondered to myself as I listened to doors slamming and kids shrieking.
“Daddy, where’s my Snow White flashlight?,” my daughter shouts from the kitchen.
“In the drawer by the fridge,” I holler back with a smile.
“Thanks dad.”
Bam.
The front door slams and the house quiet.
A minute later, out the den window, I see the neighbor’s house lit up with flash light beam as if it’s a movie premiere on the Hollywood Boulevard.
As I hold the flashlight in my hand, I think about the endless summer nights of the kids playing German Spotlight with that flashlight.
I put the plastic item on the table, temporizing my decision on this important item for later, perhaps when I have sampled a few sips of Sammy Hagar’s Cabo Wabo.
That’s when I spy the old telescope in the office. The tripod is bent, and the body of the mechanism seems to be warped. I move to grab it to toss it in the starving contractor bag.
I stop as I near the telescope. I think back to a quieter moment in my life when I was on the back deck with my oldest son. He was into astronomy and the night was perfect. The sky was dark like an interminable void of black felt. The stars twinkled into the ether beckoning the question “Are we alone?”
Mars was doing one of those astronomically cool things that Mars periodically does.
I can’t remember if it was retrograding or dancing a celestial jig, but we had the little telescope out on the back deck and we were peering into the soul of the universe like Galileo did with his son and Inca Joe did with his son ions before this random moment in time.
I let go of the telescope and moved back to the center of the storm.
I scratched my head and wondered what the hell to do.
I have to pack something, but what? I have to throw away something but what?
The room was laughing at me, teasing me, daring me to be more decisive.
“You think you can throw me away?” A clock that doesn’t work anymore sneered. “Go ahead. I dare ya”
I stared at the cabinet below the television. A hundred VHS tapes with Disney classics like Winnie Pooh and Peter Pan were daring me to make a decision. I peered into the darkness, past the patch cords that connect to electronic devices now relegated to displays in the Smithsonian Institute.
Cinderella. Bambi. Snow White.
Oh my God. How do I throw this into the monster?
It’s like taking out a knife and plunging it into my heart.
How many times did I sit with each kid and watch one of these movies?
Memories were burning in my brain.
I pushed back from the cabinet and stepped on a roll of tape.
“Ouch, what the hell…..”
Like a mine field of moving, my floor is littered with scissors and marking pens and boxes.
I take a seat on the couch, also covered with crap.
I take a sip of coffee and put on SportsCenter.
The talk is whether Auburn and Oregon should play for the National Championship.
Right now, with the swirling indecision of life blowing by my eyes, moving is arduous, like fixing a carburetor would be to a pre school kid.
I google moving tips looking for some invisible salvation.
A web site pops up with easy to follwo steps:
1. Give yourself time. give yourself 8 weeks.
Sadly, I have given myself 8 days.
FAIL!
2. Get Organized and make a list of all the tasks you need to do.
I kick a box into the pantry.
FAIL!
3. Clear Out the Clutter
See yellow flashlight and telescope.
FAIL!
4. Say Goodbye: the website says allow yourself the time to say goodbye. Throw a party. Invite friends out for dinner. Take an hour everyday to walk through your neighborhood. Visit one favorite spot every day. Feel the memories and allow yourself to relive them one more time. This will also help with the transition from the old to the new and give yourself some much needed time to enjoy the moment.
I close the contractor bag’s mouth and put the flashlight in the save pile.
I fondle the blue bottle of Sammy Hagar tequila and smile as thoughts of “manana” manifest in a brain sick of memories, sick of moving.
And that is crazy.