Moving Day

Well, sort of. More like de- and re-storing day. But eventful nonetheless.

After two weeks of shopping and stocking, as well as meeting with moving company reps in order to survey my freight-forwarding needs, and then wrangling quotes out of them, and then deciding, the day finally arrived.

I showed up promptly at noon. They showed up tardy at one. And the fun began.

Of course when we'd landed in the states, the sum total of our stored stuff fit into a unit 5 by 10 feet and 8 feet high. Medium full. Boxes and bookshelves, a dissembled bed, some rolled-up carpets. Some tatami mats. Four dozen African masks of various sizes and descriptions. Maybe 15 African statues. But in the process of collating what of mine remained at other people's (primarily Thor's) house, another space was needed. I rented a van for a day, and Thor and I somehow managed to get my table, which is essentially a 4 by 7 foot slab of white marble, out of his house, and into the van, and then out of the van, and into the locker. It was heavy, and so we used a system of books, sliding the tabletop on its edge from book to book across the floor, and replacing the books in front as they got left behind. Sort of how they did the pyramids, I guess. But anyway we did it, and brought along an assortment of gorgeous wheelchairs and some other goodies as well.

And today, three guys, Luis, Martin, and Jose, showed up and continued the trajectory into their big professional moving van.

But there was an intermediate stage first. Because first they had, incredibly, to un- and then re-pack every single item I owned.

This was partly because, as the ex-roommate of a bartender, nearly everything I owned was in beer boxes, a big red-flag for customs agents snooping for illicit alcohol imports; and partly because of 9/11 laws, which say that moving companies now must know and provide a complete inventory of what they're shipping. But we know what's really happenning here: the moving company wants their logo on every box. It just looks good.

And so I sat, and watched it happen. Out came a beer box, out came the razor blade. Zik, zik, zik. The box was open, the stuff came out, and went into another in a huge pile of new boxes. One by one every book, every object, every african figure and mask, came into view and then disappeared again. Literally my life flashing before my eyes. Books, books, books. Art books, textbooks, comic books. Souvenirs from Sri Lanka and Zambia and Bolivia. My diploma. Boxes of childhood photographs. Kristi's wisdom teeth. All the clothes I'd forgotten I had. All the doodads I'd forgotten I had. A globe with a minibar inside it. A devo hat. An ashtray made from a deer's foot. On and on and on.

I don't know what my movers thought about all this. They mostly just buckled down and did it without speaking, and what words they did utter to one another were in Spanish. But they must have wondered, if nothing else, about the sheer volume of african masks, and about the tatamis, which are huge (6' x 3' x 3") slabs of straw and which weigh a ton, and of course about Ferdinand.

Martin did ask about Ferdinand. "Unicornio?" he asked. "Something like that," I told him. I didn't mention that, according to the British Museum, there are possibly the remains of suicides and epileptics within his belly.

And they packed and they packed. It took hours, the boxes piled up in the fluorescent-lit hallway of the public storage. Of course simultaneously around the corner, in the new storage space we had recently engaged, a whole different type of packing was going on. How do you wrap an antique wheelchair? I wish I had a picture to show you. Each chair ended up as a sort of franken-box, cut out and taped around and with paper wrapping on top. Unfortunately, Sarah had the camera. D'oh. And of course there was the table to contend with.

For that, a specialist was called in. He arrived, took some measurements, returned to his truck, returned with some wood, and built, right there in the hallway, a perfect-sized crate to hold the stone slab. Very efficient, really. And then three large strong men lifted the table into the crate, without the benefit of Thor's and my Gizan book technique, and then out came the crate-maker's drill again, and zip, zip, zip, the thing was closed, and my table was secure. Again: O for a camera.

Now, I don't have much furniture, but what little I did have became the responsibility of Luis, who wrapped it in layers of thick paper. Like giant brown gifts, gifts with the contents markered onto the sides. But nice work. My bed, my dresser, my bookshelves, all neatly wrapped and labeled.

I should point out, though, that this all took six hours to happen. Six hours in a tube-lit corridor. Six hours of detail-oriented, yet menial, work. Six hours without a glimpse of daylight. Six hours of seeing every individual possession I have flit through my cortex, only to be concealed once more. It was numbing.

After all of which, we loaded up the elevator. Load after load, in fact, of boxes on trolleys, and finally, whoosh, out into the clear evening air. Up into the big orange truck. And then back for more.

I signed what I needed to sign. I was given a copy of the inventory. I thanked them, tipped them, and left. I'll see my stuff in France. Slowly but surely, it's actually happenning.