This will be brief. Would you rather it weren’t? Would you like to hear about my day yesterday? I will thank you for your good wishes, because I was lucky at every turn, even the wrong one that the taxi driver took in Harlem. By eight-something in the evening, I was at home,  dressed for fed, and dying for Kathleen to come home so that I could tell her a very funny a story. (You have to know the guy.) But she was very late, and I very tired, so the story will have to wait for this evening. As you can imagine, a day that began with movers and yet ended with a funny story had to have gone well.

I had been given a window of noon-to-four. That’s to say that the mover’s dispatcher would call me between eleven and three to give me an hour’s notice to get to the 62nd Street storage unit. The call came shortly after noon, before I’d even begun to wait for it. I was dressed and ready, of course, so I scrambled outside and hopped into a taxi. I was at the facility in no time. Presently, Ray Soleil appeared, in a last-minute assist. I’d thought that I could manage the day by myself, and I probably could have done, but not so comfortably and companionably; and certainly I should not have arranged the boxes and the balcony furniture and the clothesracks as adroitly as Ray did. But I’m getting ahead of my story. The movers appeared punctually; they carried away, quickly and without incident, the things to be moved; and, although Ray and caught a cab almost immediately, they showed up while I was still filling out paperwork for renting the uptown unit. I was still in bureaucracy mode when the movers were done carting our stuff upstairs. Because of an arrangement between the storage facility and the moving company (and our commitment to rent the unit for a year), I did not have to pay the movers myself, for the moving. But I did have to pay $3.65 for gas. When I was done at the front desk, Ray took me back upstairs to see what he had done (bravo!), and then we walked out onto Tenth Avenue and up to the IRT station at 215th Street. We were done. The entire operation had taken a little over two hours. 

So, now we had a late lunch, at the Seahorse Tavern, and after taking our time over that, we repaired to the apartment, where we had a look at the small plastic storage chests that I wanted to move into the now-vacant center of the 62nd Street space. (The walls are lined with plank-and-cinderblock shelves, laden mostly with books.) There turned out to be five such chests, and only half of the drawers were taken up by Kathleen’s crafts materials. Three large drawers were full of Christmas ornaments, some of them so old and rare that Kathleen won’t let me hang them on the tree. One half-empty drawer contained nothing but pre-recorded cassette tapes, classical albums mostly. Withing a very short space of time, Ray and I reduced the number of chests to be put back into the closets down to two; we taped up two more chests for transfer to 62nd Street, and discarded one. (The poor dining table is littered once again.) Then I freshened up, and, grabbing a framed poster that I’d meant to give to Fossil Darling for his birthday in July, we schlepped the two chests into a taxi, dumped them at the old storage unit, and took another taxi over to the West Side, where Fossil awaited with apéritifs, after a few of which I took him and Ray to Shun Lee West.

I have finally arrived at the point of not waiting for anyone to show up somewhere to something to make it possible for me to get on with this Project that I am Managing (even without the help of Project Management for Dummies, which has not yet arrived): culling the unnecessary from our worldly possessions. While I was out at Fire Island a month ago, I fondly dreamed that I wouldn’t be needing anyone’s help (other than Ray’s now and then), but I wasn’t reckoning with clearing the balcony (I hadn’t thought that it would be necessary so soon) or replacing the motor on the dishwasher. So it is only now, three weeks later, that I find myself where I thought I’d be in the middle of September. Now, at last, I can get to work on the library.

But not today. Please, not today. I have a small job to see to before dinner time, and I have to go to Fairway, but for the better part of the day I will be staring vacantly into space. I’m reading a fabulously funny book, Chuck Thompson’s Better Off Without ‘Em, but rather regretting the funny bits, because Thompson’s “Northerner’s argument for Southern secession” is quite serious at heart; I’ve been saying the same things for years, and feeling like a crazy, cranky outsider for doing so. Thompson’s “language” can be cringe-inducing, and it hardly makes the argument more respectable. The chapter directly ahead of me concerns SEC football, which, as Thompson will, I expect, argue, simply perpetuates the economics of slavery for the sake of entertainment, as if that made it all right. I don’t think I can handle that today.  

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 9th, 2012 at 12:19 pm.