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I have made the sleep-deprived trip from Cincinnati to Philadelphia a number of times before but this time Suzie was in the car as we headed East. We passed the Centennial Barn that marks 76.2 miles having passed and we passed Columbus, OH and the dozens of signs for Zanesville. We passed Wheeling, WV and the last Hardee’s before Philadelphia. We passed Harrisburg and Valley Forge and Willow Grove and eventually we passed my mailbox. In a stupor, we walked into my house and re-collapsed in our respective beds for a nap until noon. We rose at 4 PM, I got a haircut that I didn’t much like.   We sat in Chipotle to wait out the rain. Despite having driven across the Gulf states it was only Philadelphia that we encountered a deluge.

We picked up miscellaneous items in Walmart and drove to 18th Street in Philadelphia to drop off all of the non-bed things which went quickly. I drove back home, picked up a bed, a night stand, a table, and some Uncrustables and returned for a second round; this time to assemble flat pack furniture and move a bed. The bed didn’t fit.  Not even, it did not fit.  Not by a long shot. Today was a long day.

Clocks are not always measurers of hours. In war, the clock is blood and iron and in moving it is steps and sweat. Suzie’s new apartment, her apartment, was on the third floor of a building with narrow steps and every foot placement was laced with a little fear that I’d fall.  Suzie’s clock had recently measured days but now ticks in time with opportunity. There is something lost when saying “hello” to someone becomes easier by at least a factor of 10. The power of “this is what I did just to be here” is lost but it is a small loss, one best mourned fleetingly lest it return. I don’t know what happens now as I’m very used to friends becoming more rather than less distant. I look forward to finding out.

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Suzie and I arrived at Ryan and Bree’s after midnight and headed to Denny’s for a long meal. Having broken low-carb after the blood-drive I decided to continue this by having a burger and fries and stealing some of Suzie’s pancake balls. Pancake balls are donut holes served with cream cheese frosting and serve as a reminder that fried starch is a highlight of world gastronomy. Ryan and Bree talked about their upcoming wedding and their life in North Carolina and this was interspersed with asides to internet culture.

Ryan mentioned that he spent little time with non-internet people and I noticed that I feel less connected to said folk. Maybe this is a byproduct of doing contract work, spending less time with Team Interrobang, or reconnecting with Scouts and school friends.

Their home was uncluttered and hosted a new large DDR setup that stood out from the simplicity of their decor. They had a rescue dog that drank too much water and was very happy to see people and Ryan and Bree crept around trying to be polite as Suzie and I slept in. They are feeling out their future, I wish them well.

Our next stop was Cincinnati and for the first time on the end of a trip it wasn’t to drop off Suzie. She’s moving to Philadelphia and tonight we will put as much of her life in the back of my car as we can. Nine hours after leaving Charlotte we landed in Florence, Kentucky. Suzie had most of her things already packed and the move consisted largely of moving things from her room to my car.

Me: I think we got everything you wanted packed.
Her: Everything?
Me: I think so. We still have some room if there’s other things you’d like to bring.
Her: Well then, I get to bring more shoes.

More shoes, indeed.

It was a Monday.  I had a job interview in a day.  Time to drive.

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I helped Randy and Kelly move today and I was glad to do so.  I did 38 trips up and down the steps of their old apartment and my Fitbit counted every one of them.  Today I was firing on all cylinders even to the point where I did a really good job of backing up father’s truck with a trailer attached.  I picked up box after box of life lived and moved it either from an apartment to a truck or trailer and then from said truck or trailer into a house.  The recipe for moving is simply doing that until you’re done.  I was a satisfied kind of exhausted at the end of the day and Randy had bought me a keto cheesesteak which is simply a pile of meat and cheese in a bowl.

There was a slight nag to the notion that I was helping someone move on with their life.  Randy and Kelly were going from apartment to house and had called in their collective families to do it.  My amazing back-up was enabled by Randy’s sister’s husband and that is a network of relationships alien to me.  I try not to inconvenience others and would feel like I were calling in favors when I next move.  I feel I’ll do most of the work with either a flatbed or a book of matches.

 

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Knots seem to be part of a set of sacred knowledges known only to stevedores, teamsters, and Boy Scouts so when I secured the tarp over the trailer with a set of alternating lark’s heads and two half hitches the onlookers in the moving caravan felt that they had witness something performed in sacred time.  The impression of mastery faded quickly when half my knots came undone on the way due to the vibrating of the line which seemed to be made of Teflon.  The rest of the trip alternated between 65 and 5 MPH and we reached our target a little before noon.

Then terror struck.

The apartment was listed as on the 3rd floor, but there was a ground floor for parking making it effectively the 4th floor.  There was no elevator, and the ceiling heights were such that moving large objects up the stair cases required that hunch/squat/tilt combination that must have been designed by Soviet scientists to most effectively destroy the lower back.  A dog was part of the moving party and each time someone went into the apartment it began barking.  By counting these canine chimes I determined that it took 11 trips to move everything and thanks to my fitbit, some 5800 steps.

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Today and tomorrow were blocked off to help someone move and the person moving requested I bring the family landscape trailer. The trailer is large enough to hold a truck, as moving offroad vehicles was its original use. The trailer can move 8 canoes at once and largely contain the entirety of a 20-something’s life as it had previously done when moving another friend and later my brother. It’d been a few years since I’d driven the trailer and truck and I didn’t remember such facts as “thing takes up 6 parking spots” and that the plate should read “CURBSLYR” for the grace with which it makes right turns.  When I arrived at the apartment complex there were sets of four spots open but no 5-ers, the closest to the building being blocked off by a Prius… gha…. Prius.  The parking process was aided by two African American fellows that were very helpful in parking and unhooking with commands like “Ok,  swing that shit ’round” and “c’mon, haul it back.”

The packing was easy as the person who needed assistant did a keen job of pre-packing so the first trial of the day was enduring the heat. The second trial was not having brought enough to drink and making a Pepsi Max run to Wal-mart at around 10 PM. I think after a day of moving, I was adequately dressed to blend in to a late night Maryland big box retailer:

I did not wear the duckface/peace sign for the trip to Wal-mart.

I think the double shorts were what sealed the deal.

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At some point, John convinced me that we should leave for a weekend trip to Chicago directly from his house Wednesday evening was a good idea.  I presumed him a capable driver and his parents outfitted us with dinner and a care package of iced tea and popcorn before we went west over the Appalachian mountains and into the west.  John and I didn’t have much overlap in musical tastes and he didn’t seem one to complain so as a last resort I started a 12 song play list of Beatles hits and promptly fell asleep in the passenger seat.  I woke up 3 hours later where he looked at me, then the radio and said “make it stop”.  My radio apparently defaults to loop for playlists and he’d now heard the set 5 times but didn’t want to break my radio by changing anything.

We arrived in Cincinnati at 7 AM and the number of sleep-deprived car members increased by one.   The drive across Ohio and Illinois was uneventful outside but inside the car I got to hear someone being fired, and then a recounting of their attempt to steal a cash register tray which was way better than anything else on my iPod.  Peter met us at around 10:30 AM, gave us a tour of his new apartment and I showered and changed before driving John, Suzie, and I to meet a fellow outside Chicago for lunch at Portillo’s, a purveyor of fine cased meats.  The call agent used rhyming announcements which made me wish silver, month, and orange were numbers and I had a mediocre Vienna beef sandwich as I talked with Ty about things while in a hypnogogic state.

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At some point I said something funny.

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Oddgo's spider senses activate.

John was made to volunteered to drive us back to Peter’s where I learned two things quickly:  He didn’t appreciate the wanderlust of my GPS and he does not enjoy city driving, where city is defined as within 4 miles of anything larger than a tool shed.  He did not enjoy driving around Chicago.

Back at Peter’s, we engaged in lively discussion:

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A lively debate

After a nap, we started putting things into boxes.  We stopped putting things in boxes when we ran out of boxes.  There were many boxes.  Tomorrow, there would be more boxes, a box-like truck into which the boxes would be placed, and two boxy freight elevators to hold our then-filled boxes. Boooo……ooooxes.

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I spent today and much of yesterday helping someone move and using my superpowers of being untied to someone’s past and ability to move mattresses to accelerate things.  The power was cut off midway through the preparation of my good morning waffle and anger fueled what I lacked in carbohydrates.  At the new place, there was a lady smoking on the stoop with a voice that sounded like she ate cigarettes rather than smoked them and teeth that looked they had grill plates inspired by candy corn.  She asked us for our names and after 15 tries learned that mine was Terry, not Jerry, Larry, Harry, or any other permutation but during my final trip she realized I was wearing shorts and now has a new pet name for me, “sexy legs”.  I don’t know if I’m flattered or scared to the fact there is a crone-in-training in Maryland who knows me only as “sexy legs”.

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Ryan’s gone.  With the exception of the attic which stores the offal of my family’s collective experience and now a lot of Scout stuff, the trails he made have been largely over trodden and the upstairs bathroom is clean for the first time since Reaganomics.  This was the impression under which I operated until I took a closer look.  One still can’t open the microwave without a shiv, talons or telekenesis (I use the talons option when the cat’s cooperative) but luckily there’s a sign in Ryan’s handwriting of “Handle Broke, will fix when I get back”, the “back” to which this refers was his November (?) trip to Scotland.  His collection of 2″ x 2″ wrapping paper squares still lie under the pool table waiting to shroud a regifted spider ring or to act in concert to sheeth a pez dispenser.  And then finally, the curio filled with shot glasses.  My favorite being one that’s just a set of acrylic boobies.  Gone but not forgotten.