One year on...

This may be more than a little bit disjointed tonight. Maybe it'll coalesce into something. Maybe not.

I did not entirely want to stay in the old house, but still and all I wouldn't have moved from there if I hadn't been so forcefully pushed. It's a personality characteristic that I hate being pushed out of my routine, but looking back on it from here, as difficult as it was, I think leaving was the thing that needed to be done.

The anniversary was hard enough to get through here in my new world. Had I to endure it in the old house, in a place that was only a ghost of my home, with her gaping, empty room to walk into every day, it might have been unendurable.

This does not mean that I let my sister off the hook for her crimes. But I feel a lot like how I imagine Tiger Whitestockings does in the photo above, still taking in her New Surroundings: "Huh. Look at that. It's Interesting. It's Nice. It's my Home now. But it's still so new. I hate new."

I see now with a lot more objectivity what a very bad place I was in a year ago today. A dangerous place, within touching distance of death by alcohol. In some ways it got a little bit better after my horrible experiences in the hospital, but my emotions did not begin to truly heal until after the move reached the stage where I didn't have to go back out to the old place every damn day and sometimes twice or thrice on the weekend. Now that it's truly done, with the "cooler" installed here, now that I know for certain that I will never see the old house again, that page not just fully turned but ripped out of the book forever, a strange mood just exactly like what a writer or cartoonist feels when staring at a blank piece of paper is full on me.

At the same time, there's my creative self wondering if I can still hack it. A part of me wants to get back to writing and drawing, but I guess that I'm still in transition: I want to get to work, but a deeper part of me dreads it and fears that I may be washed up. Anxiety being the anathema to doing creative work, I know what has to happen. The desire to work is not enough. The fear of failure needs to be stepped over like a crack in the sidewalk. Step on that crack and the bears will get you. My foot is metaphorically raised and extended over a very deep and wide crack that, when I look into it, as I cannot seem to avoid doing, seems insurmountable.

Today at work, I received my performance review for the year. It was perhaps made better by the fact that in my self-assesment prior to the event, I did not hesitate to tell the truth that this has been less than a stellar year on the job. I gave reasons, and offered specific examples, but did not make excuses. Was I just being honest? Or did I manipulate this scenario perfectly?

In any case, my boss was uncharacteristically generous in her comments, Much more so than in prior years when I actually deserved more generosity than was forthcoming.

It's Reunion time at the college. One  of my biggest weekends of the year. In this time I will work another eleven days straight in a row, without a day off. For me, this is a little bit like Sleep Deprivation, even though I won't really be missing much (if any) sleep. Time Alone, Quiet Time, Solitude -- whatever you call it, that's sleep for me. I know that I'll get through this all right because I'm in a better place now than I have been in well over a year. It's just One More Milepost that will be smaller in my rearview window than it appears now.

Today, an elderly alum who seemed desperately confused and sad looked me in the eye and said, "Have you seen my wife?"

It was the kind of question that makes every potential response into a lie.

How could I possibly know if I had seen his wife?

"Maybe" would have been too ambiguous a response. "Yes" could well have been the truth, but how could I answer the inevitable question that followed?

I said "No," -- and felt as if I was lying.

-- Freder.

Journey's End?

Blogger's recent crash has coincided with a couple of milestones for me. It may take a couple of longish posts to catch up.

Plus, I just had a bad spell of tears. It's hard to organize my thoughts.

Last night I was so full of clarity. Tonight, not so much.

Just overnight, the first nasturtiums that I planted going on three weeks ago started poking their way out of the ground. Just overnight, the leaves on the trees finally popped and have started to enclose the house nicely.

This evening after work, I was staring into the flower bed to see what was what when a couple of young boys went by on their bicycles. I wasn't paying them any mind. The youngest one actually called out, "Good evening, sir!" and I turned and smiled and said hi. The older one said, "I like your mailbox!" -- meaning my Mechanical Man. I thanked him, and then they were gone.

Last night, some paper lanterns that I ordered arrived, and I wasted no time in hanging them along my front porch. I could hardly wait until dark to turn them on and see how they looked.

When darkness came, I was so happy with the effect that I wanted to see what it looked like from the outside. I put my shoes on, walked around the block, stood in the dark and admired my house.

Then I realized that this was exactly the same thing that I did all though the sad summer of last year.

The old house had been irrevocably changed by the loss of my mother. I used to take a drink out into the yard, sit at the garden table in the dark with all the lights on inside the house, and look in at the world that was.

Last night I stood in my yard outside the new house, and looked in on the world that is.

I realized that, although there is still some unpacking and work to do, it doesn't really amount to much compared to what's behind me, and it doesn't have to be a priority anymore.

I realized that, if life is divided into chapters like a novel, and if the last chapter of my life was titled "Transition" -- that chapter has drawn to a close.

I'm no longer in transition. I'm here. And everything that happens from here on in is, trite as this sounds even to me, a lot like my nasturtiums.

The seed's been planted. Now I just have to hope that something will come up.

-- Freder.

The Further Adventures of That Wacky Aspie Guy

I haven't posted lately because I've been , , , well, busy on the one hand and mentally at sea on the other. But something happened just now that's too idiotic not to type, so I'll start there and work my way backward.

I had a premonition about watching The Wrestler that I should have taken to heart. It's well-done and fascinating, and, good lord, Mickey Rourke looking like he's been dragged through a cactus-infested desert behind a Jeep. But I had to turn it off when the staple gun and the dinner fork and the barbed wire came out. Who thinks of this stuff? Who are those people in the crowd who can watch it as entertainment?

That wasn't the idiotic thing.

With the telly shut down as quickly as I could possibly shut it down, I meandered into the kitchen and decided there was no way I was going to hand-wash all those dishes. I loaded up the dishwasher, and went to put the detergent in. . .

. . . and it only halfway filled up the cup before it ran out.

So, I grabbed my bottle of Ivory, squeezed some into the cup, closed the lid, and squeezed some more into the "pre-wash" slot.

As with all of my Finest Moments, I have to type: "You can see it coming, can't you?"

I should get a tm on that line.

I went into the bathroom, and while I was in there the dishwasher suddenly got really quiet.

By the time I came out, water and soap suds were boiling out around the door, looking just like something out of The Blob, flooding the length of my kitchen floor.

Long story short: After two more attempts and two clean-ups and lots of begging with the powers that be for mercy, I got it going again with, to coin a cliche, No Soap. It's happily chugging away as I type this.

On Monday night, I found a ginormous box sitting on my deck. I thought: What the  -- ?? I didn't order another computer while I was drunk, did I?

It was my three lilac trees from White Flower Farm. My first inclination was to wait and plant them on Saturday. Then I thought -- Nah! I've got light!

I planted all three of them around the house, and named them Monica, Nicki and Kristine.

Bet you can't guess, and I'm not going to tell you.

While I was planting Monica, someone from the house of Kaspar the Mad Aryan Gardener crept up on me from behind. It was the woman of the house, R____, who as it turns out works in the Health Center at the same college where I plug away my days. Of all my neighbors, I like her the best: having the common workplace gives us something to talk about, and she was just right: not Forcibly Friendly, if you get my drift, and knew when to end the chatter. She was happy that I have outside cats, and she likes all the stuff in my yard, so that was a plus, too.

The Old Me would have imagined that she flirted with me, just a little bit. Now I understand that this is a delusion of Asperger's Syndrome: we misinterpret the signs, and when a woman is just being Ordinarily Friendly (something we have a hard time understanding in the first place) we mistake it for Interest and Openness to Something More.

Are you out there, L____? Sorry. Sorry. Sorry.

On Monday at work, I was just coming to terms with how deeply swamped I was under Purchase Orders and a six-page newsletter that needs to be done, like, now (and which, as it turns out, my Student Worker had only been pretending to work on for me), when my boss came by and handed me a sixteen page order of sale books, hundreds of titles that each need an item card before I can do the PO, and they're going to be here by the end of the week.

They call it Job Security, I guess.

My father and his wife are back from Nevada, and for Sunday I invited them over to my house for dinner. During the two weekdays after I invited them, I looked closely at the house and came to understand what a Horrific Pit it was. I thought about putting them off until next week, but then I looked at the calendar at work and realized that the next solid month is going to be Hell Time. So on Sunday I bit the bullet and gave this place a beating to make it look halfway presentable.

I don't know if anyone else has Anxiety Attacks while cleaning, but I sure did this time. The vacuum cleaner was acting up, I kept tripping over myself, I was agitated about this, that and the other thing, had to keep telling myself to calm down, calm down, but it didn't work.

The actual dinner came off all right, and maybe a little bit better than all right. It was good having them at my place rather than the other way 'round; I felt like I had a degree of control over the situation that I never feel when I have to go eat lunch with them. I cooked chicken and corn on the cob and spinach, and it all turned out well. M_ seemed a little perturbed with some of my methods (like, you have to put salt on corn before you cook it; it brings out the sweetness), but I was able to shrug it off -- my house, my dinner, my cooking. I've been subjected to Salmon (which I hate) at your place -- now it's Your Turn!

Sunday might have been easier if I had done a lick of work on Saturday. But, after five months of pushing, driving, pushing, driving, I think that I hit the wall on Saturday.

I tried to write a post about this and deleted it. The sixteenth of this month marks a solid year that I have been Coping and Dealing, Coping and Dealing, Coping and Dealing.

I'm burned out. It's the reason why I'm in denial about the car, it's the reason why, when I walked into the Studio on Saturday afternoon to work on it, I just avoided bursting into tears and said to myself, out loud, I can't do it, I can't do it.

I said, "What I really want is to just go out on the porch, flop on the couch, and spend the afternoon reading."

Pause. Then I thought, "So, let's do it."

It wasn't all reading. I dozed a lot, too.

-- Freder.

Plunder

Yesterday I went out to the old house again for what I can honestly say was the next-to-last time. I wanted the rest of the ornamental rocks and I wanted the giant children's blocks in the little barn. No, I don't have the keys anymore (and anyway they have changed the padlocks). But I lived in that place for more than thirty-five years, I know its idiosyncrasies, if I want to get in, I can.

It took some of the sting out of the drive to take a different route. I needed to swing by my lawyer's house to pick up a sign that my mother had painted many years ago. I hadn't been able to fit it into my car on the last day.

This was a nice drive that ends along the south edge of C____ Lake. Pulling into her driveway I passed a sign reading WHAT PART OF NO TRESPASSING DO YOU NOT UNDERSTAND? and the near-lifesize plywood cow that I had given J___ earlier. I found my sign standing outside of her garage. She wasn't at home. When I looked into her garden I got a rude surprise: there on the end of a metal pipe was my mother's large copper rooster, the rooster that had been her shop's trademark and was a feature in our front yard for many years.

This just didn't seem right. She must have bought it at the auction, because I certainly didn't give it to her. It's one thing to part with some of Mom's treasures and know that I'll never see them again; it's quite another thing to have a special one re-appear in a completely new context. Well, it was J___'s right to buy anything she wanted at the auction, of course, and I knew that she had bought several pieces. But this felt like a little bit of a slap in the face. I stood and looked at it longer than I needed to or should have. Then, metaphorically at any rate, I shrugged and got into my car. It's not something that can be helped.

I had another shock when I reached the old house. The nice copper mailbox that I was thinking, at the suggestion of my friend L____, of swapping out with the black one that my mechanical man is holding, had been completely destroyed.

This must have taken some doing. Even the very strong, swinging iron "arm" that the mailbox had been mounted on was mangled. This thing has withstood years of being battered and hit multiple times every winter by the town snowplow, so I don't believe it was that. Either it had been worked over by someone with a lot of determination, spite and elbow grease, or someone had crashed a vehicle into it.

I would have been crushed to see this if I were still living out there. Even so, it made me sad. But once again, it was something about which there was nothing I could do.

The yard seems quite strange without any quats in it.

I loaded up the rocks. This was not an easy job. When I took two of them the last time I was out there, I hadn't imagined how much I would like seeing them at the end of my walkway here at the new house. Technically, they belong to the new owners. Not any more.

I also took my garden hose. I'd been planning on leaving it for them, but . . . I changed my mind. As my friend BC has been known to say, "I bought it, I paid for it, it's mine."

Then I got into the barn. There were two old advertising umbrellas that I had forgotten about, but needed for the yard. There were some small things, a set of Donald Duck bowling pins, a children's book, that I decided not to leave behind. I filled a couple of the giant blocks with these, and loaded them into the car. I could only fit three of the blocks inside, they were so huge. So, two remain behind. I'll get them when I pick up the jailhouse.

Back home once again. I off-loaded everything, set the rocks out along the front sidewalk, made a run to the supermarket. It was such a nice day that my neighbors had pulled out their lawn furniture, and instead of working some more in the house I decided to do the same.

I made good on my promise to the wooden deer and fixed his antlers. Then I carried him around to the front of the house. The Panda Bear, The Turkeys, The Indian, The Concrete Dog and his Doghouse, the Gas-Cannister Pig, a large ornamental pot, the second concrete bird bath, the Boinger, trellises, the Chickens, a wooden Blue Jay, the Crocodile, all came out of the garage and took up places in their new home. The Indian needed his headdress remounted and the male turkey needed to have his head glued on, so I did that. I brought out the metal table and chairs and carried them up onto the deck. I had opened most of the downstairs windows, so the quats sat there watching me whenever I came around with something new.

By the time I got done with all of this I was so pooped that I wasn't good for much more than flopping onto the porch couch. I put my feet up on The Thurber Carnival. Patches, Honey and Pooky all came to join me.

Today hasn't been nearly so productive. I've been on edge, fussing with little things.

But there's still time.

-- Freder.

ADDENDUM: Accent on the DUM. I left out the best part of the story! As I was collapsed on the porch trying to gather up enough energy to, say, stand up, a couple of kids came walking down the street. They were probably between the ages of ten and twelve. As they passed my front yard, one of them jumped up onto the rocks and skipped from one to the other all the way to the end. I thought, "Yesss!!!" That's exactly what they're for! That's exactly what I used to do when I was their age! I'm glad I went to the trouble of carting them over to a place where they will see their proper use.

Also, I finished in the Halloween Room this afternoon. It looks great if I do say so myself. And I do. Now there's just  just the Studio and the Laundry Room remaining with piles of boxes. Oh, and the upstairs hall. Still, things are coming along.

Final Bill

What a long, mixed day this has been!

Thanks to above normal temps all week, the snow had clearly melted enough for me to make the run out to the old house in order to collect the outside things that I didn't want to leave behind. These included the concrete, ornamental garden bench that sat beside the main door, the special bricks that we used to line the edge of the garden, the concrete bird bath, a concrete pillar that one of my mother's folk-art wooden birds sat on in the summer months, a small stone pedestal, a rusty old tractor seat, and all of the elaborately carved blocks and bricks that my family recovered from The House that Was all those decades ago, in Minnesota.

Yup, all the heavy stuff. I wouldn't be surprised if it weighed half a ton, all told. Whatever it weighed, my car never complained through the whole process, though it was riding several inches lower than normal by the time I finished.

There is still the old Jail House that I will have to hire someone to move for me, but other than that, I am done out there.

It was a strange visit. As I drove out the old level of anxiety started to return. I wasn't sure what I would find.

The yard was even more melted and cleared than my yard at home, so I didn't need the shovel that I'd brought along, just in case. I had terribly mixed feelings as I set out to load up the car. On the one hand, I knew the grounds so well that they felt a part of me, and on the other I was an interloper where I no longer belonged. I looked in through the living room window, and then wished that I hadn't. The new owners had changed all the padlocks on the two barns, and added an all-new padlock to the front door.

The heavy lifting warmed me up quickly, and I began stripping off layers. The bench comes apart into three pieces, the largest being the seat, and I was out of breath by the time I'd done wrestling it into the car. The car sank visibly with everything that I added.

As I worked I began looking wistfully at the Mechanical Man. This is a large metal figure welded together out of pipes and car parts and the like. He was built as a mailbox holder, but we never used him that way. He just stood out at the edge of the road. The mailbox was meant to rest on a long metel bar that juts out of his lower abdomen like a gigantic robot erection.

I always liked him, but I figured that I would have to leave him behind. None of the auctioneers apparently wanted him. It seemed that he would stay at the house.

But as I was loading up and looking sideways at him, the coin suddenly dropped. He was built as a mailbox holder! What did I need at the new house? A mailbox holder! My mailbox was currently a dirty, rusty old wastepaper basket with a lid that I inherited from the previous owner. It sat on the top front step. I'd been meaning to upgrade, but how?

Suddenly, I knew that the mechanical man had to come with me. I measured him unscientifically with a fallen branch, and it seemed that he would fit in the car -- although not with the load that was already in it.

I'd been meaning to set out the white-painted rocks in their places along the edge of the driveway, as a final gesture. Instead, I loaded two of them up into my car and took them with me.

I drove home, unloaded the car, set up the bench in its new location near the fire pit in the back yard, decorated a bit with all the bricks, whipped up a quick lunch, and then headed back out to the old house.

This time there was no anxiety. I was really excited about my idea for the mechanical man.

It didn't take long for the excitement to go south. His feet were bigger than I realized. That jutting erection (this old guy is on some pretty serious Viagra, lemme tell ya) was at just the wrong angle for getting him in the car. He was danged heavy, too. I had to "walk" him across the front lawn. The new owners will find some pretty unusual footprints the next time they stop by.

Somehow, with a lot of struggle, I got him into the back seat of the car, only to find that he was much taller than I'd measured and would not fit.

I hadn't come all this way and gone through all this hard work to take no for an answer.

At last I had the brilliant notion that by lowering the back window, I could pull his head through the other side and let it hang out. Alas, I'd forgotten that Chevrolet, in their infinite wisdom, had made the back seat windows so that they only lowered halfway. Because, you know, only children ever ride in the back seat, right?

I looked at it from all the angles and I thought that I could still pull his head through that space.  I'd have to put a coat or something down to protect the glass, but it was worth a shot.

You can see it coming, right?

I was having a little bit of difficulty, not much really, in making the maneuver, when suddenly the window erupted into a million pieces right in my face.

I took it in stride. The old me might have had a fit or broken down. The new me just shrugged, pulled the mechanical man's head and shoulders through the cleared space, got into the car and drove.

I mean, what else was there to do?

When I got home, I unloaded him with some difficulty, and stood him in a corner of my driveway. I grabbed one of the flattened boxes I had on hand and some clear duck tape and "boarded up" the broken window. I drove over to Home Depot, bought myself a mailbox and a couple of screwdrivers, then swung over to the supermarket before heading home.

I was very angry to discover, on opening up my new mailbox, that the manufacturer had not included the nuts and bolts to mount it with. This meant another trip to the hardware store, and I barely made it before they closed at 5:00 PM.

It was a fiddly job, but by about 5:30 my mechanical man no longer looked like an exhibitionist. I got him onto the handcart and wheeled him, mailbox and all around to the front of the house. That's where he is now -- and I took the picture above just to prove it!

I still had a quat tray to change out, quats to feed inside and out, a shower to take, dinner to make (chicken wings and green beans, all done from scratch, and it turned out yummy!). Then bills to get ready for tomorrow's mail, including my final bill on the old house from Central Maine Power (it was a pleasure to be able to walk out my front door and put them in my new mailbox, being held so diligently by my mechanical man), and this blog post to write.

I wanted also to write about the debut of Pee-Wee Herman's recent Broadway show on HBO Saturday night -- but it's after ten, I hurt all over, and am very tired. Moanday is right around the corner. But I made some strides today.

Opening Out

A View from the Brave New World

I started this post before dinner. After dinner, I stayed in my chair and watched Rachel, Rachel on TCM -- a movie that I have long wanted to see, and one that did not disappoint. Newman proves himself a skillful director, the script is lovely, Woodward delivers as usual.

There are individual lines that I would love to use as titles for posts, they resonate so powerfully:

How can I be out of danger if I'm not dead?

and

I can't keep you alive. That's not up to me. It never was.

It would give the wrong impression to say that I "identified" with Rachel, the details of her life are just too dissimilar from mine, and her dream of life is more tangible and physical than mine: she wants a child. But there are powerful parallels that can be drawn, and I don't find this unusual. I think most everyone experiences the stage of life that Rachel finds herself in, sooner or later. Some later than most.

*

I'm so glad that I didn't let my father and his wife talk me into buying the first house that we looked at. True, it would have been more affordable; but I would not have been happy there, and if I had been forced to trade out my old life for a life in a tiny little crackerbox like that, I would not have been happy. And that would have been a dangerous thing for a lot of people, me included. The thought of my sister getting everything that she wanted (i.e., money), while I was forced into drastically depleted living conditions would have angered me and darkened me to an extent that I don't even want to think about.

True, it had three bedrooms -- but those bedrooms were slightly larger than some of the closets in the old house. The dining room probably would not have been able to contain the dining room table. The living room was just a strip across the front. Both the dining and living rooms were covered with a deep shag carpet of an oppressive green that I would have had to rip up.

It was a constrictive atmosphere. The whole time we were there I was physically aware of its smallness. And that was without any furniture.

My father's point was that it wasn't permanent. It would be a launching stage from which I could go anywhere. But that was not what I needed. I'm not a fan of impermanence. I needed to land somewhere not with a bounce, but with comforting sense of settlement. I am starting from ground zero. I needed a place that was conducive to growing a new life from within.

I keep hearing people say that the new house is so big. For me, it's just the right size. Much smaller than the old house, but not so small that it doesn't possess the kind of openness that I need. I will have a study, and a studio. I have a library, and a Halloween Room, and a toy and game room. I will have a room for every time of the day, and every mood of my life. It is organized with a specific intent: to allow me the space to discover the person that I am going to become.

As I type this, my little Honey is sitting on my lap, her head rested on my left arm, purring contentedly. We have crossed through some rough terrain! But it's going to be all right.

*

And now a little shout out to FlickChick: funny what you were saying about Casablanca today! Right after Rachel, Rachel -- surprise surprise! There it is.

-- Freder.

Here at the End of Time

The old house as I prefer to remember it.

I hadn't seen Tiger Grumpyface since the last really bad storm (more than a week), and I hadn't seen Tiger Whitestockings in two days. At first I wasn't too worried; the food was still getting eaten. But today I saw not one but two strange quats eating off the Tigers' plate, and for the first time I started to suspect foul play.

Instead, when I went out with their dinner just now, both Tigers appeared and seemed eager to see me. Whitestockings had lost some weight. But all is well. Phew.

*

It was all over at the old house by a quarter to two. I felt overwhelmingly sad as I pointed the car away, oppressively sad. But when I arrived home and came into the new house, I saw that my life was here, and was immediately cheered. It's been a damn lot of work, and it's not over, and the future -- as the fortune-tellers say -- is in doubt. But home is here.

That's a mighty powerful three words.

I was up at seven-thirty to do my chores and feed us all, started out with plenty of time but somewhere along the way I spent too much time online and ended up running a bit late. The mysterious plower had been back, and this time he had shoveled out the path to the front door as well. JA, my lawyer, was no more than a couple of minutes behind me pulling into the driveway.

I was glad that she came, because it was a help in many ways. But helping me wasn't her main motive in coming -- she was hoping to score some Free Stuff.

I was okay with that. She didn't take anything without asking first, and the auctioneer was leaving a fair amount of stuff behind. I still can't understand his thinking. Some of what he took was absolute rubbish, fit only for Goodwill; meanwhile, he left some perfectly good and salable things behind. I didn't want them; or, if I did, I didn't have room for them. As an example, Mom had a set of six giant children's blocks that were made out of wood. She used them for both packing and display purposes at shows and in her shop. I'd love to keep them, but there's no room, what would I do with them? I think they'd bring something at an auction, but Steve the auctioneer was disdainful. He tried to take two small, worthless, cardboard display pieces that I expressly wanted to leave for the new owners, but he won't take the blocks.

He is a loud, brash person. He is completely bald (not even having eyebrows). He persisted in leaving the main door wide open to the cold, even when no one was carrying anything out. 

The morning was a long emotional replay of the last two times that the auctioneers had come to tear the place apart. They made a terrible mess, again. In my old bedroom I pulled down a last couple of posters. I looked out of the window for the last time. I hid in there until the tears stopped.

JA sat down with me and told me about the auction. It did not go as well as anticipated; at any rate, JA thinks that we may end up with about half of what they had estimated. As she flipped through the catalog and showed me the lots, and the prices they had gone for, I felt sick and sad. It is galling and depressing to see my mother's life reduced to numbers, and such low numbers at that. Some few things went for more than expected, but the vast majority hovered at or below the estimate. I hated even seeing that catalog. I wanted her to put it away.

The day seemed to drag on so slowly. It was cloudy out, so the light was tricky. By noon, I was sure that it was coming up on four o'clock. I was astonished to see that it was just past one when the auctioneers left.

I gave JA a key to the house and one to the small barn. Then, with both of our cars loaded to the roof, we drove down to the neighbor's house. One of the new owners is his son-in-law. We spent about a half hour there, an awful lot of formalities to go through just to drop off the keys. And that was it.

I think it will take me two more trips, not because I have so much left to take, but because it's nearly all bulky. There is a wooden deer for the lawn that I am keeping, and a giant rooster sign that my mother and I made when she was trying to have a shop there at the house. There's a stepladder that's going to have to go down the middle of the car.

I'm going to try to get it all tomorrow.

And then, suddenly, my life is going to open up again, at last. As I unloaded the car this evening, I realized that next weekend will be Entirely Free. Tomorrow, this chapter in my life will be over.

-- Freder.

A Day at Home, or The Delayed Post

"Ah! West and Wewaxation at Wast!"

On Sunday I wrote my first blog post from home. Of course, I had no internet connection, so I couldn't post it, and now much of it is outdated. The part of it that hasn't changed is that, in the more than two months in which the move has been happening, Sunday was just the second day that gave me some down time in the house. I wrote the blog post knowing that it would be pointless; but I just desperately wanted to use the study and the computer for their intended purpose, a day in which to actually live in the house.


Of course, I did still make a run out to the old place, just to check on the level of the heating oil and to throw a load of yard ornaments into the car, but that took just a couple of hours from beginning to end. As I wrote on Sunday: "There's no reason to spend any amount of time there. When I walk through the empty rooms, it feels as if the house is haunted, and I am the ghost."


I wrote a few paragraphs about the virtues of the new computer, which is danged virtuous, I must say, now that it's connected to the interwebs and has some of my old files successfully moved onto it, especially including my novel in progress.


And I wrote about the quats, who "almost can not believe that I am here. They have spent so much time alone in the last two months that my being here during the day is a novelty for them. They've been following me around, soliciting attention. Honey even climbed into my lap while I was typing this."


This was all the more true on Tuesday, the day that I spent waiting fruitlessly for the Fairpoint service guy to show up.  Because I was expecting him, I couldn't very well go out and get another load moved, so by default I had a whole uninterrupted day in the house. Again, the cats really seemed to love having me around for a change, and I enjoyed myself doing the bit of settling in that I could. TCM was running Seven Brides for Seven Brothers that afternoon, so I let that play on while I cleared boxes out of the laundry room and moved them to their likely destinations. 


Brides is one of the wonkier musicals I've ever seen; this was not the first time. The first time was years and years ago when I spent much of the summer visiting my maternal grandparents in Bloomington, Minnesota. My cousin Charlie and I were good buddies in those days, and he moved in to Grandma and Grandpa's place for the summer as well. At night we slept on folding cots in their finished basement. They had a television down there, and we watched the late movie every night, in the dark. This was the first time I saw Karloff and Lugosi in The Invisible Ray, a terrific SF-horror programmer. And, of course, Seven Brides, which we both thought was hysterical. When Howard Keel sang "Bless your beautiful hide | Wherever it may be!" we both rolled around laughing and laughing. It became one of our running in-jokes of the summer.


So, it was a good day, until Fairpoint ruined it by never showing up. Still, it's all come out in the wash.


Tomorrow will be a big day. Perhaps, please, the last of the big days.


The auctioneer is coming out to the old house, bright and oily at 9:00 AM, and he will clean out the last of the antiques. While they are working in the house, I'll load up my car from the barn.


I have written a note to the new owners, pointing out some things that they ought to know and some things that they might want to know. I have already taken most of my keys to the old house off of the two keyrings I use, and put them into the envelope with the letter.  Tomorrow or Sunday, I will add the remaining two keys to the envelope, seal it, and take it down the road to my neighbor, whose son-in-law is one of the new owners.


After tomorrow, I don't expect ever to enter that house again.


-- Freder.

The Light at the End

It's nearly over at the old house.

I still have some things outside, buried under three feet of snow (a concrete garden bench, a bird bath, some tiles that I will have to write about at another time, and the jailhouse -- ditto), and I still have some things in the two barns -- yard ornaments, mostly -- but inside the main house I am done.

It's hard to believe, really. . . Everything from the house is moved.

I made my last sweep through the basement, workshop and generator room. As expected, there wasn't much that I wanted: barring only the laundry that was hanging on the line and piled in the sinks, the things I took didn't even fill two boxes. I expected to find more tools and useful things in the workshop than what I did. Most likely, my sister or the auctioneers beat me to them.

The whole sweep took less than an hour. I brought one load back with me on Saturday, then made three trips out and back on Sunday, clearing out not just the things in the house, but a good chunk of the yard ornaments in the big barn. This last required a lot of repacking and fussing during the final load of the day. There were particular things that needed to come out right away. With the barn now shoveled out and no padlock on the doors, my sense was that I'd better take the things that meant the most to me, because they might not be there when I get back.

My car is still full, because I can't fit anything more into the house. The laundry room that I'm using as a staging area is full to the ceiling with boxes, baskets, totes, and even a Christmas Tree. Some of it (like the tree) is going straight up to the attic. That's Job One for me tonight.

I still have to get the auctioneers over to the old place, let them have their last sweep through, and then I will be ready to turn the keys over to the new owners. I'm actually looking forward to that. Heating two large houses is for the birds!

I got through it mostly without tears. I learned that controlling the tears meant controlling my thoughts. If I thought too long about the fact that this was it, the end, done, that this was basically my Good-bye to the house and all the years that it contains, then I'd break down, every time. But if I just kept focused on the task, the packing, the loading, the seeing to it that I had everything I needed and that it all went into the car in the right order (the last of the plants, including the old geranium, had to be the last into the car, due to the cold) -- then I was all right.

By the time I'd been out and back three times, I knew I'd put in a day's work. It was time to kick back. My dinner came out of the freezer. I flopped into my office chair and launched one of the cheap games that I picked up the day before at Wallyworld, just so that I would have something that I could actually do with the new computer. Killed an hour. Watched an episode of Dark Shadows (one of their more turgid efforts: yeah, guys, we get that Maggie has been attacked by a very special vampire). Enjoyed having Patches and Whitey sit on my lap in the new home. Walked through the place and looked at everything I've done over the last two months. Discovered that the sofa in front of the bay window is a really neat space, and one where I will want to spend some vacation time, just reading. It looks out over the drive at the row of pine trees lit by the street lamp.

Went to bed early.

Just under two months. Even though there's much left to do (and still no phone or internet!) the quats and I are firmly installed in the new diggs. The past is the past. Over. I just have to keep on plodding towards the light.

Time like a river

All I could think last night was, how can we really be halfway through President Obama's first (and hopefully not last) term? And that, when we both listened to his first State of the Union Address, I would never have believed that my mother wouldn't be around to hear the second.

I'll digress from the main subject here to say that I felt President Obama knocked another one out of the ballpark last night. Best State of the Union address ever. But it was just a speech. A brilliant one, perhaps, but will it take? Will positive change come out of it? That remains to be seen. It was, I must say, deeply refreshing to see the Democrats and Republicans sitting together, sometimes rising in unison, sometimes in waves, but never in that awful lopsided "one half of us likes this, the other half is going to sit here with frowns on our faces and our arms crossed, glowering" stance that has been the norm in recent years. At least the Republicans gave President Obama the respect that he is due, and didn't shout "Liar!" from the Peanut Gallery, or talk back from the Supreme Court section.

Now then. It's time -- for Time.

I have been saying the same thing to friends -- and recently to students -- for years now. It's my favorite quote that I ever invented: "Nothing in the first twenty years of your life prepares you for how fast the next twenty go by."

I might add, the decade that follows goes even faster, and as for Twenty-Ten (and Eleven, so far), it's just been a blur of disastrophes flowing by at about a million gallons a minute.

I'm so involved in the move, with no real down time, that January has made that Phhhhhhitt! sound in passing. I missed paying my credit card bill entirely, and was late with the oil bill and the insurance bill and the DirecTV bill and gawd knows what all else. When I got dunning emails from two of those companies, I thought to myself "What? What day is it?"

I thought it was somewhere around the eighteenth. In what I laughingly refer to as the Real World it was the twenty-third.

The fact is, I never even opened the DirecTV bill. I thought I had more time, and one thing I do not have time for is paper mail.

Ten years ago I never dreamed I would type a statement like that. I loved getting paper mail, I loved sending and receiving long letters. I guess if I got mail like that anymore,  I would make the time for it. I did receive a nice card from my Uncle (Mom's brother) and Aunt in Florida. I opened that and it made me happy.

But the rest of it? I don't open a bill until it's time to pay it (that was my mistake with the TV bill: it was the first one, I didn't know the due date), the majority of what remains is Junk Mail, and as for the steady stream of envelopes that I receive from my father, they get scaled into the bill stack unopened as well. I know what it's going to be: either a "Friends and Family" letter in which he will reveal things about me that I don't want revealed to his entire list (a perfect example: at first I did not tell him that I had moved out of the old house, because I didn't want The Wolf to know. When I did tell him, I swore him to secrecy and even said "You can't even put it in a friends and family letter!" -- so of course, that was the first thing that he did), or it will be newspaper clippings on subjects that I'm either not interested in or already know about. I appreciate that he's thinking about me, and I believe that is the message that he's really trying to send, but I don't need to open the envelopes anymore to get that message, especially now with so much on my plate.

It will be February before I know it. I wanted to be completely out of the old house by then. But that is not going to happen.

Just as I was not allowed to take any time off in the month following my mother's death, now, with the move in its last stages and the need to close it off so urgent, I am not being allowed any time off to bring it to completion. In fact, I'm being asked to work six days and extended hours for the next two weeks.

It seems that the big events of my personal life are all coinciding, lately, with the big events at work It is Book Rush coming up, that busy time when the students return to campus and mob the bookstore for one week. My boss wants me here. I can understand that, but would one weekday towards the end be such a horrible thing to give me? It's not merely the emotional and physical stress of the move, but I have to heat that house until I turn in the keys, and it's costing me a small fortune.

I am contractually obliged to be out of that house by the end of February. When I signed that agreement, I thought: No problem! I'll be out before that!

But Time gets past us. It's the real golden rule.

One thing I have decided: I must, in future, make the attempt to use my time in better ways. Blogging has helped. It's given me a focus that I did not have. Many thanks to all those of you out there tolerating it.

One guy I know doesn't have to worry about time getting past him, but he's a fictional character: The Doctor. One of my favorite quotes of all Time is his:

"One day, I shall come back. Yes, I shall come back. Until then, there must be no regrets, no tears, no anxieties. Just go forward in all your beliefs, and prove to me that I am not mistaken in mine."

-- Freder.

Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day

I was going to title this post "Ashes Are Burning," after the song by the British band Renaissance, but decided that it sounded more defeatist than I felt. Instead, I'm going with the book by Judith Viorst. Just substitute me for Alexander.

The agenda (get out to the old house and keep on with Operation Clean Sweep) was bad enough. But I left the house without my wallet or checkbook and was unwilling to go back and get them. It was good of whomever is doing it that they had plowed the driveway again. From there, things went as well as could be expected, though there were tears. I finished in the kitchen, the pantry, the supplies closet, and my mother's bedroom, headed upstairs and started in on the long hallway with its many drawers and the equally long closet that runs its length. This seemed to take forever, but I found some treasures, including several pieces that my mother made. I swept through the guest room -- nothing much there -- and started on the attic. But by then it was three PM and time to load the car.

I had parked too close to a snowbank on the passenger side. When I started up the car to move it, I heard a POP, thought What the hell is that? and knew the answer immediately: I had no power steering. Fluid all over the snowy ground.

No wallet meant no Triple A card, which meant I would have to drive it home that way and risk breaking the whole column. What to do? I finished loading, though the frustration level had ramped up a notch or two, and was not helped by the extreme cold.

By 3:30 I had finished, and went inside to grab a shower. One of the few things I dislike about the new house are the bathrooms and the water pressure in the upstairs shower. I'm paying to heat the water at the old house anyway, so I might as well use it when I can, right?

I suspected nothing because I had hot water for the duration. Still, it had been a few weeks since the oil tanks were filled, so I went down to take a look at them. And my jaw flopped open. They were bone dry, on the coldest Sunday of winter.

I called the oil company (which has the worst name that an oil company could ever hope to have: Dead River). got their emergency line, and the woman I spoke to put the call out. Then I realized there was three feet of snow in the front yard, closer to five feet beside the road where the town plow had piled it up.

I started talking to myself, and what I said, over and over, was "You're in a hell of a mess!" I went out and started shoveling.

This ramped the frustration up several more notches, and made me tired in the bargain.

By the time I finished, no one had called back. I walked down the hall to the attic just long enough to carry out one box, and by the time I got back there was a message on the phone from a very dull-sounding man, saying "Ayuh, I god a call from dispatch to call you." [Pause] "Guess I'll call back laytah."

A far cry from "We'll send a truck out right away."

I called Dead River again and got a different person. I was getting somewhat frantic by this time. I said "I just missed his call" and the man said he'd call again and tell them I was available now, but that I should stay by the phone.

The phone was in my bedroom. My stripped, dirty, empty, sad bedroom. The sun was going down. I don't even have a light in there now. I waited on my knees by the phone and nobody called. When my legs started to hurt I got up and started pacing in the darkening room. I was still talking to myself, asking that bastard in the clouds the Oliver Hardy question, "Why don't you help me?". I waited for what must have been ten or fifteen minutes. By the end of that time I was shouting and screaming at the phone, "Why don't you fucking CALL?!"

That must have done the trick. The man at the other end of the line was much more lackadaisical than what I thought the situation required. I said that the house was out of oil and he repeated after me and said nothing more. I said that I needed oil delivered and a person who could bleed the line and get the furnace and water heater going. He said "I've got someone who can do both of those things."

Pause.

"How much d'you want?"

I thought that this was a ridiculous question. Enough. As much as you've got. Before I could think of an answer, he said, "Be sure that someone's there to pay the driver."

I said, "Pay the driver?"

"Ayuh."

"I don't have my wallet or checkbook with me, I don't live here anymore, we normally pay on account, this happened once before a couple of years back and we didn't have to pay the driver!?" When I get frantic I tend to run on a bit.

He said, "You don't have an account?"

"I d-DO h-have an account we've been a customer for thirty five years!" I was beginning to stutter.

"How much d'you want?"

"W-w-well, h-how about five hundred gallons?"

"Five hundred gallons?"

"W-we h-have two five hundred gallon tanks, that should be about half. . ."

Honestly, I don't remember where the conversation went from there. But it ended soon after, and the wait began. I went out to the attic and decided that this was it: I wanted so much to be finished with this ordeal that I made a very quick run through there, packed a few things, carried the boxes down and called it done.

Done. I still have the basement, with laundry on the line and dirty laundry in the sinks, and the workshop and generator room, where I don't expect to find much. But in the main part of the house, I am done.

Done. Maybe one more day of packing, maybe three or four more loads in the car, get the auction house out there to take what they want of what's left, and then I can take the keys down to R___ B______ next door and tell him I am out, the responsibility will be his and his son-in-law's. I'll still have things outside and in the two barns, or course -- that's maybe two or three more additional trips. But --

Done. I pulled the phone out of my bedroom and brought it to the kitchen, so that I would never have to go beyond the living room, ever again.

As the darkness closed in on the house, it became even more horrible. I packed up the last clothes in my bag that I'd found in the attic, and started piling boxes in the kitchen hall. I began sobbing, then wailing and screaming. The tears were literally dripping off my face, snot was running from my nose, I tried very hard to stop but every time a wretched shriek climbed up out of my gut and I was off to the races again. The level of frustrations and the stress and tiredness, and the relief and sorrow of knowing that I was "done" had all built up to the point where I couldn't control it anymore. It was a total meltdown that went on for half an hour or more.

The oil truck arrived just after five. He spent an hour filling the tanks and starting the machines (it turns out that the house has two 275 gallon tanks, not two five hundreds. We settled on 250 gallons). He told me the most horrible story.

It came about because he asked why I was so out of breath. I couldn't tell him that I had been behaving like a crybaby and had only just stopped. I told him the rest of the truth.

He was a young man. He seemed very much at peace. He said, "Once you get past this, I bet you'll see that things all turned out for the best. I really believe that there's a plan for everyone." Then he told me that his younger brother had died of leukemia five years ago, and that he had recently lost his father.

He said, "We took him into the hospital to have his big toe amputated. It got infected and they had to take his whole foot. Then that got infected, and they took his leg up to the knee. Then that got infected and they took it up to the groin.

"When that got infected again, they said they were going to have to cut off everything below his navel.

"Well, it was just my sister, my older brother and me. He was already in a medically induced coma. I said, 'He would never forgive us if he woke up to that.' And they all agreed.

"We told the doctor no. He said, 'In that case, he's probably going to die within a month.' We told him our thoughts, that dad was a very active outdoorsy man who would not want to live like that. And he said, 'In that case, you're probably making the right decision."

He said, "Someday, you're going to reach a place where you'll be able to just put your head back. . ." And here he put his head back, spread his arms, sucked in some air and smiled widely. ". . . and say, 'Everything's great!' Just try to focus on the good things in life."

Both the furnace and the water heater were roaring away by this time. He said, "My friend, you're all set," and we shook hands.

It was six-fifteen when I finally pulled out of the drive. And I do mean pulled. On the highway, the gentle curves were easy to manage, but on the side roads and in town the turns required quite a lot of muscle.

I was so glad to finally get home. I hugged and kissed the quats until they were quite sick of it.

This morning I drove over to the dealership and left the car with them, so that's in progress. I called Fairpoint from work. They said that my phones had gone online on Friday as expected. I said, "No they didn't." She put me on hold and after a bit came back to tell me that the lines tested fine right up to the house, which means that a service appointment is needed: $95 for the first half-hour, $45 for every half hour beyond. The earliest they could schedule me for was the second of February. I took it.

When I told my boss, she basically said, "Nuh-ah!" That Tuesday is the first day of book rush, and she wants me here every day, extended hours. I had to call Fairpoint back and push the date forward to the 8th.

As Mr. Vonnegut so aptly put it, "And so on." Me, I'm just looking forward to that day when I can put my head back, spread my arms wide, and say, "Everything's great!"

-- Freder

What's new at Azooza Zoo? or, Stuff an' Nonsense

I need to start taking new pictures of life in the All-New, All-Different DuckHaus. I was looking for a shot of the quats, but all I have were taken in the old place, and looking at those pictures makes me sick.

Strange things are happening in the new house. For instance, Patches and Honey are co-existing. Honey used to be very territorial, and would chase others (especially Patches) out of her upstairs domain with the forcefulness of an angry cop. She's not doing that anymore. Patches even slept on our bed with us all last night, and Honey didn't trouble herself over it at all.

Whitey has found the studio bedroom, and goes in there at night by himself to sleep happily on the comforter. Pandy Bear likes it, too, but he prefers the sofa in front of the gas fire. Pooky will sit anywhere that's soft. She's not going upstairs as much, and I'm just as happy with that, although I still cover my bed with newspapers every day, just in case.

I still have no telephone or internet service. The third deadline came and passed yesterday with no change. When I tried to call Fairpoint from work today, I jumped through all the hurdles they put you through and finally got the message that the office was closed. I went to their website and found a way to contact them by email. I did not hold back in my wording. I tore them a new one. I'll follow up with a call on Monday. Fairpoint is very much living up to their reputation. Their confirmation email arrived with a list of "helpful" links at the bottom. When I clicked on a link I was taken to a webpage that had nothing to do with the subject I'd selected.

Unpacking is proving troublesome. Nothing that comes out of a box that I packed in one room of the old house is actually going into a corresponding room in the new one. For every single thing I unpack, I have to stop and think about where I want it to go. Even the books: it suddenly dawned on me that there was no reason at all why all of "my" books had to go upstairs, in and around "my" room. I could put some in the dining room if I wanted. I could put them anywhere. It's all my room. So now, every single book has a decision attached to it. Which shelf, in which room, does it belong on? Is this book good enough for the dining room? Is that one good enough for what I'm calling the Library, where I am keeping all the vintage Oz books and the Poppy Otts? This is a reference book -- all reference books are now going in the study, except for my mother's books on art, antiques and collectibles, which are going in the library. All scary books are now going in the Halloween room. Children's books -- where in hell do I put them? Probably the studio.

I get long, rambling emails from my father containing paragraphs like this one:

"I really am sorry to give you this long lecture, probably for the eighth time, but Claudia has me very worried; I do not think she can be trusted; I think she can become irrational, and all that just makes my heart break and weep, but has to be faced as a possibility. In a nice way I have said much of this to J____, but she is so close to her Brother that she cannot conceive how virtually all of your Mom's estate could be eaten up (Claudia's lawyers taking the case on spec, ie fee to be paid by estate) once things really blow up. YOU MUST BE VERY CAREFUL AND NOT LEAVE ONE CRACK FOR "THEM" TO EXPLOIT. These are the real vampires of our age. They will start by asking for an accounting and will get a court order if it is not forthcoming, or that accounting is not creditable on its face. To the extent they have to use time or money to get that accounting, their fees for doing so will be paid by the estate. NOW are you starting to understand? I considered making J____ a copy of this e-mail, but decided that you should decide the extent you want me involved with her."

I got this (and two even longer, more rambling paragraphs) in response to the question "should I keep the family silver? Is it an heirloom? I don't really need it for myself." I also don't need the answer that I got!


He wrote, in a separate email:

"I used to read cases involving family estate disputes; so glad I am not Executor because Claudia would be ready to eliminate me."

 Talk like that does not help me!

Yesterday's storm left eight or nine inches of fresh snow on the ground. It's beginning to pile up. My plow guy hadn't come yesterday afternoon when I got home from work; the only reason I made it up the driveway was because it was such light and fluffy stuff.

I shoveled off the front and back steps; tonight I need to do the garage door and a path to the oil and gas tanks for the delivery person. Tomorrow I will have to shovel out the old house, yet again. I so want to get done with that phase of the move. The new house desperately wants cleaning after a month of my occupancy and the assault from the movers, but there's no time for all the other work that needs to be done.

I'm getting used to the gas stove. At first it was touch-and-go; I actually burned one of my skillets because I wasn't expecting the burner to heat up so fast. I put the skillet on the burner, turned the burner on, turned away to fix myself a drink. I thought I had time for that simple action. I'm used to a burner taking, maybe, days to heat up. The next thing I knew, I was hearing "Pop! Fizzle! Ping! Pang! Pop!" The pan was smoking.

I've learned to be very careful with the "HIGH" setting!

I see Tigers Grumpyface and Whitestockings every night. I still don't know where they go by day, but I see pussycat footprints in the snow going around behind the barn and over to the neighbor's yard. Whitestockings, at least, seems content.

-- Freder.

Every Day in Every Way. . .

On the last day that the auctioneers were taking my mother's house apart, we finally opened the door to the pantry, which had not been opened (it had not been possible to open it!) in at least a decade.

Inside was an Oasis. Books and collectibles that I had forgotten about, old tins and even unopened food products. Hanging from the light was the in-store display piece pictured above, depicting a scene from the Mickey Mouse cartoon Plane Crazy. I think Mom got it because she was friends with the manager of the Portland Disney Store -- she was certainly a good customer there!

I would not let the auctioneers take it. I figured it wasn't worth much, and it was a spectacular reminder of the Wonderland that my mother had created in her house. I hung it over the dining room table, so that I would have something to make the empty house feel like home.

It's quite large, so it was a tough job fitting it in the car and still loading up with other things. But on Monday night I brought it back out to the All-New, All-Different DuckHaus with me, and on Tuesday night, after a nicely relaxing evening making and eating a pizza and watching Pioneers of Television on PBS, I hung it up again over the dining room table, where it now belongs.

It looks great there, even better than it did in the old house.

Every little thing that I do in the new house makes it feel happier, homier. Every book that I unpack marks the place as mine. I've begun putting my mother's collection of seashells out in the bathroom. It's starting to be good.

But then, settling in has never been a problem for me. Anywhere I go, anywhere I work, I mark places to make them mine.

Saying good-bye, leaving things behind, that's what's always been my problem.

I am thinking about using some vacation time next week, if the weather improves, to really bang away at the old house and git 'er done, so that by the end of January I can put it behind me, and sever the connection forever. That would be a good thing on so many levels. The old house is nothing more than a millstone to me now. Heating two houses is incredibly expensive. It's time to make it a memory.

Moving Daze

Laurel and Hardy did it. Mickey Mouse did it. I'm surprised that the Three Stooges never did. By definition, comedy usually involves pain. The kind of pain that isn't so funny when it happens to you!

But, really, the final phase of the formal move came off as well as could be expected. I now have furniture!

When I saw the truck pull up I grabbed the cats before they could know what was happening and locked them away again in the bathroom. Much complaining from behind the door! Then I noted that the truck had not pulled up in front of the house as expected, but backed into the driveway.

I was told that the town would not let them park in the street, and that I would have to shovel the sidewalk. I said, "That's baloney! I've seen at least two moving vans parked in front of this house in the last six months! They do it all the time! It'll take me an hour to shovel this out!"

In the end, they parked in front of the house and started off-loading, and I got busy shoveling in case a cop came along and ordered them away. A cop did come along, but he paid them no attention, and I shoveled the sidewalk for nothing (the town snowblower came down the walk just a short while after I finished!)

The movers poured sand all up and down my front walkway and soon were tracking it into the house with wild abandon. Footprints everywhere. I still haven't cleaned it up; I had higher priorities. Once again Mister Complainer let his partner do the lion's share of the heavy lifting.I pitched in and lugged a bunch of stuff myself. After all, they were being paid by the hour. We loaded up the house, then they moved the van and we put the lawnmower and wheelbarrow and the garden dog and my mother's flats (display pieces that she painted to look like buildings -- she used them at art shows to display her paintings way, way back when she was pursuing art full-time while raising us youngsters) into the garage.

They came inside and assembled the beds, starting with mine. As soon as it was ready I made it up, and flopped down on it in relief. I said, out loud to the room, "This is hot!"

It was all over by around 12:30. I paid them off ($1,039.50) and waved goodbye, hoping never to need or see them again! I went inside and let the quats out.

Honey was first out the door as usual, zooming at slightly under the speed of sound, but doing it in that low, distressed crouch. "What's he done now? What's he done now?" she seemed to be thinking. I followed her upstairs. She jumped on the bed with a look of disbelief, sniffing about. "Is it? Is it really?"

Downstairs Patches was not asking questions. She knew, and was jumping on every single piece of furniture with a happy look on her face. Everyone else was sniffing, but contentment was the overall tone.

For my part, I felt suddenly exhausted, almost too weak to stand. I flopped in my comfy chair before the telly and just sank into it. I hadn't been that comfortable in a solid month. I turned on TCM.

I must say that TCM is becoming my favorite channel. In the early days of video and DVD, it was a pleasure to track down movies that I knew about and knew that I wanted to see, but TCM is a different experience entirely: I'm getting to see pictures that I never heard of, never knew I would like. Yesterday it was Two Knights from Booklyn, a 1949 comedy with William Bendix and Grace Bradley (an actress I've never encountered before that I know of, but man-o-man, whatta cutie!). It was pretty dumb, but also genuinely funny in the way that modern dumb comedies are not. I don't think I've seen Bendix do comedy before, but he's hysterical in a good-natured way.

I was not feeling any stronger, and finally realized that I hadn't eaten anything all day. I made myself breakfast and I made myself lunch, one after the other, and wolfed it all down while watching the movie, which kept going off on a new tangent just when I thought it was over. I like it when movies do that.

Eventually, TCM followed it up with another Bendix comedy, Kill The Umpire, and that was when I turned off the set and started getting on with my new job: unpacking!

This move is far from over! But anyone who has done this would know that. I wonder if anyone unpacks like me, though: I get started in one area, then something comes to light that belongs in another part of the house. I take it to where it belongs, then immediately see something that needs doing right away, get involved in that, and forget all about what I was originally doing. Shake vigorously and repeat. In the end, no one room really got done, but something got done in all the rooms, with the result that the place is really starting to shape up. It does feel and look like home now.

A dirty, messy, box-strewn version of home, but home!

And apparently, I'm not the only one who feels this way. Honey slept with me last night, all of her own volition. She left once to use the bathroom, but jumped right back into bed with me after she got herself cleaned up. I didn't have to go looking for her in the night.

Oh -- my friend Jean is doing well, and out of the hospital.

-- Freder.

"Why don't you do something to HELP me?!"

Many thanks to my friend FlickChick (who has a much more entertaining blog than mine) for the heads-up that TCM would be running a Laurel and Hardy marathon from Tuesday night into Wednesday. The parts of it that I was able to catch have easily been the best part of the last two days -- and they reminded me of something as well, the only perspective I've been able to maintain in the chamber of horrors that I've been trapped in during that time: Life is a Laurel and Hardy comedy: one nice mess after another.


It's better now. Really, the only real concern that I don't have an answer for at this point is that my friend Jean is in hospital and I hope she's doing well. The rest of it -- the nice messes that made up yesterday -- is all being worked on.

Let's start with the easy stuff. I still don't have a computer. On Monday they tried to deliver at the back door, so I left a note there the next morning. On Tuesday they instead tried to deliver at the front door. So on Wednesday I had notes on both doors -- when I got home and struggled up the stairs (more on that latter) I noticed that the note on the back door was gone. . . but there was no package!

And I still don't have telephone service. It was originally supposed to start a week ago Monday. When it didn't, I called from work and they gave me a new number, and a new date: yesterday. Yesterday came and went, and still no phone service.

Yesterday was also to be my moving day -- so of course the weather weenies were calling up a storm. They said that it would start after midnight and be terrible by morning. So I was overjoyed to wake at 7:00 AM and find that nothing was happening. Yippee! I thought. It's not going to be as bad as they predicted!

You can see it coming, can't you?

I drove out to Albion and loaded up the car while I waited for the movers to arrive. And waited. And waited. By the time I was finished loading, the snow had started to fall. Still no movers. I waited until after nine, then called the company and said, "Once again I am here and you're not!" The woman said that they were on their way, should be there any second, that they had left at a quarter after eight.

It took another ten minutes for them to arrive, and by that time the snow was beginning to get serious. It gathered on their boots and blew into the house -- all I could think of was the empty winter home in Doctor Zhivago. I helped them where I could, and kept their ramp swept clean, but the snow was coming down at the rate of an inch or two an hour and toward the end I had to stand out in the storm full time just constantly sweeping the ramp clear. That was miserable, but just as well -- I had managed to get through all of my weekend hours at the old house without tears, but yesterday I broke down several times. It was better to have a focus, even on a task such as that.

The downstairs went quickly enough, but upstairs there were four beds to take apart, and that was time consuming.

By the time everything was loaded and we were ready to hit the road, it was near one o'clock and there was probably six to eight inches of snow in the driveway. The moving van was stuck. My car was stuck. With much effort, we got out and onto the road -- which had not been plowed or treated in any way. It was a case of putting your tires in the tracks of the vehicle ahead of you and hoping for the best.

This was probably one of my ten worst winter driving experiences ever. It was white-out conditions all the way. For much of the drive, I could not even see the moving van just in front of me. The main roads were not much better than the town roads. The blower on my car was not working well enough to handle the cold, and I had to wipe down the inside of the windshield several times.

Once again, my plow guy had not been along. I was able to get most of the way into my driveway, but at the end it makes a sharp left turn and goes up an incline to the garage. With nine inches of snow on the ground, the car could not handle that, and I got stuck there again.

I went into the house, rounded up the cats and threw them into the bathroom, then grabbed my shovel and did the fastest job on the front walkway ever, only to have the movers suggest that they take the load back to the moving company with them and deliver it on Friday.

I wasn't going to have any of that. I asked them to do it right then and there.

Have you ever noticed that on any given working crew, there's always one guy who does less work than anyone else, and complains the loudest? This one went into full complaint mode. They off-loaded two and a half pieces of furniture and then flat-out quit on me. There was nothing for me to do but head inside and let the cats out.

The plow guy came along as I was shoveling out my car. He "helped" me in exactly the way that Stanley helps Ollie. He helped the car right off of the driveway and into the ditch, where it remains as I write this. I could not call Triple A because I had no phone.

Also, I could not drive to the store. I had meant to do that in the evening, after the move. I was low on some basic supplies.

So I walked. Three quarters of a mile one way to the supermarket, through the storm. What the hell, I was wet already, had been wet all day. The walk out wasn't so bad. The walk back was into the wind. The snow caked into my hair, my eyebrows, the whole front of me was white. My gloves were wet. By the time I was halfway home my fingers were so cold they were on fire.

When I got home I made the mistake of sticking them under the faucet. The pain as they thawed out was horrific. I laid down on the floor and screamed.

But it passed in about five minutes. I puttered around, unloaded the groceries, did my chores, then remembered Laurel and Hardy. With Stan and Babe and the cats for company, I made an early dinner (my only meal of the day) and wound down with a couple of drinks. By six o'clock it felt like eleven. I needed to get that day behind me. I went to bed early, leaving the dishes in the sink, and slept like the dead.

Mixed Nuts

Not much in the way of pop-culture blather to report. Last night TCM ran Mark Rydell's film adaptation of William Faulkner's last novel, The Reivers, but I tuned in late, and it was dinnertime so I was away from the telly for most of it. In any case, I realized that my memories of the novel were too vague for me to have any meaningful notion of how good an adaptation it was. I must have read the book at least a quarter-century ago, and I admit I didn't get as much out of it as I should have. I was a big fan of Faulkner's, and went into it with the wrong set of expectations, not realizing until many years later that it was intended to be a comedy, not the kind of southern gothic drama that I was used to from Uncle Billy. I kept asking myself, as I read, what was wrong with this picture? Well, what was wrong was me.

Beyond that, all I can say for certain is that Steve McQueen seems an odd choice for Boon Hogganbeck, but Will Geer is just perfect for Faulkner, and Burgess Meredith's narrations are a pleasure.

After that, I watched just enough of last year's "re-imagining" of Sherlock Holmes to know that it wasn't worth wasting any time out of  my life over. I normally like Robert Downey, Jr., but he's woefully miscast here, and with his fake British accent I couldn't understand a word he was saying. That was actually the best part of the movie. I could tell from the opening frames that this was going to be a stink bomb, but I toughed out about ten or fifteen minutes before I turned off the set and got back to unpacking.

Oh, and I did sit through the remake of Ray Harrihausen's Clash of the Titans on Saturday night. It's better acted and more dramatically sound than the original (Lord Olivier really sleepwalked through that one), although it's still quite nonsensical -- and I'm sorry, but although it allows the director more fluidity in which to frame a shot, the computer-generated special effects don't hold a candle to Harryhausen's techniques.

I spent most of Saturday and Sunday at the old house, packing and packing so that I would have enough not just for a load each day, but enough so that I could swing by on Monday and Tuesday and just load up the car without having to take the time to pack more. I'm really making strides. All my books are packed, the big closet is cleaned out, the built-in shelves are bare. The house is growing more and more eerie, an empty, silent place. I believe that I'll only need a couple more weekends to pack up everything that's coming with me. Then the auction house needs to be called back in, to clean out what they want. Still, there will be quite a lot left over. My lawyer says she knows someone who will take the rest. But I'm tempted to just throw the keys in my sister's face and say to her, "It's all yours. Take anything you want and clean the rest out, give the keys to the new owners when they come. I'm never coming back."

I was able to get a light carriage sofa into my car, now the cats have something comfortable to sit on in the new house. I'll have to move it when the real furniture comes in, but for now they like it much better than just a blanket on the floor!

The move is scheduled for Wednesday. Of course, the weather weenies are predicting snow. I've reached the point where I don't care. I need my furniture now. If the moving company cancels on me one more time, I'm going to use a different moving company. I can't find anything because I can't unpack. Boxes are piling up where the furniture must go. This move has reached critical mass.

I enjoy living in town. I've typed this before, but it bears repeating: winters at the old house were made harder by the feeling of living on the moon, being in the middle of nowhere. Our nearest neighbors were half a mile away. The forests and fields were barren and still when covered by snow. I would look out of the windows on a soundless night and feel completely alone.

In town, it never gets completely dark. There's a streetlight at the end of my driveway, and many of my neighbors never turn off their porch lights. I'm sure that the Tigers Whitestockings and Grumpyface appreciate this, as do I. There's an ambient glow to the night sky from all the lights, public and private. I look out of the windows and see just enough trees and woodland to make it seem homey and comfortable, but I also see the homes of neighbors, windows discreetly curtained, and cars rolling up and down the hill. I am still alone, but I am alone in the world instead of out of it.