The next day we drove back to VA to retrieve the rest of our stuff and finish cleaning up the house.  The very next day.  After one of the worst days I’ve ever spent I ended up having to endure one of the other worst days I’ve ever spent.  We drove 350 miles to do a little more physical work.  Then, all in one day, we drove that same distance over those same roads back to NYC, to Long Island, actually, to dump off the stuff at my wife’s aunt’s house.  This was 700 miles of driving and plenty of physical work, all in one long, fatigue-filled day.

It was a lonely day for me, too.  My wife’s pattern in the car is to fall asleep and stay that way for the entirety of the trip.  “That’s what I always did when I was little,” she says, by way of justification.  She must have been pretty well rested by the end of all this.  She racked up a lot of hours of sleep while I was driving those roads over and over again.

I don’t remember much of it, really.  I was in endurance/perseverance mode, which for me involves a loss of emotion, a loss of frivolous mental activity.  All I do when e/p mode is called for is focus on the present moment, the task at hand, and how to get the task accomplished with the minimum of suffering. Continue reading →

This traumatic event engendered an unforeseen delay, and the unforeseen delay delivered us into the hands of those same Fates we had snubbed just hours before.  The Fates usually spin, weave, and snip the thread of our lives.  In NYC, though, the Fates are in cahoots with the local Traffic Enforcement folks.  The Fates take it easy, merely steering the parking police to people’s cars, and the parking police take it from there, guiding the tow truck to the spot and sealing the deal.

As we would learn, traffic patterns near the Queensboro Bridge are much like the tides in the East River–they change drastically with the time of day, and they wait for no man.  The cops saw to it that we were towed tout de suite.  Here beginneth the adventure of retrieving our car from the NYPD impound lot.

If you are towed in Manhattan, your vehicle is deposited in a secure, undisclosed location.  You can ask anybody, though; they all know where they take it–the NYPD impound lot on 12th Ave., near the Jacob Javits Center.  What people might not mention is that you’ll need cash, plenty of it, to retrieve your vehicle, and you’ll have to get there by yourself.  Our building was between 1st and 2nd Avenues, and we should have taken a cab, but if you’re me, and you’re new in town, you decide to drive your rental truck crosstown to the impound lot. Continue reading →

The drive to New York went surprisingly well, for a star-crossed journey.  Sure, I only saw my wife behind me on rare occasions, during extremely sharp turns, hidden as she was, three feet off my bumper.  With its bad brakes, the truck took so long to stop that I scarcely considered the possibility that she might rear-end me.  We negotiated the highways and bridges and and tolls and avoided the roadway hazards in near-miraculous fashion.  We had rough directions from my wife’s Long Island relatives, and they served us fairly well…until we actually made it to Manhattan.  Their directions put us on the FDR East River Drive, which is a lovely, fast route for traveling north and south on the east side if you’re in a car.  Trouble is, the city has rather stringent laws against driving trucks on it.

Stringent though they might be, breaking laws such as these does not really attract much notice in a city where the cops are beleaguered, with real crime to deal with.  I mean, if something bad had happened on the FDR, the final disposition of the legal case and the inevitable law suits would have gone against me.  As it was, frankly exhausted from the day of packing, unpacking, loading, unloading…and loading again, and then driving for several hours with brakes that technically didn’t work until just before I was about to crash into the vehicle ahead of me, this little legality seemed like something of which I could plausibly deny knowledge. Continue reading →

Moving day arrived in late June.  See, residents and fellows all start July 1.  This is why you don’t want to go to the hospital in early July.  Brad and Brent and Brittany and Betty Sue are all standing around, trying to look competent while their palms sweat, having suddenly become aware that they don’t know anything about medicine, much less the human condition in general.  They know how to sit in class, they know how to read and study, they have cut up dead people, but those skills won’t do you much good with whatever medical condition brought you to them.

The other thing about late June is that it’s hot, and it rains a lot.  Ah, the rain.  Loading our rental truck, unloading said truck, stopping briefly to check whether things had shifted in transit–all of these were occasions for a downpour.  It was uncanny, but again, the uncanniness came from the fact that we didn’t yet fully comprehend the star-crossed nature of this particular expedition.  Had I known what I know now, I would have opened an umbrella each time I reached for the latch on the truck’s back door. Continue reading →

The first step of moving, the joyless drudgery of packing, is usually the worst part.  Although it is not creative or interesting, you still have to think it through and pay attention to what you’re doing or you’ll just have a big mess on your hands.  Packing also takes place far in advance of the move so that it is impossible to feed off the enthusiasm that one might have for new places and new challenges while you’re doing it.

In this case, we would leave a three-bedroom house with a full basement and move into a 700-square-foot apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.  We figured that only about one-third of our possessions would fit into the apartment, so we had some serious choices to make.  We had to determine which third of our accumulated stuff would make the move, and what would happen to the other two-thirds.  These intense negotiations required much forethought, along with a few Faustian bargains, Hobson’s choices, and even a little of the wisdom of Solomon one hears so much about.

We at least had a free option for storage–my mother-in-law’s garage in Charlotte, NC.  Of course, that was 275 miles away from Charlottesville.  So, first we had to figure out what we needed to store, boxed-up non-essentials and furniture mostly, and then get it to Charlotte where it would lie in state, gathering dust, cat hair, and other filth for three years.

This trip to Charlotte was the first indication of just how badly things would go with this move.  We rented a truck for the trip, loaded it up, and ignorant of the way the stars had aligned against us, we took off.

My wife has a tendency to tailgate.  I saw her doing it just this morning on the way to work.  She says she doesn’t tailgate, so I’m guessing it’s a definitional thing for her.  She doesn’t actually tap the bumper of the car in front of her–that would be just plain rude–so she thinks she’s doing fine.  Well, as she followed me to Charlotte, she was “saving gas,” allowing herself to be sucked along in my draft.  That worked out OK until we found ourselves in Danville, VA, right on the North Carolina border.  I saw something in the road ahead, something metal and spiky, like those things they use to hold tent poles when they set them up on pavement.

Continue reading →