Waiting for Gouda

The house in which the Lovely Wife™ and I were renting an apartment was recently put up for sale. As we do not have the approximate half-million dollars that is the asking price, it doesn’t seem that we can continue to live there. It turns out that Illinois law doesn’t allow the two of us to be sold with the house as “additional features”, and so, we now have the privilege of participating in that exciting American past-time:

Moving.

As it has been a good 42 months since my last move, I had forgotten what an entirely pleasurable, simple and relaxing experience the whole thing can be. Just picking up every single thing you’ve managed to accumulate in your entire life and setting it down somewhere else. It is all very simple and very easy. I can’t understand why people don’t do this every chance they get. In fact, after this next lease expires, I think I may just try to arrange it so that we can move every six to eight weeks. It’s fun, and it’s fun when it’s fun!

The first step after you decide that you would like to move is:

Finding A New Place To Live

This is actually a very important task, because if you forget about this step, you’ll end up just carting all your possessions all over the place and you’ll have no place to stop and put them down. In fact, this happens to be how the entire state of Florida was populated. People from all over the country (and let’s face it… these were the not-so-bright ones) just packed up and drove until they ran out of land.

The Lovely Wife™ and I, determined to not let this happen to us, dutifully grabbed the latest issue of the Chicago Reader and scanned its pages for suitable-sounding domiciles. We had only a few qualifications: it should be somewhere on Chicago’s north side, it should be relatively close to public transportation, and the monthly rent should be somewhat less than the annual GNP of small Latin American nations. The Lovely Wife™ made a few calls, as she is much better on the telephone than I am (ironic, ain’t it?) and we were off to visit our potential new homes.

Our first stop was just a few blocks away, on what was, unfortunately, one of the ugliest corners in the whole area. Situated across the street from the Mobil station and upstairs from the unemployment office at the intersection of two insanely busy streets, we pretty much knew as we were parking the car that we would have to pass, unless the space offered something truly special, like, say… a master chef/maid/masseuse that lived in the broom closet. We went upstairs anyway, figuring it might be good to get a practice viewing under our belts. The owners of the place, a rather young and friendly couple, greeted us and showed us around. This did not take long. There was the front area, the kitchen/dining area, and the back area, which, it was suggested, would serve as the likely bedroom. We poked around, we inspected closets (which were sadly empty), we asked thoughtful, potential-renter questions like, “So how much is the security deposit?”

It was all a charade. There was simply no way in hell that we would move into a place like this, but we assumed that making ugly faces and running back down the stairs while shouting, “Flee! Flee this wretched pit of hellish despair!” would not be acceptable. And poor Marta and Aloysius seemed so eager to show us all of the features (“You could probably fit an entire Cornish hen in this oven.”), I think they might have taken such a response personally. After a while, we shook hands and departed gracefully, letting them down easy with vague promises of future contact.

Our next stop was a place of the sort that is charmingly referred to as a “garden apartment”. This is real-estate lingo for “dank basement pit”. Even knowing this going in, we figured that we might as well take a look, because hey, we’re not exactly the Rockefellers, and I had been in a few basements in my day that weren’t really all that bad, you know? This was not one of them. Dark, narrow, low ceilings, and the added charm of rusty metal structural support columns punctuating the exact center of each room. The windows offered stunning views of gravel, neatly broken up by jail-cell security bars. Again, we suppressed our initial reactions as we followed Tatyana around from one cramped dungeon cell to the next, murmuring generic comments about this or that architectural element (“Interesting girder, there.”) Tatyana assured us that, although the place had an air conditioning unit, she almost never had to turn it on because it stayed fairly cool down there. You don’t say. Could that be because of, perhaps, the complete and suffocating LACK OF DAYLIGHT? Count Dracula would have walked in there and gone, “’Zounds! A little dim in here, in’it?” Any money we might have saved on rent would have gone straight to paying for Zoloft.

Our third stop sounded absolutely splendid in the paper. Large, two bedrooms, nice neighborhood, a garage parking space. The rent was probably a little on the outside of our upper limit, but at this point I think we really needed a little beauty in our lives. The landlord, whom on that day was known as Mr. Heckles, met us outside on the sidewalk, with some other woman lurking nearby. It turns out he had scheduled another prospective tenant to look at the place at the same time. This put an interesting twist on the proceedings, as we were now suddenly confronted with a little competition. As we headed up the stairs, the four of us in a nice little line, something peculiar came over me. I realized that I loathed this woman. Who did she think she was? Coming to look at our apartment? She had a lot of freakin’ nerve! Trying to look in the closets when I’m there trying to look in the closets. Checking out the back porch as I’m checking out the back porch. Asking the landlord what the security deposit was. Hey! That is MY question! I always ask that question! I had half a mind not to listen to the answer so that I could ask him again later, but I figured that convincing the guy that I was some kind of forgetful moron wouldn’t be too good for our chances.

Quietly watching this interloper traipse about in my potential new home, I noticed that she was dressed much better than I was. Granted, this is rarely a difficult or particularly noteworthy feat, but it made me realize that she was an entirely different sort of person than I was. She had a skirt-suit thing going on. I had jeans. She had some kind of attaché / organizer thing. I had a couple notes scrawled on the back of an envelope. She stood up straight. It occurred to me that I couldn’t really picture the two of us living in the same sort of place, and it was only then that I started to really look around. The place was nice. It was big. It was… well, it was expensive, wasn’t it? In fact, according to my envelope, it wasn’t very likely that we could afford the place anyway.

Huh. Well, she can have it, I thought. She deserves a place like this, where she’ll have plenty of room to… iron her slacks, or whatever it is that people like her do. I don’t think we have enough stuff to fill up all this space anyway. I mean, look at the size of this dining room! And we do most of our dining in the living room! And so, after the exchange of a few more pleasantries and a by-now useless tour of the garage, we made our retreat.

Our search wasn’t going all that well. Surely there was some nice, comfortable middle ground somewhere out there. We needed help.

Quite accidentally, we got Brian.

One of the listings that my Lovely Wife™ so ably called about, turned out to be held by one of these intermediary groups that shows properties and draws up leases on the landlords’ behalf. The landlords don’t have to deal with the hassle and the middleman company gets the first month’s rent. We showed up at the office and met with Brian, who, by all appearances, was a friendly, neat young man who asked us a few questions about our price range and our space needs. Soon he had a short list of available property in the area that seemed to fit our criteria, so we climbed into Brian’s car, the Lovely Wife™ volunteering to squeeze into the back seat, and we were off on a whirlwind tour of the neighborhood.

Over the next hour or so we barged into people’s lives all over town, interrupted their routines, snooped through the corners off their homes while they stood awkwardly by with their arms crossed, perhaps nervously hoping we wouldn’t open that one closet and find the… (corpse/drugstash/porn/flo-bee)… well… whatever. We pulled them away from their televisions, or their stoves, or, in one memorable case, their boyfriend, and quizzed them on their thermostats and their mailboxes and their overall satisfaction with the parking situation. If they were home, we bothered them. If they weren’t home, we went in and looked around anyway, armed, as we were, with Brian’s authority as Some Guy We Just Met Who Seems To Have Keys To Everything. It was a strange feeling, following some stranger around into other strangers’ apartments, and I couldn’t help but imagine that this so called “company” and its “employees” that barely seemed to “serve” a “purpose” might be some sort of scam. That perhaps we were unwittingly engaging in some sort of illegal activity. Brian did little to dispel this notion when, at the last house of the evening, we knocked on the apartment door and nobody answered. He took out his various keys and tried literally dozens of different combinations of keys on the three different keyholes presented to us. After a while of messing about with what might as well have been some kind of science fair experiment/ IQ test, Brian said, “Wait here. I’m gonna try to go around and climb through a window.”

Whoa. I was pretty sure that was not included in his rights or obligations, but we decided that if the police ended up getting involved, we could probably just point our fingers in Brian’s general direction and yell, “It was all his idea!” in our best grade school whine. I had to admit that I was a little excited at the prospect of hearing the deadbolts click from the other side and having Brian grant us entrance to the place that had thus far denied us. I suspect it would have felt a little like being Short Round when Indy has solved the booby trap in an ancient temple.

Okay, maybe not.

Sadly, Brian was either unable or unwilling to scale the outside wall and smash open some poor, unsuspecting fool’s bedroom window, so we just met him back downstairs by the front door. He drove us back to his “office” and urged us, if we liked any of the places we saw, to sign on them as soon as possible. My Lovely Wife™ and I agreed that the second to last place we had visited seemed just about right, but we wanted to take a little time to think things over.

Later on, in the comfort of our own not-for-long home, we decided to go ahead and take the apartment we had liked the best of those Brian had shown us. It was probably about the right size, on a nice street, with what seemed like an appropriate monthly rent. We agreed that the odds of our finding anything substantially better on our own were pretty slim, especially in light of our progress thus far. And so, the next night, we went back over and signed the lease.

Step One was complete! We now had a new place to put all our stuff when the time came. Which brings us to step two:

Packing

I have mixed feelings about the entire process. On the one hand, it kind of sucks going through every last one of your earthly possessions, which, unless you’re some kind of damned dirty hippie, is really just a measure of the success of your life so far. (This can be somewhat depressing when you learn that your most precious belongings are action figures.) But on the other hand, it really, really sucks to actually have to collect all this crap into piles and then put these piles in boxes and then put these boxes in piles of boxes.

The only good thing about the packing process is something that must inevitably happen every time you move: The Great Purge.

You know what I’m talking about. Eventually, you have to go into the back of your closets and spare rooms and into the corners of your attic and basement and pull out all of the miscellaneous items that have somehow trickled to the periphery of your life. You have to study this stuff, figure out what the hell it all is, try to recall where it came from and when was the last time you used it, or even looked at it. Based on these estimates, you then must calculate the odds that a particular item will ever be used again, and if you think it might, will that use likely come before some arbitrary future cut-off date. And everybody seems to have a different scale, a different date-range, which can vary from item to item.

For example, I realize that I haven’t plugged in my lava lamp since about 1994. Furthermore, I can’t really envision a scenario in which my lava lamp would garner much use until… well, forever. (Okay, I suppose I can come up with a few ideas, because I have a good imagination, but the key to this whole process is practicality, and the odds of my having my own fully modernized tree-house just aren’t good.) This, for me, means that the lava lamp must go.

On the other hand, however, someone like my Lovely Wife™ may have a couple hundred books that have not been cracked since the first Reagan administration, and that will never, ever, ever be looked at ever again (because all those dang writers keep making new ones, you see). Using my guidelines, maybe… and I’m only saying maybe… some of the books might be considered for donation. But we are all different. And so, keeping dozens of exceptionally heavy boxes full of countless books that a certain someone won’t even be able to lift when the appropriate time comes, seems perfectly reasonable to some.

The Great Purge is an individual process. And the decisions are not always easy. I came across an old camera tripod that I used during my college photo classes. The plastic ring that tightens the camera in place had a small crack in it, a tragedy the origin of which I can no longer recall, but one which essentially robs the tripod of its one basic duty: holding the camera perfectly still. This tripod had sat in the back of every closet I had for the last eight years. We actually had another, better, correctly functioning tripod in the back of another closet, ready to go in the unlikely event that we would suddenly need a perfectly still camera. This particular item was failing the Great Purge test in just about every area. And yet… I remembered when I got this tripod. It was an absolute necessity and had cost me about $150.00, a cost I justified at the time by naively saying that it would last the rest of my life and that it would always be something useful. Now, $150 bucks is no small amount at this stage in my life, but back then, as a college student, this was an obscene amount of money that ended up being tacked onto my Discover card, the only creditor who still had any amount of faith in my ability to some day, somehow pay them back.

And now, here it was. Broken. Useless. A relic from a time long gone. A shattered reminder of the fragility of life. I cradled it in my arms, embracing it for one last time.

And then I realized that maybe I needed a break from packing — I was actually hugging garbage. I went and got a beer, leaving the remainder of the closet for another time.

The tripod ended up in the “donation” pile. It was headed to Salvation Alley.

I don’t know about where you live, but here in Chicago, there seems to be a very effective spontaneous grass-roots recycling program. Any item placed in the alley behind our home that is not clearly and obviously rotten trash is collected within a matter of hours, sometimes quicker, by parties unknown. Old furniture, mattresses, shoes, videotapes, books, scrap metal, small appliances, old chunks of wood… you name it, it is taken. Hence, if you have some items that you no longer want, but that you might feel guilty about throwing away, have no fear! Just donate to Salvation Alley. Somebody, who for all I know is watching the area near our trashbins with binoculars from a helicopter, knows what to do with all of our donations. Broken microwave: gone. Half an old bookshelf: gone. Pile of chipped, castoff, mismatched plates: gone. All before the afternoon is over.

It’s really quite remarkable. And convenient. Just try doing that out in the suburbs. Just pile a bunch of crap you don’t want anymore in the backyard and wait. C’mon! It’s fun!

One other thing about packing that I’ve noticed: No matter how well organized you are, the closer you come to the end of your packing, the collected contents of a given box will become more and more odd. At the beginning, the boxes all seem to make sense. Books, CDs, Elvis collector’s plates. Nice and neat, properly labeled on the outside with a fat black marker. Eventually, however, you realize that although it seems like most of your belongings have been neatly sorted and stacked, there is still a rather imposing amount of stuff sitting around the house. Stuff that doesn’t necessarily belong to any particular established group, but hardly constitutes any sort of group on its own.

You have little choice but to go around collecting all these items, and thus, you soon have a box that contains an electric pencil sharpener, a couple of candle holders, that weirdo-sculpture thing that somebody gave you at your wedding, a BB pistol, and a banana hanger. The box isn’t quite full yet, so you wander from room to room, looking for other small objects that managed to survive the Great Purge. There’s a spool of speaker wire. Here are those carved wooden tulips that used to be in that vase. And, oh, that decorative pewter mug. Great.

You arrange them all carefully in the box with the other things, and something odd occurs to you. Taken individually, you can conjure up a decent reason for the existence of each of the items, you can assign some sort of value to them. Now, however, as they are collected, it seems like you basically have a box full of useless junk. This seems to violate one of the principles of the universe. The whole is less than the sum of its parts?

Now that the box is full and taped shut, you have to label it. Fat marker in hand, poised over cardboard, but there is uncertainty. Short of listing out the contents in detail, half of which you have already forgotten in the fifteen seconds it has taken to seal the damn thing up, no label seems remotely adequate. The box defies simple description. No word could possibly capture the eclectic nature of what this box holds. Well, except one, which you dutifully scrawl across the top in fat marker:

STUFF

You bring the box over to the pile of boxes and you realize that there are already seven (seven!) boxes with that word scrawled on them. Now where the hell did all this… this…. well, you know… where did it all come from? You briefly consider trying to add adjectives, but decide that having boxes labeled Random Stuff, Extra Stuff, Other Stuff, and More Stuff is hardly an improvement over the current situation.

Now that we have all of stuff together (or mostly together, as we all know there are a few things you can’t pack until the last moment: your toothbrush, the coffeemaker, the Nintendo), there’s really not much else to do except one day rent a truck and schlep every stupid little thing we own out the door and down the stairs and out the door and down the sidewalk and into the truck and across town and out of the truck and up the sidewalk and through the door and up the stairs and through the door. Saturday is that day.

I, for one, am really looking forward to it. It’s fun!

Stay tuned for further developments. I’ve always found that dealing with your local U-Haul center is kind of like trying to rent bananas from a bunch of monkeys, so we’ll see how that goes. Also, it seems that the utility companies insist that our new apartment number has to be one that the landlord says doesn’t exist, so that could be interesting.