A Moving Story

I have used One Slip lyrics to fuel my fiction on a number of occasions but there are large pieces that could easily fit into this post of reality. Except I don’t have the time nor energy to weave the words into my detail. But I’ll do my best to give this a double dose of my normal alacrity and we’ll see what happens.

“A small regret, you won’t forget,
There’ll be no sleep in here tonight”

The move has been harder, tougher and longer than expected in every way. I am built like a bull and not Baryshnikov. You won’t look at me to dance gracefully across the stage but you’d hire me to move your couch or engage in general demolition. I have hands that some refer to as paws, arms like a gorilla a broad back that has been used to move more than a few pieces of furniture.

This is not the first time I have moved furniture for myself or for other others. I know what it means to work with my hands and have never been the stranger to hard, physical labor. Grunt work in basketball and football has always been where I made my mark. I pound, push, pull, tug and shrug my way from place to place. So I approached this move like I had with every other.

But time is a fickle woman who sometimes can be a friend and sometimes a foe. She tossed her head the other way and I found myself fighting aches, pains and bruises that had never been. Add in a heat wave that sent the temperature soaring above triple digits, more stuff to move than anticipated, unexpected emotion and you to can chug down this witch’s brew.

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Somewhere around midday I found myself thinking about my paternal grandfather and what sort of stories he might have shared with me regarding the move and the accompanying nonsense. But instead of focusing on what he might have said I remembered a different story that took place when he was in high school.

Grandpa got in trouble in school and was told that he couldn’t return to class unless his father and he met with the principal. Grandpa was less than thrilled with the idea of telling his father about this and decided that there had to be a way around the punishment that would have assuredly been doled out by my great grandfather.

So he hired a man to come to school with him to pretend to be his father. The time and day arrive and together the two of them walk into the principal’s office. The principal begins a lengthy recitation of what my grandfather has done wrong. Midways through his recitation the man who is prentending to be my great grandfather reaches over and belts my grandfather, knocking him off of the chair he is sitting on.

A few minutes later my grandfather is furiously berating the man who hit hm and asks why he did it as the whole purpose in hiring him was to avoid getting punished. And in response he was told, ‘you wanted it to look real, didn’t you.”

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The majority of the move is now done. There are relatively few items left to pack and or process. The majority have been moved into storage pods, given away or left in garbage cans. Soon we’ll have completely crested the hill and it will be time to decompress and let go of the energy that I have been carrying around. New chapters remain to be written and new opportunities to be discovered.

Much has been learned and more remains. This post is really just part of short diversion designed to help me catch my breath. It is time to pop two Advil and finish what has been started. This story remains unfinished.