The process evolved slowly from "I'm going to sell all my stuff and just pack what fits in my car" to a small pull-behind trailer ("What about Sydney's stuff, Savannah? She, at least, needs to bring her mattress." "She can sleep on a cot," Savannah declared.) until calmer heads prevailed ("How much weight can this trailer hold, Savannah?" "One thousand pounds," she reported. "How much does your car weigh, Savannah?" Long pause. "Fifteen hundred pounds?") until Savannah, who is really good at math and physics, settled on a small moving truck.
With this in mind, my friend Joan, who may or may not be good in geography, made a small request. "I am calling on twenty-five years of friendship," she said as we split a fish fry on the night before my girls were to pack their lives into a truck to travel cross-country in a futile effort to finally put some distance between themselves and their loving mother. I squirted lemon on my fish and asked for extra tartar sauce. "What do you need?" I asked, mentally preparing myself to update her resume or offer her an organ. "Is there any way that Brad and the girls could swing by Soldotna on their way to San Diego?" "Soldotna, Arizona?" I asked around a mouthful of fish. "Is there room in the truck?" she wondered. "We'll find a way," I assured her before turning to the waitress to order lemon meringue pie.
"Soldotna, Arizona?" Brad asked as he maneuvered the moving van from Connecticut to our house. "It's a treasured family keepsake," I explained, "It's a favor for Joan." The conversation, for all intents and purposes, was over. It was a favor for Joan.
Sydney and I headed over to Joan's mom to pick up the treasured family keepsake that weighed three hundred pounds and had a rocking mechanism designed to guillotine unsuspecting fingers. While we watched Joan's nephew Lane effortlessly wrestle it onto the pick-up, I was busy wrestling Joan's petite mother as she insisted that I accept payment for our efforts. I think that woman could have loaded the treasured family keepsake by herself...she is strong. An hour later, I had a pocket full of money and Sydney had thrown out her back, not-so-effortlessly, wrestling the treasured family keepsake into the moving van.
Joan and I followed the progress of the Mosiman Family Moving Van as it crossed the nation (Imagine the map featured as Indiana Jones traversed the globe); stopping first in Mason City, Iowa for a fond farewell to the grandparents, shooting over to KC for some barbecue, pausing to peek at the Petrified Forest before swinging over for the treasured family keepsake exchange in Flagstaff. Whew! What some people won't do for Joan! An organ exchange might have been easier!
No comments:
Post a Comment