Sic Transit

“So. Add to all this mayhem (me, packing books and paintings and china, and calling Maryanne daily for succor and encouragement, and Dean, ever-so-slowly packing LPs and CDs and sheet music, mostly in the depths of the basement), Dean’s six concurrent eye surgeries, which occurred between the fall of 2013 and late fall of 2014, with house-showings and runs to Goodwill and the cashing-in-of-retirement-funds wedged in between glaucoma- and other eye specialists’ appointments (an entirely other saga, as well), and you will have some idea of the velocity at which we were both moving . . . seemingly in place.”—Elizabeth Boleman-Herring

By Way of Being

By Elizabeth Boleman-Herring

“It’s easier to die than to move . . . at least for the Other Side you don’t need trunks.” ― Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose

“I was eight when I moved to Florida, and I thought, ‘Oh great, the retirement capital of the world. I’ll be dead within a decade.’” ― Jarod Kintz, “This is the Best Book I’ve Ever Written, and It Still Sucks”

“Even though the ship may go down, the journey goes on.” ― Margaret Mead

PETIT TRIANON Florida—(Weekly Hubris)—1/5/2015—I have survived the past 17 months by taking notes. In my head.

As Oliver Sacks, the great humanist-neurologist writes, “To be ourselves we must have ourselves—possess, if need be re-possess, our life-stories. We must ‘recollect’ ourselves, recollect the inner drama, the narrative, of ourselves. A man [well, anyone, really] needs such a narrative, a continuous inner narrative, to maintain his identity, his self.”

Recollect, but not, it seems, often in tranquility.

I thought, before Our Great Peregrination—with all my husband’s vast, collected musical chattels—that if I did not sort of hum my own inner narrative to myself as I went along, I would simply cease to exist. No great loss, in the greater scheme of things, and certain to happen, sooner or later but, for the nonce, I was the designated driver, and needed to keep my wits about me.

At the beginning of this voyage, which has lasted somewhat longer than a year, we were residents of Greater Metropolitan New York, separated from the Mother Lode (Manhattan) by bridge and tunnel. At the tail end of the long, weird trip, we find ourselves camping out in what was not so long ago a patch of flat, dry dirt shaded (if fortunate) by a citrus tree: north-central Florida.

To conflate the words of Oliver Sacks and Temple Grandin (about whom Sacks has written), I am always either an anthropologist on Mars, or an anthropologist from Mars. Oft times, I vacillate rapidly between the two, but one thing is a constant: wherever I find myself will seem, to me, like Mars. And Mars is not, was never, my home planet. Wherever I travel in the land of my birth, I am out of step, a bit like John Cleese attempting the polka or George W. Bush negotiating a (any) door in China.

Fifteen years among the Shtreimel-and-Tzitzit-bedecked, the just-off-the-jet Sub-Continentals, the middle managers in their Beemers, and the rightly disgruntled in toto African-Americans of Teaneck, New Jersey, I was a stranger in a strange land. Now, newly arrived in a place I call Petit Trianon, amongst the mouse-ears-wearing octogenarians, the single-toothed rural Floridian poor, the golfers and the Mah-Jongg and the pickleball enthusiasts, I am, once again, a square, blue peg in a decidedly round, red hole. (If socialism has a color—puce? magenta? ashes of roses? —I am a socialist/progressive-colored peg—octagonal? —in a round hole.)

I’ve been back in the US from Europe since 1991, and have never truly settled anywhere, but the past year has distilled my alienation and discomfiture down to a fine essence.

Oddly enough, I haven’t been so cheerful since 1991.

Though, since August of last year, I have felt myself ever more keenly a displaced if note-taking refugee from a galaxy far, far away (at sea, up a creek, out on a limb, off the reservation, beside myself, and all over the map), I’ve also stopped struggling. After you clamber onto a roller-coaster and the gears engage, what else can you do but laugh and hold on? When going straight to hell, rock that hand-basket. 

In the summer of 2013, following my husband’s participation in the reunion of the late-1970s Buddy Rich big band, aka Killer Force [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kXjrxLDZ2pU and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BAdOWzyJ0MY], and after almost two years of searching, fruitlessly, for “enough space” and “low-enough taxes” somewhere within striking distance of New York, Dean and I finally threw in the towel and accepted the fact that we could no longer afford to live on the doorstep of the great city my husband has called home since his 20s.

Manhattan had priced him out long ago. Then, from Brooklyn, he had moved to jazz-musician-friendly Bergen County. Now, New Jersey, sub-sub-urban New York State, and Connecticut had priced both of us out. There wasn’t a moment of truth for us but, after six eye surgeries and two abominable, snowy winters in Teaneck, we made one of those gobsmacking decisions only victims of the Potato Famine, the Plague of Locusts, or The Dirty Thirties (Google it) make. One day, we were looking at maps of the Tri-State, struggling to see where we had, perhaps, not waited 20 years too late to investigate relocating (nowhere, it proved); the next day, we said, together, “We have to get out of here. Way out of here.”

Since only one of us still retains living nuclear-family-of-origin members (all of them, in fact), it seemed immensely logical to “go home,” as it were, and give Dean (who, in 1968, went on the road with Jimmy Dorsey’s Orchestra, under the direction of Lee Castle), a chance to be with his next of kin. He would commute north to New York once a month to keep his and his brother’s big band going, but he (and his 12,000 LPs and 7,000 CDs and our c. 1,000 books, not to speak of Luis Orozco’s enormous oil paintings) would reside . . . elsewhere.

You know how you strike a match and then discover how close you are to a fire accelerant?

We had never expected the house to sell as quickly as it did.

However, we had also never expected to land a 6’2” (well, in heels) Hungarian realtor out of Wyckoff.

Maryanne Elsaesser said, “Dean, what do you want for this place?” He told her. And then, we put the house on the market, fully expecting to languish, and shovel snow, and make payments on our c. $14,000. in %$#@ Teaneck taxes till spring, at least.

What we did to get the house ready to show was the first indication of the Bataan Death March just ahead of us. Consider that, given my Deeply-Southern and only-child inheritances-of-stuff, we had enough furniture to create a sink hole under several houses. Maryanne’s “stager” cast a cold eye on our three floors and a basement crammed with Victorian, early-19^th-century, and Mid-Century stuff, and we suddenly found ourselves giving away, selling, auctioning, and simply abandoning fully 2/3s of our possessions, creating a sparkling, spare, Spartan environment for  . . . those who flock to open houses.

Maryanne said, prior to the first open house, and the first shooing us out of our own front door: “What will you settle for, Dean?” He told her.

“I’ve got this, Dean,” she responded, and did she ever.

Dear Reader, the very first two persons to see the house made offers. In mid-September. And they stuck to them, and raised them.

Dean looked around at our some 12 rooms stuffed silly with records, CDs, charts, books, filing cabinets, musical instruments (we had two thought-to-be unmovable pianos), and lay down on the floor.

I, instead, got on the horn to my high school buddy, Jean Nolan, who works for an immense moving company on The Right Coast, and got an estimate for a white-glove move. (We were taking with us 12,000 jazz LPs, I reiterate, and that was only a third of the pile.) Jean’s local factotum came by, sized up our (to me) then-pristine, drafty-looking dwelling, and came back with a quote of $22,000.

This writer lay down on the floor with her jazz musician husband and, Lo, we both wept. The white gloves then came right off and we got to work. We were going to pack all this stuff we still owned with our own de-conditioned hands (wrists, elbows, arms, and backs), and then we were going to find two-men-and-a-truck-times-about-20.

Through a friend of a friend of Roberta Lawrence, we located the twin companies (MovingStaffers.com and Upack.com) that would enable us to move without breaking the bank. Well, without breaking the bank quite as completely.

If I’d known before the movers arrived how much of the actual work of organizing, supervising, loading, and chattels-rescuing we’d be doing, even after packing about 99.9 percent of it ourselves . . . . Well, it’s a great good thing we don’t know many, many things in advance.

We speed-packed. Some 500-600 boxes, I estimate, in addition to what furniture we kept. Eventually, what we had held back in The Giant Purge filled 1 ½ moving vans. I have the exact cubic footage here somewhere, but who the hell cares? One and ½ moving vans should express the plenitude of the calamity.

Once Maryanne’s little bidding war for the house came to a satisfactory end, and the closing date was set, we began a non-stop shuttle to and from Lowe’s, Staples, UPS, The Container Store, and Home Depot, purchasing newsprint and boxes and china crates and tape. But, most especially, we placed order after order (as we discovered how many of the little buggers we actually needed) of U-Haul’s so-called “small box.” I discovered (through Google, of course) a man (one Billy Jam) who had moved 30,000 LPs from Queens to LA using U-Haul’s “small boxes.” In each of them, 100 LPs nestle perfectly. Box upon small box of those LPs now reside in our $250-a-month climate-controlled (it is Florida) storage unit. But not for long: we’re building shelves.

And if I tell you how much those shelves are going to cost us, you yourself would lie down on the floor and weep, but that’s a story for another time.

So. Add to all this mayhem (me, packing books and paintings and china, and calling Maryanne daily for succor and encouragement, and Dean, ever-so-slowly packing LPs and CDs and sheet music, mostly in the depths of the basement), Dean’s six concurrent eye surgeries, which occurred between the fall of 2013 and late fall of 2014, with house-showings and runs to Goodwill and the cashing-in-of-retirement-funds wedged in between glaucoma- and other eye specialists’ appointments (an entirely other saga, as well), and you will have some idea of the velocity at which we were both moving . . . seemingly in place.

But where were we going, you might ask? Where, indeed?

In darkest Florida, Dean’s mother was looking at houses for sale in her area. His sister, her significant other, Dean’s parents, Dean, and I would all be living within three miles of one another, but the original Mrs. Pratt was in search of the perfect, pre-owned (now there’s a thoroughly American descriptor) house. It had to have space for the LPs and CDs and sheet music and instruments and books, of course, if not two pianos. And it was a tall bill to fill, considering our monetary constraints.

Rosalie persisted, however, and the down payment was made in our name.

Now, I had not seen the house at this point, nor would I see it till the day we closed on it, December 1^st. Yes, there were some piss-poor photos on the realtor’s website, but what could Dean and I make of them, exhausted, one of us with healing-after-surgery peepers, peering at a computer screen (with our broken lumbar vertebrae wedged into whatever chairs we had left)? Or of the house’s surroundings? Or its grace points? Nada.

But here is yet another instance of that “not struggling” phenomenon I mention above in Paragraph 10. I thought: Rosalie’s a bona fide genius who, poor dear, knows her eldest son and daughter-in-law-from-Mars like the back of her hand. Also, having lived in Petit Trianon for some 30 years, herself, she knows the territory very well. Much better than any of her children, and much better than any of the area realtors. Deep in my heart, I knew Rosalie would do a fine job of finding for admittedly-difficult-me, as well as for Dean, the perfect house.

And she did. (That’s the happy ending to this story, but we’re really only halfway there.)

After the fact, here in situ at the end of December, Dean and I have just calculated the cost of the move, including Moving Staffers (the packing and loading crew), and U-Pack (the truck, etc.), plus all the materiel from The Container Store, UPS, U-Haul, Lowe’s and Home Depot, and it came out, in the final analysis, to $14,221.87. Not chump change, mind you, but also not $22,000.

We departed from home in Teaneck two days before Thanksgiving, and just a few more days before Dean’s 65^th birthday, neither of which events we would celebrate in our ungodly haste to get south in time to recuperate from the sale, the packing, and the loading before the vans arrived and we had to—and we knew what we were in for this time, or so we thought—do the whole thing over again, but backwards. (Shades of Ginger Rogers.)

In the event, we got as far as Delaware, my ancient SUV loaded to the gills with trumpets, cymbals, Mother’s fine silver and china, more trumpets, Dean’s important papers, and entirely the wrong clothing for either climate, the old, or the new, when, suddenly, the heat no longer seemed to be working and the car, which had never done such a thing in its 14 years, overheated.

Steaming, we limped into a Holiday Inn Express near Rising Sun, Maryland, bastion of the Ku Klux Klan (as we learned the next day).

We were both bone tired, the SUV was crammed with everything-tangible-we-felt-most-valuable, and it was the eve of the biggest holiday in America. We went down to the desk at first light, and the saintly people there took pity on us and began calling round to mechanics. Of course, everyone with a lug wrench was booked to the gills getting locals’ cars ready for the drive home to grandmother’s. There was no room in any bay for our alien vehicle, and no one willing to take on an ancient Ford with a failed thermostat.

However, also at the desk was a very young man—I called him the poor woman’s Brad Pitt—who said he knew a thing or two about cars and he’d be willing to come have a look.

The jazz trumpet player, the writer, and Master Pitt popped the hood, but beneath it was a problem obviously above our pay grade(s).

Warren—for that is the young man’s name—called his dad, Alex, of North East, Maryland, on his cell, and told us that his father, who could fix just about anything, would be over shortly.

Remember: this was now the day before Thanksgiving, in Maryland’s perhaps most-thoroughly-Redneck-county, and we were two extraordinarily white strangers stranded in a Holiday Inn parking lot with a feverish SUV full of valuables. Need I mention that we also looked like hell, and weren’t making a whole lot of sense due to exhaustion?

Alex—compact, middle-aged, very soft-spoken and African-American—appeared almost immediately in one of his own Fords, and . . . took over.

There were bits and pieces to procure from the auto parts store (blessedly open and nearby), and the SUV to get to Alex’s house and informal garage (also nearby, or we wouldn’t have made it). Warren went back to work at the hotel desk, and Alex, Dean, and I took off into the Maryland sticks. I don’t know what all he had planned for the day before his whole extended family met to cook and socialize, but he dropped everything, and spent hours and hours and hours in the freezing cold (it finally snowed the day following, by which time we’d made it to Central, South Carolina), but he tinkered and tinkered till he got the car running better than it had in a very long time.

While he worked, and I handed him tools, and Dean petted his black-and-white Persian cat, Alex talked to us, and so we got to know him better than we might have if we all hadn’t been swept up in a holiday emergency, he hadn’t been such an astonishingly generous and gregarious person, and the snow hadn’t been threatening.

It was all, in a way, a perfect storm and, after many grim personal disappointments in Teaneck, meeting this man in extremis was, for me, a gift with a price beyond rubies.

Alex was born very near where the Klan has its headquarters in Rising Sun, and he told us, with great good humor, that he just sort of lived-and-let-live among the good old boys. A surgical nurse, among other things, and a matchless mechanic, Alex will often help neighbors out with vehicles so, once, when he saw a known Klansman in the ditch with his truck, Alex stopped to help him out, too.

“Now, why would you help me?” demanded the man, astonished.

“Because you were in the ditch,” said Alex, evenly.

After repairs had been effected, the Klansman asked Alex out for a beer, but Alex demurred.

“I wasn’t going to go that far,” he told us.

My teeth were chattering as we stood there en masse beneath the sunless noontide of Maryland, but I knew that, from then on, things were going to get a lot better.

A day or so later, we got an email from our Good Samaritan, just checking to see if we’d made it south. We intend to stay in touch with Alex.

With a new thermostat, and after one full night of sleep at friend Ted Balk’s house in Central, we made it to Petit Trianon a few days ahead of the moving vans, which had to be driven in and dropped, one after the other, at our new house, which was located on a tiny cul-de-sac.

Of course, the hundreds of small boxes of LPs had to be decanted into a storage unit about five miles from the house, or we wouldn’t have been able to get in the door despite the house’s c. 2,500 square feet of floor space.

I still await a hotel bill slipped under the door here, as the house seems far too palatial for a pair of artists, atheists, and socialists. I keep thinking the desk will call up to say the next holiday occupants have arrived at the villa, and our own time is up. Thus far, though, no one’s tossed us out.

However, the move in in early December proved far more traumatic in terms of physical labor and nervous exhaustion than the move out in November, and much funnier.

Whereas we’d had a crew of five to seven, not including drivers, in New Jersey, three normal-sized men showed up to offload and unpack (at least some of) the boxes, at two locations. This took far, far longer than anyone had predicted, and, late, late on the second day, when we told the guys they could, indeed, have the four-person hot-tub on our so-called Lanaï if they could manage to get it out of the house and onto their truck, they decided they were up to the task.

Emptied of water, this behemoth weighed in at a thousand pounds, so some physics and figgerin’ were in order. This entire enterprise was undertaken after 9 p.m., in a no-creature-stirring, no-sounds-heard-after-dark gated community in north-central Florida, and involved three gleeful, raucous young men first end-over-ending the gigantic cyan-blue contraption across the St. Augustine grass, and then scooting it along, slowly, like a great spa-slug, using a couple of sheets of way-too-thin plywood and a piano slider.

After manhandling it to the back of the truck, the trio lifted it—I will never know how—into the vehicle, and decamped. Just before they left, I gave them every expensive knick-knack and gewgaw and piece of ceramic lawn art we’d found around and in the house when they arrived, and they were as thrilled with the decorative sconces and plaster gnomes and wee concrete benches inscribed with poems “To Mother” as they were the spa.

We are a decidedly odd species.

So, here we are. On Mars. And I find, suddenly, that I’ve forgotten over half the unforgettable things I meant to record about this long, strange odyssey, which is probably a very good thing.

I do want to thank so, so many people who helped us along the way: Jean Nolan, who comforted and coaxed from afar about the move’s being doable; Maryanne, who transformed Dean, seemingly overnight, from a happy home-owner to a happy home-seller; Sharon and George, who collected everything I needed to sell on eBay and are in the process of selling it; all of the men and women of U-Pack and ABF Freight, who made it possible for two starving artists to take some of it with them; and, most of all, Rosalie Pratt, who found the perfect house, and made it possible for all the various dominoes to fall, neatly, in a long, graceful row, when none of us really thought we could pull the whole thing off, in any way, at both ends. Thank you from deep within our hearts, Rosalie.

And Alex and Warren, who saw us in the ditch, fallen at almost the last gate, and helped us up.

Alex, this is no mere postscript here: at this particular time in human history, when we all pretty much know homo sapiens has done for the planet, and it’s really “too late” for us all, and at this particular time in American history, when almost everyone has given up on the races’ living together in love and harmony as Dean and you and I seem to know it must be, and can be, you restored so much of my faith in people’s basic decency and ability to rise to the occasion with grace, generosity, and good humor, that I cannot put it into words: you were our Thanksgiving gift. As we will never forget this wretched, gut-wrenching move, we will also never forget your kindness.

The anthropologist has finally written up what field notes she can remember, and you and Rosalie are the star players in our autumn saga.