By Bob Stevens, the Muddled Male
Well Ann, my wife, finally won and we moved off the hill. You would think that moving for us would be a snap since we have moved thirteen times in our sixty years of marriage. But looking back it is obvious that a series of moves over time doesn't make the next move any easier. Time and the temptation to hoard conspire to make every succeeding move more difficult.
When we were first married everything we owned fit in the back seat and trunk of a small car and could be moved in one trip. The next move required us to add Ann’s dad and his old International pickup along with our small car. Two relocations later the move had escalated to needing Ann’s parents to pull a trailer full of our things behind their Desoto. Our moves after that escalated from needing a small Uhaul, to needing a large Uhaul, to needing multiple large Uhauls. Aging, I have decided, infects us with the tendency to accumulate stuff. While that is what helps keep our economy humming, it also puts us in a situation where moving to a different home is only possible if each home is larger (and more expensive) than the preceding home so that there is room both for all the old stuff we haul from our previous house and the new stuff that we will inevitably buy each time we discover something we can’t live without.
One of our tougher moves, as I remember, was the time we sold a house we had been living in for more than twenty years and were within three years of having the mortgage paid off. That was the same home that we had purchased for $16,000 with monthly payments of $121/month. Then we moved into a larger home that we purchased for $127,000. It came with a thirty year, $83,000 mortgage, payments of more than $800/month, and lots of storage space for more stuff. I was physically sick during the entire transaction and Ann had to do the move without me. Luckily she had help from her sister and brother-in-law, because I was emotionally incapacitated and spent my time curled up in the fetal position, laying on the floor, whimpering.
Well this time we were moving from a large home to a smaller home with a smaller mortgage and smaller monthly payments, but I was still incapacitated. The cause of this move’s anguish was old age and fear of a hernia. Luckily our son still has big muscles and an innate skill for packing miscellaneous and odd sized things in a way that keeps them from shifting and rattling around the truck as we careen down Logan Canyon on the way to our new home. We also had help from other family members who are blessed with the special skills needed to shepherd Ann and I through this very painful experience. Our youngest daughter “The Bully,” for example, is a take-charge type who keeps things moving while constantly barking out commands like, “You don’t need that any more, just get rid of it” as she quickly stuffs things randomly into boxes based on fit, not the order in which we might need to use them once we are in our new home. To make things more stressful the Bully was working with her tutor, Ann’s niece, who was also stuffing and giving orders to keep the move progressing quickly forward. Ann and I just wandered aimlessly from room to room ringing our hands and whimpering, “Oh what have we done, oh what have we done” which didn't really accomplish anything except to keep us out of everyone else’s way.
So now we sit here in our new home with a garage full of boxes plus more boxes scattered throughout our living space, and we don’t know what is in any one of them. To add to the challenge they are marked with cryptic notes like Miscellaneous Den Stuff, or Electronic Things from Dad’s Closet. The biggest challenge of all, however, comes when a random box is opened to reveal something that we didn’t remember we had, we can’t remember ever needing one in the eight years we lived here, but now we know we have it we are convinced that we better find a place to store it in case we need it in the future.
One thing positive that came from the move is that my friend, the Professor, gave me a bright red Tee shirt with a Logo printed on the front that said, “QUESTION AUTHORITY BUT DO NOT QUESTION BOB.” The other day I stopped in at McDonalds for a sandwich and when the young lady behind the counter told me the cost and collected my money she failed to ask me for my name so that she could call to me when our order was ready. As I walked away wondering she said, “I assume your name is Bob?” And now everyone in town knows me as Bob which, Ann says, is better than calling me Boob, like she does. Just as long as they don’t find out that other name the Professor gave me, “Hombre Confuso.”
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