Packing

Tuesday—At home, everything is a mess, but I'm trying not to let it bother me. I'm packing books and CDs and DVDs and LPs—even a few dozen 78s—and thinking ahead to the repainting and cleaning up that I'll need to do before I can put this condo on the market. Frankly, it's a daunting prospect. I'm lucky that I have friends who are willing to help out, and in fact have been helping out for the past couple of weekends.

There are 36 cartons piled up in the living room, looking rather like the Great Pyramid of Cheops under construction. They're waiting to be crammed into the tiny 5' x 10' storage room I've rented for $65 a month at a nearby U-Haul storage facility, along with the 15 cartons already there. There's major pressure to make sure everything fits into this space—at that price, I really don't want to rent a second room! For that reason, each carton is packed as full as practicable (just as it says on the Ritz crackers box)...which means that each one weighs a ton. Getting them down the stairs one box at a time is a backbreaking job. I have hand trucks, but they don't help much.

It's hard physical labor. I always try to be careful ("lift with your legs, not with your back"), but in a job of this magnitude you inevitably get tired and careless at some point. Two weeks ago I pulled a muscle in my side, and for the next few days I suffered from sudden, intense muscle spasms that made me double over and grunt in pain. It was pretty embarrassing, since I had two sets of company coming to visit that weekend. Fortunately, my back's OK now, and I'm trying even harder to be careful.

Packing is emotional too. It's very hard saying goodbye to all my books. I've always been a voracious reader, and my small apartment had five big bookcases filled to bursting with every kind of book: art, technology, science fiction, animation, children's books, dictionaries and language books... Putting them in cartons, knowing that I won't see them again for many years, is like saying goodbye to dear friends.

And of course I'll be doing that too. I have elderly friends, close ones, whom I may literally never see again. That's a chilling thought. I have younger friends with whom I'll (of course) promise to keep in touch, but who knows how long that will last? My former officemate Lou, who changed jobs and moved away a year ago, isn't much for writing letters, so I often don't hear from him for months at a time. On the other hand, my officemate Holly, who moved away a few months ago, emails me several times a day—we're actually better friends now than when we worked together in the same room.

It's hard to predict. The people with whom I already have email correspondence are the ones I'm most likely to stay in touch with. The ones I just talk to daily at work...well, we'll have to try to make the transition to email. I know from experience that sometimes that works, and sometimes the conversation just peters out. I know I'll be making new friends out there on the road, but I also know I'll be losing some old ones. I hope this website will help keep my old friends in touch with me. Perhaps being able to read about my travels will make them feel as if I'm still part of their lives. (Or maybe I'm just being egocentric—who knows whether they'll want to read these ramblings?)