That darn cat.
The tabby cared not that the once-furnished domain was now barren. We could take away the bedding and the collections and the clothing piles, but we couldn’t take away the sunshine through the window. Unless we hung the curtains back up. Which was tempting, just to be spiteful.
Last night around 12:30 in the morning was the last time I’ll ever step foot in the home where I grew up. After forty-one years my mother finally made the tough decision to downscale to a smaller, more affordable place for the sake of long-term retirement planning and easier living space management.
My wife, my son, and I spent six hours Saturday helping her pack and fifteen hours Sunday helping her move. With just the four of us working on it, and with her unable to lift anything heavier than a bag of groceries, it was extremely slow going. By the time I called it a night around 1 a.m., I could hardly stand to look at my old bedroom anymore. That was partly because I was tired of being there, partly because I was just plain tired, and partly because by the time we hollowed it out…well, as my son put it while we stood there surveying the room one last time, it looked like the set of a disturbing horror film.
Behold the encyclopedia that time forgot!
What we have here is a complete, 29-volume set of the 1983 Funk & Wagnalls Encyclopedia. This product was sold through Marsh Supermarkets to discerning shoppers at the rate of one new volume every week until their collection was complete and informational victory was achieved. For a little extra you could buy single companion volumes such as a medical encyclopedia, a legal encyclopedia, and the Funk & Wagnalls Hammond World Atlas in case you wanted to see all of the USSR or learn what kind of currency was used in Zaire.
Up until a couple weeks ago, my mom still had all twenty-nine volumes on her shelf, thirty years after the original purchase. Just in case.
Three weeks ago on a milestone Monday, this was the scene in our driveway. Our morning was spent using our combined physical forces and my amazing Tetris powers to cram all my son’s possessions into a U-Haul truck for his big move up to college. (We also tossed in a few pieces of bonus ugly furniture for his meager quality-of-living peace of mind that we won’t miss anyway.)
Instead of the standard dorm experience that I’m told millions of Americans thrive on each year, his domicile of choice for the next four years or until catastrophe strikes will be a modest, off-campus apartment. This sort of drastic lifestyle change would require more than a few suitcases and tote bags.
Dramatic reenactment of the horrors we witnessed. (photo credit: Clevergrrl via photopin cc)
My son is a high school senior preparing to transform into a college freshmen as of fall 2013. This weekend we took a road trip to the city where he’ll theoretically spend the next four years learning, growing, and becoming greater than his parents. Our family mission: scope out potential apartments for him. Due to the long list of issues that living on campus would present (on which we won’t be elaborating here — suffice it to say this is our family’s decision), his only hope for avoiding a seventy-mile daily commute will be to negotiate off-campus housing. To that end, I found a lead on a pair of potential pads at shockingly competitive prices in a wide market that’s nearly sold out as a whole for the upcoming semester. My wife and I, dutiful and curious folks that we are, drove my son up there for a pair of apartment showings to ensure we wouldn’t be exporting him and his possessions into Avon Barksdale’s prized Towers from The Wire.
Like first-world anthropologists stepping tentatively into the native habitat of an otherworldly culture, we three ventured into each of the two available cribs, whose current tenants would be finishing their current leases in time for my son’s arrival in town. None of us knew what to expect and hadn’t really prepared ourselves. Judging by the conditions we tiptoed around, neither had the tenants.
Midlife Crisis Crossover! 