M2NYi30ES – Moving Day

Moving day arrived in late June.  See, residents and fellows all start July 1.  This is why you don’t want to go to the hospital in early July.  Brad and Brent and Brittany and Betty Sue are all standing around, trying to look competent while their palms sweat, having suddenly become aware that they don’t know anything about medicine, much less the human condition in general.  They know how to sit in class, they know how to read and study, they have cut up dead people, but those skills won’t do you much good with whatever medical condition brought you to them.

The other thing about late June is that it’s hot, and it rains a lot.  Ah, the rain.  Loading our rental truck, unloading said truck, stopping briefly to check whether things had shifted in transit–all of these were occasions for a downpour.  It was uncanny, but again, the uncanniness came from the fact that we didn’t yet fully comprehend the star-crossed nature of this particular expedition.  Had I known what I know now, I would have opened an umbrella each time I reached for the latch on the truck’s back door.

How anything in that load had anywhere to shift was a matter for speculation, so full had we crammed that truck.  Of course, that was after hours of delay to get the brakes fixed the morning of moving day.  See, when I got into the truck at the rental lot that morning, and be aware, this was after waiting 40 minutes past their opening time for the guys to actually open the gate, I pressed the brake pedal and found that it traveled about four inches until it finally started to have any effect.  The pedal firmed up and started working about a half-inch from the floorboards.  I was loath to take off on a drive of 350 miles over unknown highways in a fully loaded truck with brakes in that condition.  I told them about it, they checked it out, and reluctantly decided that, yes, this was unacceptable.  They worked on it, or said they did, for the better part of four hours, and according to them, they replaced the master cylinder and fully checked it out.

This delay meant getting a much later-than-anticipated start, but I felt that it had been for the better…until I tried the brakes and found that the exact same thing happened, just as before.  I had to admit that the brakes did stop the truck, though, eventually, if you were patient, and half the day was gone.  I decided it was “all systems go.”  I never worked for NASA.  Perhaps it is clear now why not.  Risk averse?  Not I.  This move had to happen.  That day.

Coming back to the house under the ever-present threatening skies, I made a mental exercise of figuring out the best order for packing our stuff.  It was going to be tight, and the packing job would have to be efficient.

Well, it was efficient; a cockroach would not have been able to get comfortable in there; but that didn’t mean we could fit all our belongings into that truck and the aforementioned doughty Geo Prism.  After much packing, unpacking, and repacking, I had to admit that it just wasn’t all going to fit.  This was a grim realization.  We had rented the last truck on the lot, so this discovery would necessitate a return round trip, from NYC to Cville and back, even after the rigors of our initial move, to retrieve the last of our stuff.  This was to be an extra 700 miles in a tiny car, half of which would become all the more challenging in that the said tiny car would be completely crammed with the rest of our possessions.

But I am getting ahead of the story, and that would be to neglect the tales and reflections of several of the less popular shades from Dante’s Inferno.  We must let those people speak.  So, “Let us go then, you and I,” for the rest of the saga.

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