Garbage day

Baņuta: Some twenty years ago my late husband and I sold our house in Toronto and moved with the kids to Riga, Latvia. We were going to stay there for the rest of our lives, that was the plan. Nic and I had renovated a spectacular apartment. It was on the fifth floor and there was no service elevator. When our stuff finally arrived from Canada, the poor movers had to lug all of it up those stairs; they all looked like veteran alcoholics, and at a certain point, refused to continue unless we paid them a lot more than had been agreed upon. Oh yeah, we paid. One object was very large and lumpy. We had no idea what it was and unwrapped it with growing anticipation.

It was several bags of garbage from my parents’ house at York Mills and Bayview, which the Canadian movers had carefully packaged and sent across the Atlantic.

An entire box never made it to our Riga apartment; customs wouldn’t release it; and at some point Nic simply went by himself to the warehouse with a big knife and cut it open and removed the contents and nobody ever said anything.

We didn’t plan to ever move back to Toronto, yet we did, under circumstances I don’t want to recall here; too dramatic; too depressing. Suffice it to say that Nic had been told he had seven to twelve months left to live.

So when we found that house at 36 Mayfield it felt like a miracle. It was an honest-to-goodness haven and ten years later, as I was packing up and saying goodbye, the ghost of Nic and the echoes of our family’s laughter haunted me. I have a memory of him standing behind a door, getting ready to prank one of the kids, his finger at his lips, shushing me. I kept seeing his mischievous self every time I climbed the stairs to get the scissors or the tape I’d forgotten. In fact, it’s only because of this move that I finally sold his saxophone, handed over his pool cue, divested myself of most of his CDs. I wasn’t really prepared for how painful that felt, he died ten years ago, after all, but it was like I was ripping off one final bandaid, because now, for the first time, I’m living somewhere Nic has never been.

There came a point in the packing when just the sight of another drawer full of objects made me want to vomit. How could there still be more things? How much could we give to Value Village? I lost my temper at Alan spectacularly, at least once, incensed by his assertion that there wasn’t that much left to pack. If he said something would take three hours to pack, I would say it took nine if not fifteen. If our intrepid friend Inga hadn’t come to help empty the kitchen, I would have been stuffing objects into boxes until dawn including someone’s body parts.

I don’t have great stories from moving day. Alan fell on the door which fell on the upside down table because the door was removed from the hinges in order to squeeze the refrigerator out of the house. He landed elegantly on all fours and none of the glass in the door was broken, but there was a moment when I thought, okay, now we’re screwed for the rest of the day. The only way we were screwed was financially. The movers charged us more than double the fee they had quoted. They were noticably fast in the first hour and then very slow afterwards. There was a kerfaffle around how many objects did they actually move. Alan and I are still arguing about this so I will not expand.

Door and fridge saga

We have a friend who was also moving this week, and something went wrong and he had a meltdown. As he regaled us with his story, he said ‘let’s just say none of us were our best selves this week.’

Good thing that week is over. Now Alan, Keely and I are ensconced in 188 Mavety and our best selves should emerge soon. They’re in one of the 500 boxes I think. The one under the one that’s past the two chairs next to the plant behind the 25 lb barbell close to the dryer. I’ll get to it, eventually.

PS I forgot to mention the Great Ordeal suffered by Oreo the cat. As soon as the movers arrived, I locked him into the bathroom with food and water which he promptly knocked over. What did I do to deserve this? was the general tenor of his wails which would die down now and then, but always return. Once Keely’s room was emptied, we could move him into her room where she hung out with him, so he was much happier, also because he discovered catnip. Then my room got emptied and the two of them decamped there and he actually purred. He is an outdoors cat but we have kept him indoors at Mavety and one of the four bathrooms has been surrendered to him.

Alan: Baņuta’s closet is fabulous.  I know I wrote about it before but I hadn’t seen it with clothes in it. Even on the second day in our new digs with nothing in its right place and crap on the floor and boxes everywhere, as I sit on the edge of her bed and face the magnificence of this closet, I’m utterly incredulous. How is it that modest renters like us have something this luxurious? And I’m almost jealous. It wouldn’t make sense for me to have a closet like that. I wouldn’t have anything to put in a closet like that.

That reminds me of a joke I once heard a female comedian tell. I don’t know why it matters that she was female but somehow it makes it funnier to me. I think it’s because, back then anyway, the sad sack single girl was something you saw much less frequently than the sad single guy. Which I was at the time when I heard the joke, that went something like this: “I have a king size bed to myself’, she said (and so did I) “but don’t feel bad for me, it saves a lot of space; I sleep on one side and on the other side I keep canned goods”.

Which is just to say I wouldn’t need a closet as fabulous as Baņuta’s’s which I have no doubt she will fill.  She just told me in delight that she used to put her summer clothes in the basement or somewhere, during the winter but now all her differently seasoned clothes can go in the closet. I was going to say that I don’t have summer and winter clothes but that would be disingenuous. I actually have three pairs of shorts I keep under the bed. I guess they would fit in my modest closet but I plan to fill it with old mixed tapes and canned pineapple.

So we’re here. And it’s pretty good. We’re excited at the possibilities. I’ve never cared much about light. Years of driving cab at night and sleeping all day makes light your enemy. But now that I’m a citizen with a fancy girlfriend and a daughter I guess light is a good thing. I don’t know why we have so much light or why I notice it.   

Maybe it’s because there’s an empty lot across the street from us? I remember someone once telling me that such a thing is bad feng shui but you can’t have everything. Maybe the bad feng shui is the reason the rent is pretty reasonable. There’s also a lot of light in my room at the back of the house. There’s a converted church a block away. Maybe that’s where the light comes from.

Baņuta just said something really funny about how happy you can get just to find a mundane object, while unpacking your moving boxes. I just uncovered a spoon and I wanted to do a little dance. First thing this morning I did a hard target search for a bottle of Tylenol. Why I didn’t tape it to my body that first night, I’ll never know.  I knew I’d have a stress headache. I knew it would keep me up. I knew it would come because usually with me, the ache comes after the thing that’s stressing me is over and it can really make its point. But I really didn’t have my wits about me the day we moved and I didn’t get a chance to have the thought “what are the two or three things you know you’re going to need tonight?”

The day before the move was kind of like the day before surgery. Like the endoscopy I had twice, from the doctor with zero bedside manner who never gave me quite enough anesthetic to prevent me from waking up in the middle of the procedure.

But that’s another story.  I’m not sure the surgery metaphor works because we’d both have to be going in for surgery, which is something we probably wouldn’t schedule.  And the day before surgery you don’t have to work that fucking hard.

Post-surgery

I didn’t think the last day would be that hard.  When Baņuta said she was having a friend help her pack up the kitchen, I thought the kitchen was mostly done. The day before I’d packed up four boxes with jars of beans and various dried legumes.  To me it was like an anthropological dig. Baņuta says we use them all the time. And no I didn’t think that the four boxes of dried pea pods was all of it but I had no idea of how deep it could get.

Anyway let’s just say the day before was anxiety-ridden. I didn’t think anything would go wrong, I just couldn’t fucking wait for it to be over.

And now that the move is over, I can’t say anything major went wrong, but a lot of it didn’t go right. The movers were recommended to us by my ex-wife’s boyfriend who moved in with her a week or so before. When my ex showed up to drop off my daughter, the movers recognized her and kind of did a double take. 

And they were all very nice young men. But there’s all this shit they won’t do or don’t want to do. It’s all about this thing called liability. For instance, they will take the TV off the mount but they won’t take the mount off the wall, presumably so they won’t get sued for the holes in the wall that you made four years ago when you installed it. Or they’ll take apart Ikea furniture but they won’t put it back together again “unless it’s a bed”.

I had to practically beg them to take apart my Ikea record shelf, which they eventually broke into tiny pieces and left that way in our house.

I don’t want to libel them but all I can say is if you hire the company that sends some male creatures and a truck, I suggest you hire another company called “one man who will do all the shit your moving company won’t do”, or you’ll be screwed..

Nice sweatshirt

They loved to wrap things, I’ll tell you that. Plastic wrap . They wrap dressers so the drawers won’t fall out. I watched them wrap our couch and their fifth time around I was thinking “the last time I saw that much plastic wrap was in an S&M video”.

But seriously, do you have to be so thorough to prevent a couple of couch pillows from shifting while in the meantime you’re just leaving various objects where they are because when they asked me to estimate how many objects we had, I was off by a whole bunch. Fine, pick it up, put it in the truck, take an extra minute and charge me for it rather than spending the same amount of time telling me why you’re not picking it up.

Baņuta and I were so exhausted from the day and the week before and from all the anticipation, and all the sheer physical work of packing and moving things ourselves.  And we’re sitting there and they’re moving the stuff and you want to feel relief – the day has finally arrived, it’s happening, they’re finally emptying the house, tonight we’ll be in our new place – but you just can’t feel any relief until it’s over. So you sit there in the dull ache of limbo and pray for the day to end.

I could see that Baņuta was feeling stress so a few hours into it I tried to cheer her up by saying “Honey, we haven’t gotten there but at least we’re on the plane”.  To which she replied “It’s more like we just got to the gate”.

And it turned out she was right.  It went ten hours that day and we didn’t even finish the move. We’ve got another three hours booked for a couple of days from now.

The Kallax Conundrum

But we’re here in the house. And when we more or less decided that the couch will go in the middle of the room with its back to the dining room table rather than at the window looking back into the room -  – shout out to Kaiva, whose idea this was -  we sat on that couch, looked out the window, and it was like we finally landed. The view wasn’t much to speak of, it was just a nice place to sit.  And though we were surrounded by boxes and chaos, we could see that our old things were looking better than ever against the gray blandness of the walls and floor. The couch looked better than I’ve ever seen it look. The two dark brown bookcases, which had never looked that good in the old place, somehow looked at home here. 

We have come across a couple of very strange idiosyncrasies, the skeptic in me is afraid our phantom landlord will inform us, through his emissaries, that “this is what you rented, live with it” and so if you talk to us two months from now, we may sing another story.

But for now, I’m trying to be positive. The landlord will go “Oh no, that cannot stand” and fix everything. Or maybe we will just decide to live with spotty heat and unreliable showers in order to keep the things we love. 

I already love the kitchen for instance. I have this egg pan that my late friend Mike made me buy but every time I used it on Mayfield I wanted to throw it out.  When we were filling bags during the move and taking them to Value Village, I suggested to Baņuta we throw out that pan but she said let’s keep it till we can replace it.  I fried an egg today on the new stove and it worked like a dream. 

Everything is reborn on Mavety.

What I’m trying to say is that It's a nice place.  It’s comfortable. I think we made a good decision.  We can be happy here. It was worth the long search to end up in this house.

As I write this, tomorrow is Baņuta’s birthday.  And because of that I know that a few days from now, it will be five years since we had our first date – a couple of old farts who thought finding love again was still possible.

Even the fridge is reborn at Mavety