Greetings, friends. (LXVI)

Greetings, friends. Everything is packed in the truck. Spoiler alert: It all fit.

Also, the Brooklyn Half Marathon is being run as I write this. Naturally, I am not running in it.

Of course, I am getting ahead of myself. Last Wednesday night, I took a red eye to Philadelphia on the first leg of my trip to finish the work of clearing out my mother’s house and packing everything worth keeping into Leto II of the House Atreides, God Emperor of Arrakis and the Known Universe, or Shai-Hulud for short.

The purpose was to meet up with Shipley in Reading PA, see Mastodon & Gojira double-headlining the Santander Arena, then drive to New Hampshire, spend an evening burning my old school papers, and then he would drive home the next day.

I was tired after the red-eye but I made it through the show, which was fine. I got to hang out with Nicole and their kid Josie which is always great.

Then we had dinner on Friday evening with my sister Kate and her partner Damon. Kate gave me a bag of Erle family photos that represented the best of everything we found in our grandmother’s literal shoebox of photos after she died — you know, all the photographs that weren’t of sunsets, or random landscapes, or family friends now rendered anonymous by the passage of time, or loved ones blinking or coughing or generally looking unattractive. I took the photos because my plan was to scan all six boxes of Burnston family photos when I got to Epsom, so I figured I’d just do them all at once.

Matt and I drove the seven hours to Epsom relatively uneventfully, except that it took like twelve hours. Along the way we talked and talked like we hadn’t done in years and reminisced and generally ruminated over everything like we were back in school again, talking over each other in endless rapid-fire branching tangents and eccentric loops, like Cassady and Kerouac. It felt good.

We stopped at a hardware store and bought a steel fire pit for the ritual burning of all my bad teenage poetry and even worse fiction and love letters from heart-aching high school romances and report cards and all the greeting cards sent to my mom when I was born and all the random paper detritus from the first half of my life.

By the time we got to Epsom, it was cold and we were exhausted and we barely got halfway through the papers. I had wanted to linger over the act, revisit the bad poetry and even worse fiction and the heartaching romances one last time before I consigned the material evidence to oblivion, in favor of the much more compact reference of human memory. We did that for a while and talked about the people we knew and all the way-back-whens. I remembered writing some of the poetry but I was glad to be rid of it forever. The experience was good but all too brief. By 3 a.m. we had to call it quits.

The following day was Mother’s Day and I went to the cemetery in Manchester. Adah had texted me: “I found the cemetery quiet but weird. There’s no grass from where they dug the grave so there’s like a Mom sized hole. But I felt good to do it.”

Oh well. The Jewish cemetery wasn’t the only place you’d find a Mom sized hole.

So I brought Mom a bottle of tea tree oil and a sewing machine bobbin I found with brown thread still wound around it and a large smooth stone from the brook out back of the house that she loved so much. I said Kaddish over her grave even though you’re supposed to have a minyan for it. I thought about pouring out the bottle of tea tree oil over her grave, the same stuff Mom used to spray everywhere because she thought she was infested with rodent mites when it was more likely an auto-immune condition destroying the proteins binding her skin together. The house always reeked of the stuff and Adah and I both hated it. Then I decided the tea tree oil would probably kill the few shoots of grass just barely starting to sprout over her grave, so I just left the bottle with the stone and bobbin.

The next few days were an absolute blur of sorting and packing and cleaning. I couldn’t find the Erle photos in my luggage and neither could Matt in his car. I had a sickening feeling I’d carelessly thrown them into some gas station garbage bin between Allentown and Manchester in an excess of car-tidying zeal. I spent a little while trying to scan the Burnston photos and found that I had no heart for it.

Moreover I had no time. I had decided to leave on Saturday (i.e. today) in order to have a little time to visit people on the way out west, and spend sometime in Yellowstone and Grand Teton, and still get back to Portland before Memorial Day.

All of which meant I was going to miss the half marathon in Brooklyn. I couldn’t see any way around it. The house sale closes, insh’allah, next Wednesday. I needed this weekend to drive. I promised myself I would keep training and sign up for another half marathon later on in the year, one that wasn’t the same week that Adah and I were selling our late mother’s house.

So I was taking the Burnston photos with me to Portland, a thing I had said I would not do because all of my family is here on the East Coast. Worse, I was already convinced that there wouldn’t be enough room in the Tacoma for everything, especially not with crates of family photos on top of everything else.

Cursed family photos. Preserve your memories, they’re all that’s left you. My heart ached for the missing Erle photos, the ones I’d thrown away. All this effort to preserve all of these memories, and I’d thrown away a hundred of father’s family’s best photographs spanning 75 years in a moment of abject carelessness. It made all the work of the last few months feel hollow and small. I tried to take it for a lesson in impermanence. All these moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.

Worse still, I still had no answer for what to do with my Great-Grandma Adele’s glass coffee table. A wee, fragile thing, in baroque handcarved hardwood. Probably a hundred years old and way too passé for Adah or anyone else in the family to want. I couldn’t bear to simply get rid of it.

Tuesday I woke up to find a text message from Brian the Liquidator: “Good morning I’m currently sitting in front of the house but I don’t see anything on the porch hopefully you’re up.” I was not, strictly speaking, being prone and still in my underwear.

I had been expecting him to come for the bed and mattress and boxspring and desk and chair the following Tuesday. Apparently we had miscommunicated. I helped him haul it all outside, the mattress still warm where I’d been sleeping on it. Then I moved all my stuff into the library and set up the air mattress there. As much of a phase change as when I had moved downstairs from the guest room.

Then I said goodbye to Brian the Liquidator, probably forever. I gave him another hundred bucks to get rid of the remaining junk. He turned out to be a good guy.

Wednesday and Thursday I did at least four garbage dump runs and drove all over Concord and environs on countless errands before and after work. Everything had to be precisely ordered and orchestrated. Here I have to skip over whole dramas in the interest of brevity, like trying to take the treadmill apart and get it downstairs, or trying to disassemble the massive oak trestle dining table my father built 50 years ago, or shipping a huge pile of late 20th century books on random Judaic subjects to Tikva’s mom, or trying to weather seal the cap and bed of the pickup truck, or trying to figure out how to sell a pair of Hogarth prints on short notice.

The whole experience has been like moving house, except it’s not my house and not my stuff. Except it is my stuff now.

The other thing that happened Thursday was that late in the evening Shipley texted me a photo of some things he found under his car seat: Some resealable freezer bags and a bag of Goldfish crackers. The plastic bags were the ones containing all my Erle family photos. I literally jumped up and down cheering and maybe cried a little. I thought I was going to have to live forever with the guilt of losing those photos. All these moments will still be lost in time eventually, but not just yet.

“FYI, I will be consuming the Goldfish,” Shipley wrote.

Adele’s table was still proving to be a pain. UPS wanted $675 to pack and ship it anywhere. On my father’s advice I was able to disassemble it by removing eight screws and then gently prying apart the frame and its 100 year old wood glue into their constituent parts. With my friend Lu’s help, we managed to take it apart and pack it down without damaging the wood.

Then I had to pack the truck. My new possessions still consumed the entire floor area of the garage. I moved stuff around, and then marked off the corners of a rectangle on the concrete floor in duct tape, to match the dimensions of the truck. Thus started the game of 3D Tetris.

A couple hours later, I was convinced it might work. I had been in state of anxiety all week that I was going to have to leave something important and now here we were. It was H-hour. Time to pack the truck.

The packing actually went smoothly, with Lu’s heroic assistance, and not without a bunch of shoving and cursing and taking things out and wedging them back in and then having to take then out again.

There was only one casualty: The wood-framed glass top to Adele’s coffee table. I could hear my mother’s loud cry of dismay from beyond the grave. No matter. I will probably get the glass replaced. And it will probably cost about what it would have to simply ship the table to Portland. Sic transit gloria mundi.

But here’s the thing: Everything fit in the truck. All of it. I’m leaving nothing of consequence behind. Six months of planning and anxiety and exhausting labor and it’s all come down to this. Everything fit in the truck. I sat on the stoop of my mother’s house and cried. Then I drank a beer and went to bed.

I only got about four hours of sleep. I woke up at full light, too filled with anticipation to rest anymore. I finished collecting garbage and did one last dump run and burned the few remaining poems and love letters I hadn’t already disposed of. Now I’m ready throw a last few things into the truck and leave, just as soon as I post this.

I will probably never come back to this house again, the house that my family inhabited for 23 years. The house my mother died in. I won’t miss it, exactly. I don’t know how to feel about it. I guess it’s like everything else from my mother’s legacy. We don’t have to keep it all. I’m keeping the things that I know will make me happy someday to have, and I’m letting go of all the many things that I believe will not.

Oh well! I will have eight days of driving to think about that. Come to think of it, I’ll have the rest of my life to think about that. It’s time to get on the road. I have a lot of driving to do today.

If you’re reading this, I send you my love. Thanks for following along. Wish me safe travels! More tomorrow.