Scenes from an interstate move

I. Resentment

The movers arrived at 7:57am on Saturday morning -- three men in their twenties, a team leader plus two helper-outers, one built like an underweight teenager and another stocky fellow who looked permanently confused.

Fifteen minutes before, I had turned to Brad -- un-drunk coffee in one hand, a roll of packing tape in the other -- and said, “Before the moving guys show up, I just want to say that I had to do all the fucking packing in advance of this move and I am extremely goddamn pissed about it.”

“I know,” said Brad. “Sorry.”

I had packed eighty-five percent of our lives with careful organization -- neatly wrapped, padded, and organized by room, subdivided into categories like “Media” and “Games” and “Dishes” and “Tools”. The last fifteen percent, though, was a free-for-all. Boxes began to disappear down the stairs; we assembled new ones in their place and hurled our remaining belongings in with random abandon. A pair of pliers on top of a curling iron on top of a faded photo of Brad’s grandparents, wrapped in a sweater that I thought I’d lost eighteen months ago but that had instead somehow wedged itself between our sofa cushions, undiscovered until one of the moving men went to disassemble the furniture.

Hurley ran madly back and forth from one end of the apartment to the other, weaving between everyone’s legs and trying to convince the new arrivals to ignore the boxes in favor of scratching his belly.

“Your dog is bothering us,” a mover said.
“I’ll take him outside,” Brad said.

Fifteen minutes later, the team leader -- a dark-haired, swaggering twenty-something with a pitted face and a Slavic accent -- looked out our back window and began wildly gesticulating and yelling in my direction.

“What?” I said, sure that some combination of sleep deprivation plus language barrier plus lingering resentment over my packing responsibilities was causing me to hallucinate. “What did you say?”

II. Catastrophe

I sprinted twice around the local park before I found Brad, wandering aimlessly back through the northside entrance with Hurley prancing next to him.

“Hello,” I said. “You need to come back now.”
“What’s going on?”
“Well, among other things, the building is on fire.”

III. But Here We Are

In Brooklyn, two brief blocks took me to the entrance of Greenpoint's McGolrick Park -- manicured and landscaped and constantly in bloom, with perfectly-placed sycamore trees soaring gracefully skyward on either side of pathways that were never free of people.

Now, two blocks -- or what I think is two blocks, an educated guess without a grid to guide me -- takes me to a meandering trail that winds its way through the woods and around a hillock along the Norwalk River. No, really: a hillock. There are shrubs and a handful of flowering trees, but mostly just a mess of vines tangling uphill on the inland side; on the other, there is dark, slow-moving water dotted here and in the distance with slender sculls. It’s no rural hideaway, and the sounds there are equal parts birdsong plus the uninterrupted whoosh of traffic on the nearby interstate, but I like it. I’ve seen jays and cardinals; newly-hatched robins; slender brown rabbits and big, burly woodchucks that look like fat and furry old men.

IV. Wildlife
The rabbits are not afraid of me, or of the dog. They let us get close, wait until the last moment, then disappear in a flash of brown fur and white tail. If you blink, you'll miss it.

The woodchucks, on the other hand, panic and hurl themselves noisily into the brush the second I step around a corner.

They do this with such frantic, ungainly terror that I can only assume I have caught them masturbating.