Movin’ On

Posted on May 3, 2013 under Storytelling with one comment

It must be spring. The birds are singing before sunrise, the peepers are peeping before sunset and you can smell the earth coming to life.  Flowers are emerging from hibernation.  And the sure sign of spring in a university town: moving vans.  Another university year has concluded and thousands of students are on the move.

The other morning I stepped out onto my front porch and noticed more than the usual level of activity in our neighbor’s yard.  A discrete inquiry rendered the following information: our neighbor was taking a day off work to move his son’s girlfriend to a university two hours up the road.  His son will follow her there, temporarily, before he relocates to China.  Sounds like business as usual for today’s parents.

A few generations ago, life was so simple.  Your grandparents bought a house that they lived in forever.  They got permanent full time jobs and in most cases, worked for the same employer their entire careers.  Their children grew up, got educated and left home … and didn’t return.  Ever.

Is it just me or have I spent my entire adult life moving somebody somewhere?  Before I got married, I moved several times.  And over my lifetime, I have helped countless other people move.  But the moving phenomenon really took hold when I got married and my children became teenagers.

If you don’t live in a university town you might not really appreciate the term “sublet”.  You can go and check the word in Webster’s Dictionary.  The standard definition is easy to comprehend.  When your sullen and often aggravating children, still in high school, approach you in the spring and inquire about subletting an apartment in town, several emotions run through your body at once.  You don’t know who is happier at this prospect: you or your child.  You know the upside.  You will have a modicum of peace in the household for a few months. However the term “sublet” for a high school student really translates as follows: “Mom and dad, I want to party like crazy”.

Against your better judgment you agree, and besides the damage deposit, which you know you will never see again, you help your son or daughter move their meager possessions. This is their first move but as experience tells us, it will certainly not be the last.  Little do you know that this fascination with moving will become a lifelong passion, maybe even a career, for one or more of your children.

When the summer ends and you have forfeited the damage deposit, the apartment now resembles the clubhouse for the Hells Angels after a raid.  You also now have have the opportunity, not a once in a lifetime opportunity, I am quick to add, to clean the aforementioned hell hole, as your offspring has to get ready to go back to school.  Is there anything more soul destroying than cleaning a mess (code for disaster area) created by a band of barbarians?  Yes there is.  It is doing this for another child in another apartment, again and again and again.  Think Bill Murray in “Ground Hog Day”.

There are six universities in Halifax, our provincial capital, home to the navy and 25,000 party animals who attend these institutions of “higher learning”.  Do you have any concept of what moving day is like in a place like this?  We do.  One of our children was attending university and in early September, Halifax looks like an advertisement for U-Haul. The city is crawling with moving vans of every description.  Many of the accommodations on and off campus are in high rises.

We are very organized people.  Months earlier we had dutifully booked a cube van from a reputable moving company. We knew that only the slothful procrastinators of this world would get their comeuppance when the end of summer rolled around and they would realize that finding a moving van would be akin to discovering the Higgs Boson particle.  We had also reserved the elevator at the high rise, at a specific time of day, which is the usual custom.

On a crisp September morning, fuelled with appropriate amounts of caffeine for the task at hand, I approached the front counter of the van rental agency.  A young man with the energy of a slug, nonchalantly  informed me that they did not have my van.  They had “overbooked”.  It was as if he was telling me that they had run out of paper clips or toothpicks.  Until this point in my life, I had never considered inflicting bodily harm on a member of the human species.  The Halifax Explosion of 1917 was about to appear like a fender bender compared to what I was about to unleash on this troglodyte.  A carefully worded message to his manager on the phone resolved the impasse.

And when it comes to fun factor, try moving one of your children who has been cohabiting with a friend, when the relationship goes sour.  I remember renting a van and moving both of the aggrieved parties to their new lairs.  And yes, once I rented a van and moved one of my children from Halifax to home and then reloaded the van with treasures from another child and moved them from home to Halifax.

Not including safe passage on a passenger vessel, I figure that it will take my neighbor about 37 days to drive to China.  We will do almost anything to get our progeny settled once and for all.

Advertisement