Sunday Memories: Moving Day

The Mariner moved in.

There was a real moving van and real movers and four-wheel square skateboards that carried hundreds of things across the lobby and floors, and, in what felt like just a couple of minutes, every room in the apartment burst open with boxes and lamps and coffee tables, all cooking from the heat wave.

A much different day than the one that I moved on in 1976.

For one thing it wasn't a day; it was a night.  And whatever small belongings I was taking in this forced expulsion from the Quartchyard fit into the trunk of my father's beat-up Valiant.   There wasn't much.  A record player and hifi set, clothes, maybe some books (I can't remember), and this chair.

Bought for $2 at the street fair held by Odyssey House on 6th Street probably 1971.  Florence and I carried it back together to Grand Street, me a 12 year old attempting to be the adults she saw in old movies and her a 48 year old furiously fighting the storm her life had become.   The chair lived in my childhood bedroom, which she took over when I fled to relatives' home.

When vacating this second time, now the adult age of 17, I took the chair.  I remembered it as being paid for with my $2 and living in my room all those years.  Florence was pissed as hell when she saw it gone and for the next three decades she'd comment about how that chair was really hers.

However, I had no intention of ever letting go of it.  Moving into an apartment of many rotating roommates and room changings, that chair followed me from bedroom to bedroom until one day, with most of my life filling those walls, it took its final spot outside the front door, a rest for the cat in his wanderings, a seat while the Mariner opened the door, a safe place to put the bag of groceries with the eggs in it, a reminder of that night I left to seek home.

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