2019-01-29 Tue
Music to Drive By
Colin Raye - Latter Day Cowboy
Leonard Skyner - Sweet Home Alabama
I doze off around 23:30 and true to form wake at 04:00. I start emptying the aquarium, shuffling around the apartment, taking every loose thing to the bed top. If I don’t sleep here tonight (likely) I’ll hoist the bed linen and covers into a garbage bag and take it with me; otherwise it is ready for me to slip into, and then quickly out of here first thing Wednesday. From 4:15 to 5:45 I shuffle, wrap, and tape. James phones to say he is heading out to shovel snow, I tell him to take his time, ready when he is. James is the other nice guy in this building, and he will not stay in a warm building when David is out there shoveling snow. The two of them clear and salt our stretch of footpath, and dig away the snowdrift that the plough contractor has tossed to block in my truck.
The pension is IN but the truck rental is OUT which means I can key in the credit card charge for the truck (3,104.27) and remove the estimate total of 5,371. Of course, I still have fuel, motels, meals to add to that.
James starts late, from four to eight o’clock spent shoveling snow. I put him in charge of logistics, what sequence to pack stuff into the truck and so on. I am good managerial material and always have someone to blame if things go wrong, (see “Charles” in 2019-01-28 ). The elevator is reserved until 2pm, and we agree that James is finished at 2pm. I slip him what few dollars are left after UHaul’s rapacious drag on my finances and he departs a happy man. Except, no doubt, for his muscles. Shoveling snow from 4 to 8, then moving a refrigerator, a couch, eight bookcases, seventy-three cartons and twenty-eight fifteen-litre plastic bins has got to cause some regrets. If he stuffs the banknotes ABOVE his mattress that might help.
I take 4 more hours to pack the rest, including draining the aquarium and corralling the guppies (If they were tropical fish, could I say that I was coraling the fish? Just a thought)
The truck is packed tight. I struggle to fit my dolly/trolley in before the door will close. I’m not kidding. It is crammed tight to the back door. I leave behind a three-drawer bedside table. Sigh! So many books and so few bedside tables.
The bathroom plants are hacked off (ten seconds) and bagged as one woven string over thirty feet long (two minutes); the water in the 15L flask is habitat water from the tank. Time for a cuppa!
I shower, don fresh work clothes, and for the last time take the elevator to the ground floor. On a whim, I decide to check my mailbox. I get very little mail nowadays. The feds send me a $100 cheque each quarter; I’m not sure why. But Canada Post wants $117 for a twelve-month change of address, and I have but twenty-one accounts listed in my “Accounts” document, and I will advise everyone by email. It’s what six hours WiFi on a Marine Atlantic ferry is for!
Well, anyway, there is the usual collection of pizza flyers, furniture deals (but “This Week Only”), and – a letter from John and Forrest. I sang with them in Gilbert and Sullivan back in my University years 1964-67, but there was no letter last year and I have feared the worst – that one of them died, or some disaster happened (running a whale-watching business off Western Australia’s south coast is almost as stressful as, say, being a librarian in Yorkville Public Library) and I had spent part of today thinking about them. They are, or were, my last hard-copy mailing of my annual Christmas letter, nowadays sent out as early as February, well ahead of my working-days schedule of late July. The envelope is tucked into my left-hand inside jacket pocket, next to my heart. I will read it, good or bad, once I am in a motel.
I pull out of the driveway at a quarter past six at night. In theory there was no rush-hour tonight; everyone will have been sent home at one o’clock to avoid the rush-hour (but instead getting caught in a one o’clock rush-hour. Welcome to Toronto). I reach Belleville at nine-thirty. Back in my teaching days I drove to (and from!) Belleville once a month to teach email to BELL Canada employees. It was a two-hour drive, every time, regardless of time of day or night, but tonight it is three and a quarter hours in the snowstorm.