The Move
Continued...

Day Nine

Multimedia is alive and ailing throughout this nation's tourist attractions. The Very Large Array has a video "slide show" which was almost endearing in its incompetence. Mammoth Cave has white people playing native americans in their educational film. And Graceland's prerecorded tour is so low budget that Sun Studios should sue for defamation. But Hershey's Chocolate World has such a slick, smooth presentation that Mom and I would have gone on the info-ride again if we hadn't first gotten lost in the chocolate shopping euphoria of the gift emporium. I never knew that chocolate starts out inside a gourd the size of my head.

We bought a bunch of gift chocolates and snack chocolates and then individual candy bars in case we got hungry. Just to be safe I had a hot fudge sundae right before we left.

There are too many roads on the east coast. Navigation has become a nightmare. I have been reduced to given directions like, "Maybe go left the next time the interstate gets complicated."

We ended up at another Wal-Mart. This time we bought mud masques. To celebrate our arrival in Quakertown, PA, a.k.a., the town wherein my Stuff will be Stored. Quakertown is in Buck's county which, according to my brother, an avid reader of the Weekly World News, is the county with the most ghosts (by haunting) in the USA. Mom promised to have a chat with the astral to find some ghosts to haunt my storage unit. Which seems reasonable when you think about it.

Day Ten

After a entirely ineffective night of "beauty and relaxation" we awoke to full scale pandemonium. Phone calls, packing, coffee making, waiver signing and deep breathing exercises.

I took possession of The Unit. My sixth as it turns out. I set mom to folding the packing blankets in order to keep her from throwing her back out too early in the process and proceeded to unload the truck solo. With no dolly mind you. I felt very empowered. I became very exhausted.

In keeping with the overall tone of the endeavor I ate only a biscotti for breakfast and as a result became delirious after about an hour and a half. Mom managed to break through my organizational fervor and forced me to eat an apple. I believe she ordered me to sit back down no less than four times during my brief respite. Miraculously we managed to unload every last one of my possessions in a little over two hours.

It was wildly windy on our way into the city. Mom said almost nothing while I kept issuing forth a steady stream of driving instructions. We encountered no traffic. Not even at the tunnel. An omen if you ask me. A good omen.

Returned the truck. Weren't penalized for either the misfit gas cap nor the Holiday Inn run-in. As I left the rental office mom said, "You didn't ask the man to call you a cab?" I said, "Mom, you don't call a cab... It's New York. You just hail one."

The End.

October 1, 1998

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