Melancholy II

It really hit me about nine fifteen tonight. There was nothing for it then but to sink to the floor and bawl a bit.

Backing up. Yesterday I went to Dad's place with my son so he could help me load the impossibly heavy motorized bed into the truck. We did most of the other furniture too. Got back just in time to put the thing into the old house's garage before he had to run off to see a friend's play. I took the other furniture to my storage unit and played Restack Everything for awhile until I actually got it all to fit. Was so done in after that, I came home and went to sleep.

Today I drove down there again, one last time. Got there about eleven and though it may beggar belief, it took nine or ten hours to go through the remaining random stuff and get it all loaded into the truck. One last bookshelf, my grandparents' coffee table, a chair, a couple other little things ... and piles and piles of Stuff that I found myself quickly and somewhat ruthlessly dividing between Box-Up-And-Take versus Recyclable-or-Trash-Hence-Toss-Across-Floor.

Except it wasn't that quick. Especially not since it included the maps my father had been collecting since he was a child (bitchin' topo map of San Fran and the central East Bay that dates from 1915, a very clean Nat Geo map of Europe as of Sept 1939, etc). Or a stack of papers between a pile of blankets and an old Capwell's box (remember them? the name went away in 1990) that included the 1937 deed to my grandparents' house, a little photo album with among other things snapshots from my grandfather's service in 1918 prior to shipping over to France, and so on. But these weren't too terribly distracting. It just took a long time to divide and box stuff and move it downstairs and somehow get it loaded into the truck.

I wasn't peevish this time. Just sort of panicky. And the facility brought me lunch, which was nice. Where rent hovers between five and seven thousand dollars per month, they can afford to be nice. But towards the end I was really getting tired. And then, after figuring out what to do with piles of sixty-year-old coasters and boxing the reel-to-reel tapes and loading the funky old lamps and taking one last look at the pile of discarded VCRs and DOS program manuals only to find old copies of Chemical and Engineering News that my father had saved because they had articles he wrote, or published letters, or something, dunno yet, and then going through the end-of-life medical ephemera that was strewn about the floor of his room and realizing I may as well take the first-aid tape and non-stick bandage pads (but you can have the sponges for oozing wounds and also the Ace bandages because, ick, they were on Dad once, and half-used creams and lotions, no, not taking those either) ... I realized I was done.

Not that the place was cleaned out. I left behind his walker, and a handful of four-legged canes, and two plastic chairs for use in the shower, and all his remaining clothes and shoes; and also all his cassette tapes, and a garbage bag filled with paper and enough paper to fill another one, and so on. The manager said I didn't have to clean the place, just don't leave behind big stuff like furniture. And I was tired, and it was late, and I really didn't want to set myself up for a run to Goodwill. They can deal with it (like I said, at that rate ...).

But I was done. I had just my hand truck and a box full of last-minute keep-ems and was ready to walk out, lock the door, and drive home. And I looked around at this two-room assisted-living apartment that had been my father's home for the past year and a half, and, well. I sat on the floor and started to cry. I mean, this was my last connection. I'd gone through all his crap and stored it away and surely I was going to spend years figuring it all out. But once I walked out that door, the chapter was closed. He would really be gone, then. No longer would there be a place I could call my father's house. Just a bunch of stuff that he's not around to care about. No more Dad's place. Just a bunch of stuff.

So I cried a bit, but you know that took about three minutes, and then I was like, fuck it, I'm out of here. Nine fifteen, hittin' the road. And hit the road I did. Hour and a half drive.

My storage facility doesn't let you in between ten and six so I have a fully-laden pickup in my parking space. I have a boss's boss-level meeting first thing in the morning so this fully-laden truck will sit in the parking lot at work too. I will start the next round of Restack Everything tomorrow night. And drop off more shit at the old house. And some of it in my bitsy apartment.

The process, you know, will never really close. Going through all this and finding stuff of my great-grandparents' pretty well illustrates that. But I did throw away some shit. Hopefully someday my offspring will have fun peevishly doing the same.