LAKELAND JOURNAL - PART ONE
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For many years, my wife's parents have lived in Lakeland, Florida. You probably don't know where that is, so here's a frame of reference: it's about 60 miles south of Orlando, a city which really ought to face facts and just rename itself Disneyville or Disneyopolis. Orlando is that place to which all currency and credit cards migrate at some point in their lives, and vacations are measured in terms of home equity rather than days. Florida (for those of you under retirement age) is a state in the lower southeast tip of our country. It's the state that always looks like someone left the sprinklers on all night.
But I digress. The point is that for years, Sue's folks (Bill and Elaine Curren) have lived in Florida while both of their kids and all five of their grandkids have lived in Southern California (home, by the way, to another Disney theme park; it's a mystery that the competing gravitational pulls of the two resorts hasn't torn the country apart). The three thousand mile gulf between the parents and the rest of the family has prevented anything more than infrequent visits, and for the last year or so, the California branch of the family has been toying with relocating the parents out here near the rest of us. The advantages would be many. We could drop by without going through metal detectors; the only baggage involved would be emotional; and the situation would more closely line up to the Walton-like family dynamic that I was raised with: that is, that family is the first line of support. This was a main tenet of the Thornton clan, and its wisdom wasn't questioned until I was born and a family council was convened to reconsider the concept. That jury's still out, but I've already been indoctrinated with the basic concept. And after all, as I recall, one of the Ten Commandments has something to do with parents. I'd quote the exact reference, but that part of the Bible always makes me uncomfortable.
At any rate, the only downside to the proposition of moving Sue's parents out to California was... well, the moving part. I'm sure very few of you readers out there are living in the house in which you were born, so you know that moving your belongings from one residence to another is basically a root canal that lasts days instead of hours. But as daunting as the cross-continent move might be, in the arena of plusses and minuses it was the one "minus" hurdle that had to be jumped to get to all the plusses waiting at the finish line. Reducing the apprehension was the fact that Sue and I wouldn't be moving ourselves; we were just arranging and coordinating the relocation of her parents. And we were going to use movers.
In our over three decades of marriage, Sue and I have moved more often than Richard Kimble. Sometimes it was because my retail jobs demanded frequent transfers. Other times, it was because companies couldn't seem to survive the trauma of hiring me, and we had to relocate to a job market where my reputation as an albatross hadn't preceded me. For none of those moves did we hire professionals to pack, load, and transport our belongings. Instead we rented a truck, invited some friends and family over for dinner, and then advised them that the house had to be emptied before we'd crack open the bucket of chicken. As often as we engaged in this activity, we never got better at it; each time seemed more difficult and exhausting than the one before. Our last move, into a 2-story dwelling, almost killed us, and we're grateful that it looks like we'll be able to stay here till they find our skeletons on the La-Z-Boys.
All this to say, when we decided to use a moving company to relocate my in-laws from Florida to California, we figured it had to be a piece of cake compared to the days of U-Hauls and hernias. What I didn't realize was that my back isn't the only thing that has progressively weakened over the years; my mind isn't capable of much heavy lifting either. So I encountered new challenges when we decided to pay and point instead of grunt and groan.
First we had to pick a coast-to-coast mover. I'm afraid the only names I was familiar with were Bekins and Mayflower. I had seen moving trucks with the logo for "Starving Students", but the name itself discouraged me from looking them up. Who wants ravenous college types handling moving chores? Who knows how much pizza they'd require on moving day, or how long it would take them to go cross country if they're stopping at every fast-food joint along the way? So I went to the websites of the first two, but it was plain that for our offload destination (Santa Clarita), they were strictly brokers, so I figured I might as well eliminate the middle-man and make the hiring mistakes myself.
The first thing I found out was that it's very hard to get even a rough idea of what the service will cost. Every consumer's guide I could find online would only say that the price would be determined by the distance traveled and the weight of the load, something that I vaguely recall being taught in my high school physics class. But I just wanted a ballpark idea of the current market price to transport a one-bedroom apartment across the country, at which point I could feel I had gathered the absolute minimum of information that would make me dangerous. No luck. Apparently the Teamsters had sworn everyone to secrecy. I skipped to the next step: trying to find a reputable mover.
Consumers Reports didn't have any guidance. I used Google to come up with a list of websites that review moving companies, and quickly found out that every moving company in America has committed some atrocity that has resulted in disgruntled customers posting reviews with headings like "DON'T EVER USE THESE PEOPLE!" or "THESE GUYS ARE RIP-OFF ARTISTS!" or "JUST WAIT TILL I FIND OUT WHERE THEY PACKED MY GUN!" I finally settled on a company that seemed to have the fewest poison-pen reviews, and one glowing recommendation from the owner's mother. I gave them a call and they emailed me some paperwork to fill out in order to come up with an estimate.
It was a lot of paperwork... even by email, there was postage due. Most of it consisted of a pre-populated inventory list of every conceivable item that any household could possibly contain that wasn't nailed down, then multiplied by three to allow for small, medium, and large variations. The idea was to read the entire list and check off the items that were applicable, so an accurate estimate could be delivered. It was a daunting project, but it was worth my effort just for the realization that I could now safely answer "yes" when the emails come in asking if there could be anything less riveting than my website.
I had to make a decision about my in-laws' car. Our original plan was to arrange the movers, fly out to Lakeland a few days before the moving date, prepare and oversee the move, put Sue's mom and dad on a plane back to California (where they would stay with her brother until the new apartment was ready), shut down the old apartment, and drive their car back to California. Whenever I outlined this plan to someone else, they would nod their heads in approval... until I got to the last step, at which point I immediately received a knock upside of my head, followed by an inquiry into the soundness of said noggin. Sue and I thought that driving the car from Florida to California ourselves, while not a vacation, might be enjoyable and bring us closer together as a couple in a way that only a 2006 Toyota Corolla can. But we're only human, and we started to reconsider the strength of our relationship after hearing the phrase "Are you nuts?" every time we mentioned the possibility. Besides, when we factored in food, lodging, gas, time, wear-and-tear, and insufficiently-sized cupholders, we decided it was best to spring for a car-transport company also.
By Friday, October 16, we thought we had everything in place. We had our estimate for moving both the car and the apartment innards. We were told that the movers would arrive in Lakeland on either the following Monday or Tuesday, and that the car would be picked up on Monday. We had made all the lodging and transportation arrangements. Sue and I would fly into Orlando on Friday, take a rental car into Lakeland and check into a hotel. One of us would take Sue's folks back to Orlando on Monday to catch a flight to Long Beach, where her brother would pick them up. We would stay in Lakeland till Thursday the 22nd to allow for any unexpected delays. Then we'd fly back and cool our heels for a week or so until all the stuff magically appeared at the doorstep of the new place.
About the new place... in spite of also being subjected to the repeated phrase "Are you nuts?", Sue's folks mustered up a lot of faith and trusted us to find a senior apartment in Santa Clarita that would work for them. If it were just me making the arrangements, it would be like hiring a 5 year old to be your nutritionist, but thankfully Sue was there to apply more discriminating standards that kept us from leasing the first place we saw that allowed a big-screen TV in the kitchen. We found what we thought was a nice enough place about 20 minutes from where we live. It's a "seniors-only" apartment complex, meaning you have to be over 55 to live there. When I mentioned to the leasing agent that heck, I was old enough to move in there, he turned pale and started muttering about limited availability and certain IQ requirements until we assured him that we had no intention of ever moving again. We just liked making other people go through the experience.
So we arrived in Florida on Friday and spent the weekend making last-minute preparations for the move. Sue's parents told us that they had received a phone call from the car-transport people on Friday advising that the driver should arrive on Monday sometime, and would give us at least 4 hours advance notice before he arrived. The movers also checked in, confirming that they wouldn't arrive till Tuesday.
On Monday morning, we hadn't heard anything from the car folks, so Sue took her folks to the airport while I hung around in the apartment, disconnecting the 80 miles of wiring behind the entertainment center and waiting for a call. By about 11 am, I decided maybe I better check in with car-movers central. They assured me that the driver was on his way, was currently in Coral Springs, and would let us know when he was 4 hours out. Not being a local, and to assure myself that Coral Springs wasn't the name of an offshore oil rig, I consulted Mapquest and discovered that Coral Springs was down near Miami, about 4 hours from Lakeland. So at about 2:00 pm, I called the dispatcher again to let them know that my calculations might not be correct (being the native of another time zone and all), but if the driver was still over 4 hours away, maybe he ought to know what I look like when I'm rousted out of bed in the middle of the night. The dispatcher suggested I call the driver directly and gave me his cell phone number. The driver seemed a bit surprised to get my call (he didn't seem at all amused when, instead of saying "hello", I opened with "Breaker one-nine"), and was even more surprised when he found out I was expecting him that day. "Are you nuts?" he replied (that phrase is really catching on, at least among the people I hang out with), "I'm down in Miami. Didn't the office tell you I'd be there tomorrow?" I told him no sweat, we were fine as long as we knew we didn't have to meet him in our jammies. Sue and I finished up some work at the apartment and went back to the hotel, ready for the big day tomorrow.
The next morning, on our way to the apartment, we got a call from the car transport driver, letting me know that he had parked his truck at a convenient local abandoned truck stop. He wasn't familiar with Lakeland and asked if I could meet him there. Of course, I wasn't familiar with Lakeland either, but I dropped Sue off at the apartment and had him talk me in using the cell phone and the reliable Marco! Polo! navigation method. Once I found him, I realized that he had wanted me to meet him there with the actual car to be transported, rather than the rental car I showed up in. I wished he had made that clear instead of assuming I had more than an ounce of common sense, and I almost told him so before the ounce that I did have made me realize that you don't antagonize someone who, with a flick of a switch, can offload your vehicle while doing 70 down an interstate. So I gave Sue a call, she brought over the Corolla, it was loaded up, and we returned to the apartment to await the movers.
They showed up at about 11:00 am... all two of them. They were hired to both pack and load, but they probably figured that a one-bedroom senior apartment couldn't take too long to polish off. Both of them spoke English with a very heavy Russian accent. Unfortunately, my only experience with the Russian language was the hours I clocked with Boris and Natasha on Saturday mornings as a kid... But these guys were the real deal. They spoke fluent English, but it all seemed to come from the throat and sort of percolate out through the lips like a bubbling tar pit. Every time they spoke to me, it took me about 30 seconds to respond as my brain tried to calculate the best estimate of what they had said. I really could have used one of those UN headsets.
Forgive me now as I interrupt the narrative flow to describe the logistics of what came next.
Sue's parents lived in the Lakeland Presbyterian Apartments, which is the tallest building in Lakeland at 13 stories. (It's the only building I've ever seen that actually acknowledges the 13th floor, other than the "Tower of Terror" at Disneyland... perhaps I should have assigned more relevance to that fact). Here's a snapshot of the building, just to give you an idea.
You're looking at the front of the building... just below the frame is the parking lot for the tenants. The Curren apartment was on the third floor. Along the entire back length of this building runs an alley where vehicles load and unload near a door that's situated right next to the building's freight elevator. I was assured that moving vans had used this alley routinely to move folks in and out. When making the arrangements with the moving company, I was asked if a 53-foot truck would be able to access the building, and I said I didn't anticipate a problem. (You'd think by now I'd learn... part of what makes problems problems is that I don't anticipate them).
I went down with the movers to direct them to the loading area and got my first look at the truck. It looked big enough to haul away the whole town, and as the driver pulled it into the parking lot, we could all tell that it was going to be a challenge to get it to negotiate the curved entrance into the back alley. Sure enough, the best he could do was position the tractor/trailer at the mouth of the alley:
I know this picture makes it look like he could just drive right on in, but this was taken after he parked the truck for loading and unloading. If he turned the front wheels enough to get pointed properly into the alley, the trailer would have taken out the corner of the property, causing some minor structural damage to the building and prompting about 45 coronary episodes among the residents of the east wing. Here's the situation from another perspective:
This is a picture of the alley taken from the loading dock area, which was the intended destination. This is also a picture of the typical distance between my plans and reality.
I asked the driver how long the truck was; he said it was a 75-footer. Of course, I'm not a big-rig aficionado, so that measure would have meant little to me before today. But now I had a frame of reference should I ever decide to transport a B-52.
At this point, while the movers were surveying the interior of the building, I figured I'd better consult the apartment building staff... surely, in the long history of the Lakeland Presbyterian Apartments, they had encountered this kind of problem before. I couldn't be the first guy to arrange for Optimus Prime to come pick up furniture, could I?
I started with the maintenance guy, asking him if there were another alternative to setting up a base camp at the mouth of the alley, but he deferred me to a young lady whose name escapes me, but who apparently was the official manager of the building. She came out and surveyed the situation, then asked me, "And what can I help you with?" I asked her if there was an alternative to using the loading dock area. She said no. Okay, then, would it be possible to leave the truck in its current position for loading? She said no. Okay, then, I asked her, could you offer me any alternative that would get the furniture loaded into the truck? Without a pause, she said, "Get a smaller truck." I have to admit, it was an elegant solution, and one I would have suggested myself if I had had a Delorean and a flux capacitor.
We stared at each other without blinking for about 10 seconds. Finally, I said, " So let me make sure I understand so I can figure out my next move. Because this is as far as the truck can travel, the only alternative you're offering me is to tell the movers here to go home, cancel my flight back to California, go out and rent a U-Haul, load up the contents of this apartment myself, and drive it 3000 miles to California?"
We stared at each other for another 10 seconds, and it occurred to me that we were blazing frontiers in pregnant pauses. She finally induced labor by saying, "Let me talk with Gary." She marched into the building, leaving me alone with Godzilla, King of the Monster Trucks. But not for long. The movers, as if waiting for the coast to clear, emerged from the alley. I asked them if they could do the job with the truck in its current position, and they nodded, after explaining that the increased walking distance would involve extra rubles.
Gary, next in the chain of command, came out and I explained that if we could keep the truck parked in its current position, the movers could load it up through the loading dock doors and I would stay on the good side of the Russian Mafia. Having watched enough CSI to know how my body would end up, Gary said that was fine, and moving day finally started moving.
Keep in mind that the truck was parked at the east end of the building, and the apartment was at the west end of the 3rd floor hall, so basically these guys had to schlep everything the full length of the building to put it on the truck... and they still had to pack everything. It was now 12:30 pm.
Sue and I sat out in the hallway while they got to work, so we'd be accessible, but not underfoot. We stayed in that hallway till 8:30 that night, when the movers finally finished. During the course of the day, Sue offered to get them something to eat, and they requested pizza, but Sue had second thoughts about getting them anything that might hold up their progress, so she brought back a bag of chips instead, making me glad I don't understand Russian.
I spent some of my hallway time on my cell phone with the moving company, letting them know that the truck was fitting in the alley about as well as I fit into my high school jeans, and assuring them that I was aware there the price would change to take into account the extra shoe leather. Then I sent an email to that same effect to Mike, the guy that I originally booked the job with. It included the two pictures above of the truck's position vis-a-vis the alley. I wanted to keep him in the loop and let him know that, even though I hadn't anticipated that the truck they sent would be the same size as the town they sent it to, we were dealing with the problem.
When he replied, Mike pointed out that he asked if the property could accommodate a 53-foot truck, and I had given a thumbs-up. I explained that the driver was telling me it was a 75-foot truck, but I really didn't know if we were sharing the same terminology, or even the same units of measure... or the same language, for that matter. At any rate, I told him that I was just thankful that we could still accomplish the move and that the bill could be adjusted accordingly, so he might be prepared for any irate Russian phone calls.
The neighbor across the hall is a rather eccentric woman. (Eccentric is the term I use for people that don't mean any harm but still make me feel like fleeing wildly in any direction). I had encountered her on a previous visit to Lakeland... I was coming out of the elevator and she was standing in the lobby. She immediately asked me who I was, where I was from, who I was visiting, what I did for a living, what kind of car I drove, and a bunch of other questions that I'd normally expect from Joe Friday. I managed to edge away from her before I had to produce any medical records, and, though our paths would cross again from time to time, I wasn't alone and was able to sic her on Sue or her folks.
This trip, though, it was a bit hard to avoid her, since we were pretty much sitting outside her door for eight hours during moving day. The first time she emerged from her apartment, she didn't even see us; but that's because she marched straight into the Curren apartment and started talking to the movers. I was dying to hear that conversation, but Sue, who had stood slack-jawed as the woman strode past her in the hallway, wasn't going to countenance anything that would slow the movers down. After her double-take, she walked into the apartment and asked our visitor, "What are you doing?", which, after over 33 years of marriage, I know is translated, "Are you nuts?" The woman replied that she was just checking on things, and Sue said, "Well they're really busy right now; they don't have time to talk," and ushered the woman back into the hallway. Our friend asked if the Currens had left any draperies behind, and once Sue had put that notion to rest, she began to hear all about where this lady came from, where her sister lived, why she didn't like peas, how cold her apartment was, and probably a lot more that I missed because I was sprinting down the hallway.
Eventually this lady apparently filled up her dossier on us and moved onto other pursuits; we noticed her throughout the day going into other nearby apartments without knocking. No shots rang out, so I'm guessing either she was expected or the other tenants thought the place was haunted.
At about 6:00 pm, I started to get a little nervous... it was obvious that the movers, who had probably already logged more mileage on the apartment property than getting there, still had some hours of work ahead of them, and I was thinking that one of the tenants or staff might want to shut us down. I was willing to do almost anything to avoid that, including pretending to be visiting the lady across the hall, or claiming that the Russians had promised to use pruning shears on my fingers if they encountered any more delays. But nobody said anything. It dawned on me later that at a senior apartment, everybody's probably in bed by 6:00.
At 8:45 pm, while his partner wheeled the last item out of the apartment, the other mover announced the job was over and had me sign the paperwork. He made it clear, via a combination of broken English and banging his shoe on the countertop, that this was supposed to be a small job, and that he was losing money on the deal. I assured him that I had already talked to the moving company and let them know that I was okay with any additional hiking charges they wanted to assess. He wanted to know if the destination apartment building was going to present a problem for his truck. I started to point out the obvious: that any apartment building other than one built on a salt flat was going to present a problem for his truck. But, as with the car-transport guy, I had a rare burst of common sense; even I didn't want to aggravate someone who could decide to offload the goods at high speed over a long stretch of road. Instead, I let him know that by the time he got there, we'd have things figured out. I could tell this filled him with great confidence.
The day was finally over. I crashed a champagne bottle against the truck as it pulled out of the parking lot, and then Sue and I crashed back at our hotel room. The next day we turned in the apartment key and waved goodbye for the last time to the Lakeland Presbyterian Apartments. As we left, the celebration party was already starting to spill out into the parking lot.
After a day of rest, we got on a plane and headed back to California. As we lifted off, Sue and I realized that this was probably the last time we'd see the state of Florida. And we learned that FAA regulations prohibited dancing in the aisles.
The next journal entry, scheduled for sometime before the close of the decade, will chronicle the move's completion. Don't worry... it's a happy ending.