Be Careful What You Wish For - I Just Might Help You Move.

When you move to a new apartment, you plan for everything very carefully, and you think you pretty much know how things are going to go. You visualize how your old furniture will fit into the new rooms; you scam boxes from grocery stores and you carefully pack and label them; you strategize carloads; you prioritize lists of painting and repair projects; you rent trucks and kegs and muscular friends.

You think you've got it under control. Then you invite me to help you out, and chaos descends.

Dean and Giles learned this the hard way, when I spent the weekend helping them move to a new apartment in Corktown, Detroit's oldest neighborhood. (Actually, it's not a new apartment - it's a spacious flat in a beautiful 115-year-old house. But it's a new home for them and their books. And you can see historic Tiger stadium from the backyard - it's a stone's throw away. If you don't throw like a girl.)



I enthusiastically joined the moving efforts, from painting to packing, - I put my back into it, as Ice Cube would say - because I think moving is very fun, and I geek out at any opportunity to pack, sort, label and arrange things. Being me, and not someone smooth, efficient and ladylike, such as Kate Walsh or Melanie Wilkes or Giles, I managed to bung up all the exquisitely-arranged plans with heaping doses of the unexpected.

For example, when Giles let me paint her office the most beautiful shade of raspberry pink, I don't think she knew that, in the process, I would get this pink paint on 38% of my exposed skin surfaces.

And when she asked me to help carry heavy boxes of kitchenware out to the van, she surely didn't foresee that I would step in a mud puddle on the way, lose my flippie-floppie, and transverse the rest of the distance with a cinderella-like hobble.

Dean, moving out of the old place -
it was a very long day and no, that's not his real hair.

When she asked me to bag up all the closet clothes and drive them down to the new house, I'm sure no one expected me to get pulled over by a cop who became suspicious of the lumpy black garbage bags filling my car. Or that he would make me get out and let him paw through my questionable cargo to prove that Giles' and Dean's clothes were not bodies, drugs or counterfeit designer purses.

But all these things happened.

In my defense, not all of the near-disasters were my fault - for example, Dean had to hurl himself against a heaping pile of couches, bookshelf-slats and mattresses in the back of the moving van to prevent an avalanche, and this was not my fault*; in fact, I almost saved the day, until my rescue attempts stranded me in the same wild-eyed spread-eagle against the precarious pile, much like Brer Rabbit & the Tar Baby**.

And I did some things very well, indeed, like boxing up and then unpacking (and categorizing, and organizing) their four 7-foot bookshelves. My Barnes-&-Noble-honed book inventory, merchandising and alphabetizing skills proved to be fresh as ever, despite lying dormant for a year. I enjoyed this part of the move more than is normal, hostilely defending my book territory against would-be "helpers."

I peer nosily at the new neighbors.

So despite the ludicrous disasters that I brought along with me, I hope Giles & Dean aren't sorry they invited me to help, because I loved being a part of making their new place a home. And remember, guys, I brought donuts.



*Never put a priest in charge of packing your moving van.

** I am aware that this old Georgia folktale is not very PC. But I grew up with an Uncle Remus storybook and LP, and nothing else is as fine a parallel with what happened to Dean and myself in the truck. Also, Giles is from Georgia. I hope she is honored by my including her heritage in this post.