On Saturday morning my father and I drove to Hyde Park, where a friendly-to-the-point-of-scarily-manic rental truck company employee furnished me with a twenty-six foot truck. That's a lot of truck. Luckily, I enjoy piloting such behemoths, and was even undeterred upon learning, shortly after driving away, that the brakes were a bit... fey. They were on their own schedule. Driving a truck that big is a perspective-altering experience. Not just because you're pretty high up, which is helpful for medium- and long-distance visibility but terrible for short-distance, but because you have to think about yourself in a completely different way. When driving a passenger car, it's easy to stop thinking about the dimensions of the car, but when you're swinging thirty feet of American beef around narrow residential streets, you find your self-awareness a bit more keyed up. In any event, I got the truck back to our Jamaica Plain apartment without incident while my father stopped and loaded up on donuts and coffee for the crew.
And what a crew they were! Many thanks again to all who did such great work. Our friends arrived in droves, early and often. They drank coffee, ate donuts, and hauled our crap out to the truck. It was a beautiful thing. After the truck was loaded, a few of them went home, but many brave souls came with us to Providence to help unload into our new apartment. This was particularly welcome, because our new place is on the third floor.
On my first trip up the stairs with a load of boxes I (and my knees) thought, "Oh lord, this is going to be terrible." But many hands make light work, and I was mindful to heed the words of a drummer/cheesemonger friend who, when asked to describe his astounding ability to eat massive quantities of food, said "You just keep the fork moving. Don't stop to think about what you're doing, just keep moving steadily." As it turns out, this advice also works well for moving into a third-floor walkup. Drag the futon up the front steps, plod down the back steps, haul a crate of LP's up the front, stagger down the back. Repeat.
At 2:30, we were done, and I took the truck, my mother, and a dear and helpful friend to return the truck at the nearby rental place on Broad Street. It was so close that we decided to just take the truck over and then walk back. The area we traversed was mostly empty lots and possibly-operational light industrial space. And chain link and broken glass. But then, we crossed a street, and suddenly the glass was gone and there stood a massive mill building that had recently been turned into unaffordable housing. It was jarring--don't we do transitional spaces here?
Back at the apartment, the crew sat around on boxes, drinking cervezas and waiting for Laura and her team to come back with pizza. They'd been gone so long we all started to wonder how lost they'd gotten--then the door opened and there appeared my wife behind the largest pizza box I have ever seen. It didn't fit through the door. That's worth repeating: the pizza was so large we had to turn it on its side to get it through the door. Twenty-eight inches of insanity. The girls made great topping choices: tomato and broccoli on one side and pineapple and hot peppers on the other. (Quick aside: after working at an artisan pizza place for a year, I came to believe that two toppings is optimal--granted a good margherita on its own can be sublime.) We set upon this pizza like a swarm of angry Lilliputians.
Among the great many joys of a 28-inch pizza is the wide variety of slice shapes. A grid cut resulted in many even square slices throughout the middle of the pie, but around the edges lay bizarre and delicious rectangles, inscrutable scalenes. I even caught a glimpse of the rare and delectable rhombus just as it was being devoured by a hungry laborer. Like birders of yore, we hunted these prized species, and killed them.
...and the first point goes to Providence.
*Of course, this is America, so I should probably have my possessions to tell me what I am. Lessee... turns out, I'm books, tools, and pans. And A/V equipment.
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