Things We Lost In the Move

2pm Friday: Heading to Echo Park to begin the clean-out process at the old homestead.

The family who's been renting my mom's home for eighteen years is almost moved out. My brothers and I are putting the lovely Lautner home of our childhood and adjacent lot on the market.

A professional organizer accompanies me… my therapist’s orders, as I’ve gone dizzy and dysfunctional in the past just entering the front door of where I grew up from age ten months to eighteen years. There are many ghosts on the move in that house - for me.

Lois Miller, of “Let’s Get You Organized”, is one of those creative beings who sees spatial relationships with clarity, and moves swiftly to right organizational wrongs. Lois is all about easy access. She’s helped me in the past in my own home/office when there was just too much clutter and no system to stem the tide. She’s a bonafide miracle worker.

We arrive, we work, I don’t get dizzy. We complete two closets worth of clean-out. YAY!

4:45pm Friday: Lois and I head back to my home -  which is normally “freeway-close” - except in this L.A. traffic. It takes us an hour twenty minutes to navigate the (usually) twenty minute trip.

Un-packing my car and moving the heavy boxes of 78rpm records, files, linens, and gazillions of pieces of framed artwork - some pieces done by my mom, some vintage reprints of the likes of Picasso, Chagall, and Rousseau - Lois and I work together. She is meticulous about wiping with damp cloth the years of accumulated dust.

While we’re stacking the STUFF in my (used to be organized) garage, I’m bemoaning the fact that I never did find what I set out to encounter today, which is a cardboard box full of my dad’s photos - many of which were from his stint at the L.A. Times as staff photographer from 1947 to 1964. Brother Mel and I surmise that some of what he was called on to document would drive anyone to drink. We cannot pretend there were not underlying causes for his alcoholism, but certainly at the end of some of those long days in a large city, there were good reasons to tip the bottle in an attempt to drown, or erase the images emblazoned on his retina. Perhaps it's best if those photos have gone missing, but someone is interested in dad's work, so I promised I would look.

6:00 to 6:40pm Friday: Upstairs in my healing space, I teach Lois the “Magic Four” yoga poses to undo any undue stress and tension our backs may have accrued with the heavy-lifting.

6:50pm Friday: I show Lois the size photos we’re talking about finding... 11 1/4 inch by 14 1/4 inch black/white glossies. HUGE compared to itty bitty iPhone images, right? She nods and notices her jacket is on inside out and corrects it.

Walking Lois to her car, I stop to give her a huge hug of great gratitude. She drives away.

7:00 pm Friday: I’m on the phone with a friend, when Lois beeps through to say she’s lost a gold hoop earring, and could it be at my house. She's just looked in the rear-view mirror and discovered one is missing. I tell her, I'll call back if I find it. I click back to my friend Lynn on the phone and tell her about the earring. She makes the brilliant suggestion to look side-ways, rather than directly down into the grass. I sit on my heels, moving like a duck or Moiseev dancer - retracing the steps Lois took, all the while talking to my friend, and noticing that the ten year old young man across the street has stopped playing basket ball with his friend to watch my strange moves. 

7:10 pm Friday: I hang up and enlist the help of my neighbor, his nanny, and basketball playing buddy, I bring out a few flashlights, hoping one of us will catch a glint in the grass or on the street from the gold hoop - even as daylight has turned to twilight. 

Nothin’. We don’t see anything glinting in the light. I look especially closely by the parked cars, where I hugged Lois g’bye, and in the living room where she switched up her jacket to right-side out, the yoga space upstairs, and both bathrooms.

In fact, I spend much of Friday night looking through the STUFF we’ve moved and re-re-retracing Lois’ steps in hopes of finding the gold.

10:00 a.m. Saturday: I hear from Sophia, of the family who is moving out of my family's home in Echo Park. She says that she’ll keep an eye open for the gold hoop earring. In turn, she asks if we encountered a heavy gold bracelet yesterday, that was her mom’s and has sentimental value to Sophia. My email back concludes that there are so many “moving pieces” in a move that things can become displaced - not just people… and that too much of life is about moving STUFF from one place to another.

Photos, a bracelet, an earring... all gone missing in the moving experience of STUFF going from here to there. The turn of a head, the gesture of an arm can send things flying. Where to look?? Open trash cans? Under cars? The slim space between bathroom carpet and the wall? Really?? Yep, I looked there… and in the record album boxes, file boxes and between frames, and in the linens used to separate the framed art work for the car ride. 

What I’ve gained in the move includes cleaner floor mats in my car, the awareness of how sneaky STUFF is, that it reproduces under car seats, and an inventory of dandelions, weeds, and violets invading the front lawn. 

I've also gained an appreciation for having company while doing the hard jobs. Thank you, Lois. Thank you, neighbors. Thank you, friend Lynn.

As my yoga teacher Rama used to say, "The easy way is hard enough… do it the easy way!"