The last gasp before the New Year (Dec. 30, 1981)

December 30, 1981

We stuffed the truck Basil rented, one precious piece at a time, feeling the crack of Jimmy’s impatience, since we all knew we were running out of time – as if we were Cinderella and midnight was coming and the truck with turn into a pumpkin with us inside.

I kept looking up the street at the absolutely beautiful door to door salesperson, and she kept looking back at me.

Jimmy worked in silence as did Garrick.

Basil kept holding his stomach as if in pain, but said nothing, simply stared out the window of the old home. His heart wasn’t what it was.

Patti and Maureen were at home, but seemed disinterested as if to say, “We won’t be living in the new place long anyway. So why should we care.”

Me, Jimmy and Garrick might have said as much. I was actually surprised Jimmy had volunteered for this, but as eldest he was expected to, and he also had a special relationship with Basil none of the others had.

Bobby, Basil’s younger son, was not around. Patti said he claimed to be sick, though Jimmy called him lazy.

Garrick and I had to make up for the loss, carrying things down the stairs from one house to the truck, and then up from the truck to the new house, feeling overburdened, the two of us like worker ants only there were only us few.

Jimmy complained about his sisters, and how combing their hair seemed to matter more than helping their parents move.

But all this family stuff didn’t matter. Garrick and I would do it with or without the others, Jimmy complementing Garrick in his usual twisted humor, “When we get done, we can complain to management about the great pay you’re getting.”

Garrick seemed to think this was funny since we weren’t getting paid.

“And if you have an extra buck or two, you might lend it to me so I can hire a hit man to hit my brother,” Jimmy said. “Or buy my sisters some new hairbrushes.”

I kept thinking how everything changes from now on, and kept looking at Basil, who seemed more frail than he had in the past, a giant of a man making his last trip to his final resting place, although not yet dead and certainly not being mourned.

I kept thinking of all the other places I’d helped move them from, and how in the past, these kids tumbled over us, laughing as we made the move, treating us the way I might have treated my uncles, we their elders with not much more sense than they had, but determined to do what we had come for.

I wanted to walk back down Bloomfield Avenue to Valley Road, to pay homage to the room house I had lived in, and then down to Pine Street to pay my respects there, feeling as if what we did today was a ceremony that buried that past and a very uncertain future ahead of us.

“Keep up the good work, Garrick,” I heard Basil say. “You, too, Al.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Jimmy mumbled. “But don’t let it go to your head.”