Wednesday, June 4, 2008

Fast or slow is fine with me

Julie and I are halfway home from Columbus, staying with her Grandmother in East Moline, Illinois. We'll be departing the Quad Cities in a couple of hours, Julie behind the wheel of the lumbering behemoth of a truck, and me on the far side of the bench seat, my broken arm poised between us like a princess atop a pile of downy pillows. We should reach the Twin Cities in time for dinner.

Our days in Columbus were action packed -- and not just with packing -- with lots of time with friends from Julie's MFA program, including the end-of-the-year party for grad students completing their degrees, called Epilog (renamed Eulogy by one witty faculty member). We were lucky to share several meals with Kim and Jen, two of the best, kindest and most side-splittingly hilarious friends you could hope to have.

Julie's buds turned out in large numbers on Monday, too, to help load the 26' moving truck -- to the gills. I'd been concerned about feeling a little useless at a time when another set of hands would help, with my arm tucked in a sling and so few objects able to hoisted single-handedly, but Bart & Elizabeth, Mike & Kevin, Tom, David, Scott, Erica, Elizabeth, Natalie, Brian and Julie made short work of the place: we were loaded in 3 hours.

And yesterday morning we set out. But not before encountering some of the jaw-droppingly inconsiderate behavior that Julie has written about in her blog. In this case, we were treated to neighbors behaving not only un-neighborly, but downright petty and cruelly. (Perhaps if you can't navigate around the moving truck we are in the process of loading -- even though lots of other people have -- you should consider another route or perhaps whether you are qualified to drive a motor vehicle, rather than standing on your horn, swearing at us in
front of the children in your care and calling the police?) Such behavior defies understanding, co-existing with such an outpouring of kindness from friends.

In any case, we were happy to hit the Ohio state line. After a quickie in the back of the truck, that is.

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