A Moving Experience

Spring breezes wafted away the morning fog. New green leaves filtered slanting rays of sunlight. Coolness crisped the dawn. Butterflies flitted among the flowers of our garden. Ginny poured cracked grain into the birdfeeders and we lingered with our morning coffee, binoculars and bird book, rocking in cushioned lawnchairs trying to confirm our tentative identification of an indigo bunting. A lizard lounged on the rim of our fountain flicking its tongue to capture moisture from the damp surface of the Grecian urn beaded with diamond droplets escaped from the fountain's cascading burbling flow.

The sparkle of Ginny’s eyes, the soft brush of her hand against mine, the husky aroma of her perfume, that tantalizing gap in her robe, the splendid prospect of the day ahead with no plans or duties — all carried the sensuous promise of untold, unhurried, lingering, day-long erotic pleasures of love, passion, tenderness spiced with lust and …

And then the phone rang.

Eight a.m. on a lovely spring morning and the phone rang!

And John Cowart, the idiot, answered the damn thing.

“Dad, if you and Mom don’t have anything planned, I’m in trouble and need some help”.

Of course we had nothing planned.

Nothing that I’d mention on the phone to one of our kids anyhow.

So Ginny and I spent Saturday helping Donald move his girlfriend from a three-bedroom house with home office equipment to a two bedroom apartment. Rental truck. Homepack job. An energetic but inexperienced 14-year-old boy the only other helper.

The house was being repainted for sale. All furniture had been piled in the garage along with sheetrock, painter’s buckets, sawdust, scrap boards, file cabinets, laundry baskets, kitty-litter box and garden tools.

Picture the neat, orderly arrangement of the Third Circle in a Dore engraving of Dante’s Inferno.

Now, Helen is the world’s sweetest girl, vivacious, energetic, personable, pretty, intelligent, artistic… it puzzles me how she could have alienated all humanity so that she is alone and friendless in the earth so that no other person in the world would show up to help her move. I mean, Saddam has more friends who would help him move than she does.

And, Donald, of course, is a computer geek who knows no actual live human beings.

Now, Ginny and I, in our younger days, worked as professional movers. That was almost 40 years ago. Recently, the heaviest thing either of us has lifted was the tv remote.

So, for ten hours we strained and lifted and levered and dollied, and slid and carried and trudged up and down the truck ramp, in and out of the house and apartment.

File drawers and lamps and bicycle and antique wardrobe and clothes on hangers and chairs and chests and hampers and tables and paintings and damn big things and a baby-changing table (??? Is there something they’re not telling us???) and paint cans and groceries and mink oil (? I didn’t know she raised minks??) and sofas and unsealed boxes with coat-hangers and glass bottles sticking out the top so you can’t set anything on top of them and garden hoses and treasures and — O damn, they packed all the rolls of toilet paper — and lawn furniture and a suit of armor and pole lamps and rugs and …

It took two truck loads.

As Ginny and I drove home we joked about how sore and stiff we felt. Aching backs and arms and leg muscles.

Naturally, when alone like this our conversation turned to risqué jokes, the kind of jokes which only can be shared (or even understood) by a couple who’ve been in love for 40+ years.

Our car lacks air conditioning.

We drive with the windows down.

We were paused in traffic in the kicked ant-hill that is Jacksonville’s Orange Park section. We were laughing like crazy about one of our erotic jokes….

I think I’d just said, “If my dick were as stiff as the rest of me…”

And Ginny said… Well, never mind what she said.

But the guy stopped in traffic beside us , who also had his window down, burst out laughing.

“He’s eaves dropping on us,” Ginny said. “He heard me say that. Young people have no idea, do they?”

We ate supper at a familiar restaurant where the waitress sat at the table with us for a few minutes complaining about her six grown children who are visiting at her house for two weeks. She joked that if she got enough in tips that instead of going home she planned to buy a deck of cards, check into a motel alone and play solitaire all night.

I slipped my shoes off under the table and lost them and had to crawl under to find them again. My feet were so swollen that I had trouble getting them back on my feet.

We felt too tired to bother unloading our car of the cast-off stuff we gleaned from Helen’s when we finally got home.

Ginny said, “John, I’m going to get these shoes off and stupefy in front of the tv. I love you but for the rest of the evening. I don’t want you to even speak to me.”

I didn’t.

But we fell asleep in front of the tv holding hands.

True love.