THE YEAR OF THE “GO” PILE

By MICHAEL PERKINS

THIS SPRING SAW THE CURTAIN RUNG DOWN ON OUR LIVES IN PHOENIX, ARIZONA. Marian had stuck it out in the Valley Of The Sun for thirty-three years; I put in twenty-five. We were both, as the young say, “over it” for some time prior to our move to California, but we had to wait until all the planets and stars lined up along with our retirement options to give us an escape window. What made the final phase of this strange was that, after decades of dreaming about The Final Day, we found the end-stage events leading up to it to be traveling at light speed. At the end of a looooong stretch of “wait”, we were fired out of a big “now” cannon.

I didn’t chronicle the entire project. On most days. there was simply too much to do in too short a span of time to stop to pick up a camera. We had about three furious weeks to finalize our new lease in Ventura, sort 3,000 square feet of earthly goods into a take-with pile comprising about half that space, hire and direct the efforts of an estate sale agent, get the surviving stuff packed and trucked westward, re-carpet the entire empty house, meet our transferred junk on the other end, and supervise the sale of the house through phone, fax and email. As I say, not a lot of time for snaps.

The scene here is something of a mish-mosh, in that it’s an early study of what-goes-what-stays, done before any final decisions for any of it were made. Hence, I can pick out objects, here and there, that we actually brought with us, some that went to estate sale, some that had yet to be ruled on, and a few things we thought we could sell that eventually went to charity. The reason this photo recently bobbed back up into my consciousness was because Marian and I are presently in the “did we leave that behind, or did we pack it?” phase, which looks as if it will go on for the next immediate….millennium. There were other photos made during the madness, including many tabletop commemorations of school and art projects by her two children going back over thirty-some years. Every museum isn’t a house, but every house is a museum. I could sum this all up by saying something philosophical about how little you can live with once you make a few tough calls, but I don’t want to congratulate myself too much while I am still occasionally opening boxes filled with “why the hell did I bring this…..?”