LAKELAND JOURNAL - CONCLUSION

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So where was I? Oh yeah...

As you might recall, back in Florida, we had shoved Sue's parents onto a plane, then waved bon voyage to all their earthly belongings before getting on a plane ourselves a couple of days later. Sue's folks were staying with her brother Kevin and his family in Orange County until we got everything squared away at their new apartment in Valencia. Once we were back in California, we checked in with them to see how their trip had been... after all, they hadn't flown in quite a while, and since then there have been all sorts of advances in airline security that we were sure they would appreciate. They told us that everything had went fine, although they were a bit taken aback when they got off the plane in Anaheim and, as senior citizens moving into the state, were immediately designated as part of an endangered species and tagged by the Department of Fish and Game.

Like I said, we had already lined up the apartment that they would be moving into. Below is a picture of the complex taken from its website.

Fountain Glen Apartments

If you reference the numbered part of the building as the southeast corner of the complex, the Currens' new apartment would be considered as located at the northwest corner. As you can see, there's a more horizontal sensibility to this place than with the Lakeland apartment building. It probably has about the same number of apartments, but in California, rather than stacking apartments, builders tend to smear them on the landscape like peanut butter on bread. Even so, the same problem exists at both locations: you just can't maneuver a mover's tractor/trailer combination into one of these places to unload furniture without converting bedrooms into patios. The parking area's just not wide enough for an 18-wheeler to negotiate.

After learning this lesson the hard way in Florida, I immediately called the moving company when we got back to Santa Clarita to arrange a practical delivery method. After drawing up numerous blueprints that would make Wile E. Coyote proud, the only viable approach I could come up with was to drop the stuff in via winch-equipped helicopter. Such ingenuity doesn't come cheap, though, and when the mover suggested a more mundane solution that didn't require me to crack an ATM machine or sell a kidney, I opted for practicality over flamboyance.

It turns out that what we needed (and what every apartment dweller needs if they want to take delivery of their furniture without ticking off the drivers and being added to the AFL-CIO's no-fly list) was "shuttle service"  As a Southern Californian,  the term "shuttle service" prompts an image of something you use when, for some insane reason, you have no access to your car and need transport from point A to... wherever your car is. It usually consists of squeezing into a van, bus or tram with a bunch of other auto-deprived losers and proving that the shortest distance between two points is strictly theoretical. But in the moving industry, "shuttle service" describes the process of driving the massive tractor/trailer that contains your furniture to a secret depot on the edge of town where they stash all the normal-sized U-Haul vans, and transferring your goods to one of those vans, which then makes the final incognito delivery to the destination apartment building with minimum drama.

So we made those arrangements, then immediately commenced waiting for the truck to arrive, which took about 10 days as it made its way from Florida to California via Nova Scotia.

About a week after we arrived, I got a call from the car transport people, letting me know that the tractor/trailer with the Corolla would be highballin' into town around two that afternoon and asking me to be on-hand at the destination to take delivery. This wasn't just a courtesy call... the deliverer wants to make sure that you have cash or a cashier's check ready for the driver. No checks, credit cards, no livestock accepted. I went by the bank to get a cashier's check, but when I got there I realized I couldn't remember the name of the company, and getting a cashier's check made out to "cash" seemed a bit redundant, so I just withdrew the dough, stuck it in a bank envelope, and tried to look nonchalant as I walked back to the car with the envelope stuffed down my shorts.

Sue and I got to the apartment around two and waited for the phone call from the driver. Again, the truck was too big to barrel into the apartment premises, but I figured we could arrange a nearby parking lot at which to meet and offload the car.

We waited till around six. I tried to call the dispatcher's number a couple of times, but just got a message machine, and as the sun went down, I chalked it up to  deja vu and figured that, just like in Florida, the truck wasn't going to make it into town until the next morning. We got back home about 6:30 and I was just getting ready to take a shower when I got the call from the driver, who also spoke in a thick Slavic accent that made me have to guess the words he was saying based on the starting letter. I eventually translated/speculated that he was telling me the car had arrived and, by the way, did I have the cash? I told him I could be there in 20 minutes and asked him where we should meet. He told me he had found a place to park on the street near the apartment building and that I couldn't miss him.

My curiosity was piqued as Sue and I drove across town; off-hand I couldn't picture a place around there that he could park. But my imagination was woefully limited to inside the box. About a block past the apartment building, the 3 west-bound lanes abruptly narrowed to two west-bound lanes, because the Kobayashi-Maru-savvy driver had parked his rig in the right-hand lane. He didn't have traffic cones, so he had cleverly parked the Corolla behind his trailer to warn approaching drivers of the sudden lane closure. He was right; I couldn't miss him. Fortunately, although narrowly, the other drivers did.

There wasn't much I could do at this point except hurry along the transaction. So Sue dropped me off behind the Corolla, I waved in gratitude to the passing motorists who wished me well with ten-second bursts from their horns, and trotted to the front of the car to meet the driver. There in the night, under the illumination of the Corolla's headlights, illegally parked on a busy thoroughfare, I slipped an envelope full of cash to a man with an exotic accent. My picture wasn't in the papers the next morning, and I'm not writing this from Guantanamo, so I guess everything turned out all right, if you don't count strange clicking on our phone lines and the suspicious looking van parked in front of our house.

Now the only thing left to do before advancing to the final stage of making the apartment habitable was to take delivery of the furniture. Phone, electricity, gas, internet, and, most importantly, TV services were all in place, the carpet had been cleaned, and the place was just begging for occupancy. On Monday, we were notified that delivery would be Tuesday; appropriately, that night Turner Classic Movies was airing The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming.

The truck that arrived on Tuesday was a small U-Haul number that most of us normal folks use to accomplish local moves... the kind that has pictures all over it with the message RENT THIS FOR ONLY $19.95! (On the rear bumper is the fine print about the mileage charges). After the situation at the Lakeland apartment building, I'm sure when the drivers pulled into this place they thought they were driving through the Pearly Gates: an apartment on the ground floor of a building where they could back the truck up to an exterior door just down the hall. They seemed typically taciturn when they knocked on the door and scoped the place out, but back out at the truck, where they didn't know I was watching, they performed the Russian equivalent of a high-five... I won't go into details, but it involves dancing and vodka.

So the return of the furniture went rather smoothly and a lot more quickly than its pick-up in Lakeland. Of course, other than unwrapping the furniture, there was no unpacking involved, so that cut down on the time. The only glitch was a missing headboard. But the driver smacked his forehead and assured us he knew exactly where he had left it back in South Carolina, and he'd get it to us the next time he was in the neighborhood with no ransom involved. Since it was a flat, ornamental headboard rather than a major piece of furniture, we put this in the "if dreams really do come true" column and signed off on the paperwork. I felt a bit wistful as I said do svidaniya to the drivers and watched the truck pull away. We had been through a lot together, and a special bond had been formed between the drivers and I, no doubt aided by the fact that I could only understand every fifth word they said.

Kevin and Lynne (Sue's brother and sister-in-law) were bringing Sue's folks up the following Saturday for the final move-in, so Sue and I had a few days to unpack some stuff, hook up the home theater and get the furniture prospectively arranged. That's when we noticed that the bedroom closet in this apartment was considerably smaller than its counterpart in Lakeland. Apparently the architects had decided that today's active senior gets by with a couple of shirts, a pair of chinos, and one set of orthopedic sneakers, because the closet was roughly the size of the restroom on a commercial jet. Sue and I should have noticed this before, but... well... we didn't. It wasn't till we started unpacking that we could see that the ratio of clothes to closet space was going to be a problem whose solution required quantum mechanics or high-compression hydraulics. We addressed it immediately by postponing any action till Kevin and Lynne and the folks arrived.

When the big day came, it was great, the epitome of a family rallying together... sort of like a barn-raising but without the ropes and lumber and people who don't believe in zippers. All five grandkids were there to do the things that the older generation could still get away with telling them to do. The closet conundrum was addressed on two fronts:
1. Kevin attacked the closet. He's more accomplished as a home-handyman than I am, in the sense that, while I'm laying down a drop-cloth to oil a squeaky hinge, he's putting together a nuclear water-heater with a hammer and a Swiss army knife. So he sized up the closet in short order, went down to Lowes (a place I have yet to work up the nerve to enter), and came back with materials to better utilize the space for storage.
2. Sue and Lynne and Mom started paring down the wardrobe. Sue and Lynne were merciless... if a piece of material hadn't touched human flesh within the past 18 months, it was gone, relegated for donation. Ben and Sam took the boxes of clothes down to Goodwill, which immediately made plans to open another outlet.

By the end of the day, things were unpacked, pictures were hung, furniture was arranged, and everybody lived happily ever after at Hometown Buffet. It was a great day. Mom and Dad seemed to like the place and they had been real troupers in putting up with the entire process of relocation. Of course, they'd still have to adjust to a world where we could drop by at a moment's notice, but the human spirit is resilient given time.

That's about it except for a couple of post-scripts:

- As Mom and Dad settled in, and as other tenants in adjoining apartments did the same, it came to our attention that perhaps I had set the sub-woofer level on their home theater system a little high. After some time, the upstairs neighbors realized that daily 6.7 tremors were a bit excessive even by southern California standards, and traced the source back to the Curren apartment. We sent Ben and Sam over to do some fine-tuning to the neighbors' hearing aids, and everything's okay now.

-About a month after the move-in, I got a phone call that, by the very fact of its unintelligibility, alerted me that the wayward headboard had made it home. I told the driver I'd meet him on the curb in front of the apartment complex and, sure enough, he rolled his 75-footer up to the municipal bus stop, opened up the side-door of the trailer, and handed me the headboard, none the worse for wear after taking the scenic route. Then, as quickly as he appeared, the Russian stranger was gone. I doubt our paths will cross again, which is probably just as well... reminiscing would just be awkward.

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