Homeless at last

I got out of the house at last on the 31st of July. Homeless at last! But I did it the Mill valley way with a Mercedes, a computer and two cell phones. Of course I had a whole collection of drek that I couldn't get rid of so it lived in the car for two weeks. And now I fully understand why truly homeless people keep so much crap: you never know when you will need some extraneous thing. I kept trying to consolidate things: a recipe collection which only had ten or twenty heirloom recipes but buried in an hour's worth of paper tossing; an album project from years past that need thinking and glueing; a couple of boxes of ancient school papers with some blackmail material buried deep; crutches - a great sympathy ploy for the plane but try using them with three pieces of luggage!; an ever expanding compliment of luggage - I ended up shipping more stuff; Chinese scrolls that never sold; files to take, receipts to store, and bills to pay; a fur neck piece that was impossible to wear in SF without risking animal fan's wrath - off to Italy with you, if not there, then a ritual burial; miscellaneous gifts dredged up from the travels of years past - perfect hostess gifts. I learned that you can give stuff to people, they will be grateful, and if they hate it they can toss it later in the privacy of their own home. And sometimes you can either mail it or just abandon it on their doorstep. I did enjoy the "cousining around" as my mother called this kind of friend/family visiting especially since it allowed for a one on one experience with several friends even if I sometimes needed my schedule to remember where I was sleeping that night. My last spot was with Kristin and Dennis who marvelously took me to the shuttle and are babysitting the last two cases until they get shipped. Just bought stamps for the thank you notes. Now to find a fan for the nighttime heat.

The Move Progresses

I have torn up every room in my house. There are books and boxes and furniture piled up everywhere!! My bed is on it's side due to rewiring of the reading lights. So I'm sleeping on the guest bed which is very high and quite firm and which is lovely and nearly new but doesn't want to sell. I should keep it and sell the other one but I love my soft, comfy bed. The renters have allergy problems so they don't want any of the rugs which also don't want to sell. And the books!! I had no idea that I had so many books. And I haven't opened most of them in years. Some in thirty years! Why keep any of them? Just the Italian history. Luckily a friend has looked them over and flogged a few for a nice bit of cash.

The packers/movers came today and are busily wrapping and rapping and packing away. They are a nice crew of part time musicians and artists with an interesting variety of hair choices. Groovy dudes all. But there must be some corollary to Parkinson's Law that states that the goods expand to fill the available pod. After packaging, my "stuff" was easily twice the volume I had expected. But after years of time wasted playing Tetris - which I recall is a video game - the boss and his vice chairman were able to perfectly fit it all into the 8x8x16 POD with a bit to spare so I saved the golf clubs. Haven't given up actually playing my age, but now I need to live to be 105.

On stuff

George Carlin died last Sunday. His comic philosophy was all over the news. Most relevant for me was his rant about STUFF. I am up to my eyebrows in 40+ years of STUFF! And George appears posthumously all over radio and TV, reminding me that it’s all just STUFF. I am pleased and only a little surprised at how easy it has been to eliminate so much of it. So how do you handle all your stuff? When I was sick in January watching dreadful TV, there was a program called Clean House where families with way too much STUFF are persuaded to get rid of lots of it so the bossy host and makeover team can fulfill the show’s mandate. Why do people accumulate so much STUFF? And why is other people’s stuff so dreadful? As George said “Other people’s stuff is shit and your shit is STUFF!” Glad to see the back of most of it. Regrets later.
Then in the NYTimes yesterday was a lengthy article about the tyranny of the HEIRLOOM! Melinda doesn’t want the mahogany table from Nana and Jonny doesn’t have room for the Deerfield chest. I am looking hard at all this STUFF. If you are going to spend real money to put it in storage it better be because you want it not because X left it to you. I have said goodbye to a lot of real drek. I just hope my children appreciate that they will not have the three week, four dumpster purge to handle when I die. But there’s still time and Italian STUFF is so much more interesting.

PhotoFobic

I have spent two days and perhaps ten hours with Dennis, Kristin's husband making the ultimate slide show of our pictures from last fall's trip to Europe. She and I met in Berlin, then visited my friend Angelika in Koenigstein followed by a tour of the Black Forest and Lake Konstanz, flew off to Rome where we met up with her sister Charlene, then Firenze and Siena and finally Venice. The total number of photos taken was just short of a googleplex. Some of them were actually good. But the best ones were human interest shots, I think. Those of you in the Bay Area will be able to see this magnum opus when you come to my send off party; no soft restraints will be used, just a continuous loop with loopy dialogue to comment on the locale since it may not always be obvious where we are. However, one of the funniest is herein attached for your amusement. Sage advice: make sure your camera is turned off before you stash it in your purse.

Texas Two Step

I visited Baytown Texas with my friend Elsie. We went to see her sister Corinne and husband Raymond. They picked us up at the airport and drove us to their condo. During the ride, Corinne directed Raymond to "git on this lane, Raymint, git on that one" and he obediently did so. I asked it they were church goers and was told they had a pretty good new preacher but he "preached real hard." I would be welcome to come along.
They lived in a tiny space in a complex with a view of the refineries that dominate Baytown and give it the look of a space station parking lot filled with alien vehicles. The air is thick with the smell of the refinery and so hot and humid that leaving the AC in the condo you feel like you have been hit in the chest with a wet pillow. Corinne (Co-rene) took us to Galveston to see the beach. They let cars drive on the beach and the waves are no higher that 6 or 8 inches and warm as bath water. Quite different from your basic California beach experience. On the way home we stopped at a roadside stand to buy shrimp: the place was completely timed in bright yellow and blue with at least ten different sizes of shrimp. We boiled up the whole mess and threw it on the table to shell and eat. They were utterly delicious!
The next night was Saturday and we wanted to go listen to music so they treated us to the local dance scene. A huge space the size of two bowling alleys had only one of the three band stands occupied. We four sat at a tiny table with beers. Raymint finally danced with Elsie. While they were on the floor, Co-rene confided "Raymint, he cain't dance. I got to lead 'im." Then one of the locals asked me to dance: a tip of his stetson and "would y'all like to dance, ma'am?" A huge guy with a belt buckle the size of a football and high heeled cowboy boots. It was like dancing with Ferdinand the Bull, as he huffed and puffed and led me around in the Texas Two-step. More quiet waiting and then Raymint finally asked me to dance. And he could dance like Fred Astair!!! At the end of our trip around, he did a dip!! Imagine being married for 35 years and missing that.
On Sunday we went to church. It was a single story brick structure sprawling around a huge grassy lot near a woods. The place was jammed! They had 200+ children in the Sunday school! Standees lined the walls. And of course the preacher preached "real hard" and actually thumped the bible several times. I didn't follow the intense sermon which seemed to bounce randomly around the old testament, and the assemblage was quiet and solemn when I was hoping for enthusiasm and affirmations. But the whole trip was a visit to another planet and a true adventure.

Memorial Day

I am not a fan of Memorial Day. I always thought that the celebration of dead soldiers only led to more of them. I admit I liked having someone put flags on the graves of relatives many of whom served (Navy, Cavalry and proto Mash units). But today I heard a very nice Memorial Day story on NPR: it seems that a French woman has created an organization that is dedicated solely to decorating the graves of the American war dead near the D-Day beaches in Normandy. They come from all over France on Memorial Day to tidy and place flowers and flags on the graves in the American Cemetary at Colleville-sur-mer. The founder was interviewed. Her lovely French-accented English described how the group does their work and sends photos of the graves to the relatives in the states, many of whom are too old or distant to visit. But the part that made me really feel the sense of the day was the comments of a man who travels all the way from Paris to this place to remember the Americans and what they did and died for in 1944. He said "Excuse me for speak French. I never forget them. I thank them for their sacrifice. God bless America." Then they played the Star Spangled Banner and he choked up and made me cry. As a frequent traveler to Europe, I have never really encountered bias against me as an individual, but America as an institution gets a lot of gas lately. How reassuring that ordinary people still remember the things we did a long time ago that were so important and so hard.

Finding an Apartment

After two trips to the Italian consulate in SF, it was made clear that if I wanted a extended visa, I would have to have a rental contract for the period of my stay. I had learned from the lame website - needs a lotta help!- that I would have to provide my own health insurance and show sufficient income. I had almost everything in hand the first time I visited. The visa official looked at my stuff and asked about my income statement:
"This is your annual income?" With the rent from my house it looked fairly substantial.
"Yes."
"Are you married?" I thought he was deciding if it would cover two people.
"No, I'm a widow."
"Will you marry me?" he asked.
"Of course!" says I.
But then the rental thingy arose.
"You must have a rental contract for the whole period." Period.

So, I spent many hours searching for a standard rental on the web. Most of the available places were tourism sites with weekly rentals in the thousands. And all furnished, which I don't need since I want to cadge some stuff for myself. And nobody answered the e-mails I sent. And the phone numbers were often "not obtainable". And lots of them had been photographed with a fisheye lens, making assertions about space very unreliable. So I finally decided I had to make a trip for the sole purpose of renting something. I left on a Monday, arrived late on Tuesday and bright and early the next morning arrived at an agency that seemed to have the best selection. Nobody home. Finally arriving an hour late, the minder sent me away until 11 or 11.30 when the important people would arrive. When they showed up, we made arrangements to see two the next day, Thursday. Plus a spot offered by a friend of a friend, that made three. But minutes before the appointment the next day, the agency pushed it off to Friday and eliminated one!! Now we're looking at Friday afternoon and I am leaving on Monday AM. After a loud and animated conversation with these clowns, I pulled out all the stops and called everyone I knew to see what was possible. A second hand reference led me to a sweet aussie gal who showed me one that day: between Ponte Vecchio and Piazza Signoria, in the middle of the tourist parade, with a two burner imitation kitchen. Nope. But the promise of Friday was something in Piazza Santo Spirito, just where I wanted to be. On Friday at noon the agency dude, Aldo - all is forgiven! - showed me a nice place with a terrace, the holy grail of Firenze housing. Then Pza Santo Spirito. A big portone, wide stairs (think groceries in a carrello), a foyer, a dining room, large living room, a brand new kitchen, and a decent bedroom at the far end of the place away from the noisy (so what, I'm gonna be deaf eventually) piazza and two (2!!) frescoed ceilings. Crappy furniture a twin beds but I can do my own thing there. Took me all of ten minutes to decide: "I'll take it" Not more expensive than the others, but a fabulous place. Room for hardy visitors. A kitchen with an oven = eggplant parmigiano. Right over a cafe = morning coffee in seconds. Walking distance from Palazzo Pitti. Yea.
But then a mad rush before banks close to get the cash needed. Taxi to Citi branch, but whoa, they've been sold to Banco Di Roma THAT DAY! So more mad dashing to American Express for a huge cash advance, just in time to meet the landlady and aussie agent at 6. Signed and sealed by aperativo time. Actually had a whole day of down time before getting delivered to the Pisa bus and then the airport and the plane to JKF and luckily an upgrade from NY to SF and on the next Thursday, my application went in and yesterday Voila! a visa for one year!