We moved 21 times before I left the nest. Most of them were “bad” moves. My wife occasionally mentions moving from our current place, and I get hives, figuratively speaking.
My brother and his young family were moved down from Connecticut by professional movers (paid for by his firm) who labeled and packed everything very neatly. It seemed like the easiest move in the world.
Then the tractor-trailer truck caught fire due to “spontaneous combustion,” according to the parties involved – the stored household goods got so hot in the blazing sun that they ignited. In January, in Connecticut. Although almost everything in the truck was “destroyed” as in, useless and replaceable by insurance, almost all of it was identifiable – charred T-shirts, warped dressers, and so on, strangely enough all the resalable consumer electronics were totally atomized – not a trace remained of charred TVs, computers, blenders, record players, and the like. Imagine the odds!
For some reason the fire investigators didn’t seem alarmed by this – maybe they’ve never seen any trace of consumer electronics survive a “spontaneous” fire, perhaps it’s very consistent where they work – and as far as I know no one was called to account for the robbery/insurance fraud. But the insurance companies for the van line and for the firm reimbursed my brother and his wife lavishly, so all they really missed were all the family photos (particularly irreplaceable were photos of her little sister who had died some years before).
And that’s not the family’s worst moving story. At one time I lived with my parents, sister, and maternal grandparents (my brother had already moved out) in a conveniently three-story house, so each generation could have its own floor. Then my grandfather died while on vacation, and my grandmother (who was in the terrible grip of Alzheimer’s) insisted the family put her into a particular nursing home with her friends – my mom didn’t want her to go, but Grandma made a huge issue of it, and once she was settled in there, would immediately forget her friends and forget she’d asked to be put there, and for the rest of her long life would rail at my mother for having “done that to her.”
Since Grandma was about to leave for the nursing home, my parents decided to move out of the big place – and my Dad announced it would be foolish to move into a new place together, since he’d decided to leave my Mom.
And so we began to sort through and pack up three generations’ worth of stuff while my Mom dealt with her own father’s recent death, her mother’s dementia and abandonment issues, and her husband leaving her, and my Dad tried not to talk to anyone, and my grandmother kept forgetting her husband was dead and wandering around looking for him. We kids couldn’t decide what of our grandparents’ things were supposed to be kept, and didn’t even know where anyone other than Grandma was ultimately going. Mom was essentially nonfunctional, and she’d never been very good at moving. Dad was essentially nonparticipatory and wracked with guilt.
The first big sweep up of junk produced so much trash that the trash pickup guys sent us a notice they wouldn’t be doing that again --we’d have to pay for a separate pickup. So for subsequent sorting and packing, my Dad hatched a scheme to keep our trash output low enough to avoid paying for the special pickup – after dark, each trash night, he’d roam the neighborhood with bags of trash, adding one or two to each neighbor’s pile in a way he hoped would not be noticed. Sort of like an evil, twisted version of Santa Claus.
Ultimately we all five ended up living separately, so the maximum possible amount of subsequent moving was involved.
That was the best move ever.
Edit: composed before Mama Zappa’s story. Wouldn’t be surprised if that case was also fraud.
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