Chapter 47

December 2, 1978

For early December, the weather wasn’t that cold. At 10:00 am, it was in the sixties although the wind was blowing at 20 mph with gusts up to 26 mph. The wind made it a lousy day to move. It seemed like anything bulky tried to take off on its own during the short trip from the van to the house.

This was a major moving day for three of the four members of the group. Having made the decision to rent out her house, Cathy was moving into Sandra’s place. Tim, having finished his house with the help of his crew, was moving into his place.

There were two houses full of furniture and one house that was empty. Some of Cathy’s stuff was of very high quality and was going to be moved into Sandra’s house. Sandra’s place was much larger than Cathy’s and there was too much stuff for the smaller place. It was decided that the leftovers could go to Tim, who didn’t care all that much if his furnishings were new or older. What was getting replaced in Sandra’s home, also could get moved to Tim’s. The result was that there was quite a bit of furniture shuffling going on.

While the actual steps weren’t completely planned out, the basic idea was to first move the stuff Sandra didn’t want any more from her house to Tim’s house. This included the cheap dining room set she had bought at Target. A couple of lamps and other minor items also made their way across the street. This would free up space in her house for Cathy’s replacement items. Cathy wanted to keep a very nice place setting for eight so Tim received the place setting for eight from Sandra.

Once Sandra’s house had been emptied of the stuff she was giving to Tim, they would move the items the girls wanted to keep from Cathy’s house into Sandra’s house. This included the antique dining room furniture that Cathy had gotten from Gladys. It was large and heavy, but with Tim and Benny hauling the table top in the truck and the chairs in the van, it made its way to Sandra’s house. Cathy brought a couple of nice crystal lamps to replace the ones that Sandra had given to Tim.

They took a short break to get lunch at a chain pizza place. It was a plain cheese pizza which the girls enjoyed, never having tasted a New York style pizza made by a real New Yorker. Tim and Benny, having had real pizzas, were both disappointed. That was one of the things that they couldn’t wait to have again, real pizzas with the thick crusts, a rich tomato sauce, and smothered with cheese. Too many other foods had gotten worse with time.

The final step was to move stuff from Cathy’s house that she was giving to Tim. The older living room furniture, some artwork, and some lamps made their way from Cathy’s house to his house. It was a lot of furniture with the sofa, couch, chairs, coffee table, and end tables for the living room. The furniture required two trips in the pickup truck and the van. With the wind, it felt like the van was getting blown all over the place. The sky was overcast now and it looked like it might rain, later.

Tim was also taking the master bedroom set from Cathy’s place. The furniture, although old fashioned, was in good shape. It was a nice poster bed of solid wood with matching chest of drawers, dresser, and night stands. Cathy had a hard time deciding if she should take it with her or not, but the fact was that she liked the more modern furniture that Sandra had.

Tim was also the lucky recipient of the kitchen items from Cathy’s house. Together, the two girls had two of everything for a kitchen and in some cases three of them. Tim got all of the redundant items which filled his kitchen rather quickly. This included the pots and pans, silverware, glasses, and small appliances. Since this was actually the most expensive room to fill, Tim was extremely happy.

The kitchen items were brought over by Sandra and Cathy in their little cars. Everything was packed in boxes, more or less by where they had been stored in the kitchen. Drawers were emptied and cabinets were ransacked. There was a small, but heavy, box with the silverware. Another box held all of the junk from the junk drawer in the kitchen.

In their rush to pack, he ended up with cookie-cutters and other items that none of the others had thought to purchase. They were dealing with a life time collection of kitchen-ware items that Gladys had collected. Later, Cathy would realize that she had given away some useful items, but by then it would be too embarrassing to ask for them back. Tim ended up with a much better stocked kitchen than the other two houses.

Tim had offered to purchase the furniture, but Cathy had turned him down. In part, it was because she and Sandra felt guilty at not having helped him complete the restoration of his house. After all, he and Benny had redone her house and completely rebuilt Sandra’s house. They owed him for having done that.

She also felt like she owed them for the fact that she even owned the furniture. It was Benny’s idea and Tim’s talking that had gotten her the furniture along with the house. The furniture had been a small token amount added onto the price of the house. After having seen how much Benny spent on furnishing his house, she came to realize that she had gotten a really good deal.

Around 3:00 pm, they finished shuttling items from one place to another. Tim still had to unpack the boxes, but everything was moved. He could do that over the next few days, taking his time to find the right places to store everything.

They stopped transporting items in the truck, just in time. A patchy fog rolled in despite the gusty winds. The temperature had dropped to 42 from the 65 it had been just two hours earlier. The humidity was 99%. The wind hadn’t died down any, but that didn’t seem to affect the formation of the fog any. It was eerie watching the wisps of fog blow past at 20 mph. It seemed to leave a trace of moisture on everything it flowed past. Tim and Benny went outside to watch it.

“I didn’t know that fog could exist in this kind of wind. I’ve always thought of fog as being a still air kind of phenomenon.”

“It’s a cloud. There are a lot of clouds where the wind is even faster. Just look up in the sky some cloudy stormy night,” Benny said.

“I never thought about it that way.”

The wind cut through their coats. The wet air drew the warmth from their body, and the cold seemed to seep to the bone. It may not have been freezing cold, but it sure felt like it. They shivered from the cold despite their winter coats.

“Are we done moving?” Benny asked.

“I’ve still got to pick up my bed.”

“I suppose we ought to get over to your house and grab your stuff.”

“Benny, I’d like to stay at my parent’s house tonight.”

“Why?”

“My mom is acting all emotional about me moving. She wants to have dinner tonight with just her, dad, me, and Katy. She said it was to celebrate my moving into my own home, but she seems ... bothered. The other evening, Calvin told mom that he wasn’t coming home for Christmas. She wishes that I had waited until after Christmas to move out.”

Calvin now lived in Fort Worth, and worked for Bell Helicopter. He was talking about going to Iran to provide maintenance on helicopters purchased by the Iranian Air Force. Iran had ordered 287 Bell 214As. Calvin thought it would be pretty neat to visit a foreign country for a year or two. Tim tried to tell him that the political situation wasn’t good, but Calvin didn’t want to hear him and, frankly, thought Tim was too stupid to understand anything about the world.

“Why would she want you to wait until after Christmas to move?”

“Her family is leaving the nest and she’s feeling uncertain about things. Her life has revolved around us kids for twenty-five years. Christmas is a very big family holiday. There’s all of that decorating of the house, purchasing presents, specials on television, and then the whole Christmas day stuff.”

Benny just grunted. He didn’t understand it, but he accepted that Tim knew best. If he thought his mother was upset about him moving out, then it was a good chance that she was upset. Tim was the person who dealt with people.

“I’ll bring my clothes over tomorrow.”

“That’s fine with me, Tim. Just let me know when to come over to help load your stuff and bring it over. It shouldn’t take too long.”

It wasn’t going to be anything heavy, just a lot of things. There were all of his clothes and mementos from growing up. In terms of mementos, there really wasn’t that much. Too many of the things he had as a kid were hand-me-downs from Calvin, and were broken useless items by the time he was done with them. He hadn’t spent much money collecting things during his teenage years. There were no record collections or anything like that. He didn’t have posters of bikini clad women or fast cars hanging on his wall. In a very real way, his room reflected the tastes of a sixty year old man rather than a twenty year old kid.

The two of them went into Tim’s house and started unpacking the kitchen. The girls had really rushed through in packing the stuff so it was a mess trying to put things away. The old toaster, complete with crumbs, went on the counter along with the coffee maker, an electric can opener, and a crock pot.

Gladys had a set of ceramic canisters for storing things. It had four canisters, which were labeled, from largest to smallest, flour, sugar, coffee and tea. He peered in each one half expecting to find them filled with something. He just placed them haphazardly in a row on the counter. Benny went over and arranged them by size.

“You don’t drink tea. What are you going to put in it?”

“I don’t know. My second wife stored nuts in hers. I’m not really a ‘nut in my cooking’ type person, so I guess I’ll store something else.”

“My mom puts macaroni pasta in hers.”

“That’s not a bad idea.”

Benny went back to unpacking a box filled with bake-ware. There were casserole dishes of varying sizes, several cookie trays, pie pans, and cake pans. He put them away in a cabinet.

“Gladys sure liked to bake.”

“In her day, that was the only way to have cookies, cake, or a pie. In our day, almost no one baked anymore. You could go to the store and purchase pies, cakes and cookies that were ‘homemade’ and cut into different sizes. When I was divorced, I used to buy little individual servings of chocolate cake and half pies. I quit buying those mass produced ‘brand name’ cookies and started buying the store made cookies.”

“I think my wife did the same thing after the kids moved out.”

“I have to say that real homemade cakes, pies, and cookies are the one thing that I really enjoy now.”

“I like all of the food. It tastes right.”

“That’s true.”

“I’m going to grow peaches, apples, pears, and plums on my future place. I’ll also have a garden for fresh vegetables.”

“Benny?”

“What?”

“I hate to remind you that you kind of forget about gardens when you get involved in some project. I don’t think you’ve ever harvested anything out of any garden you’ve ever grown.”

“I’ll hire a grumpy gardener to go with my grumpy housekeeper.”

Tim laughed. He knew that was exactly what Benny would do some day in the future. He would also have a prostitute who visited once a month. Benny had no intention of marrying. Of course, when Benny got rich there would be lots of women who would want to marry him, and would be overjoyed that he only paid attention to them one afternoon or evening a month. That was as much as Benny needed a woman in his life.