On Moving
Moving is either a form of torture invented by the devil to reduce a preacher to tears and madness or a test permitted by God to teach him patience, endurance, and the control of tongue and temper. Let the harp represent the musician; the pen, the writer; the gavel, the judge; the skull and cross-bones, the medic; the star, the detective; but oh, my dear Oswald, for the preacher the moving van!
Whether you play that delightful little game “fruit basket upset,” you know, Oswald, where everybody grabs a chair and the left one wails, or whether you belong to a more democratic organization that believes in each church picking its own, moving day, like God and the Judgment, is inevitable.
You will either be called upon to move just when your garden is coming on, after days of back-breaking labor, and you will have to leave the tender young carrots, the thriving tomato plants, the tiny new peas; or you will draw a time when the thermometer is 8 below zero. If the former is true, you never move into the new place to find a nice garden left by your predecessor; you usually pay the trash man a dollar to haul away six barrels of junk left behind by the dear man. You survey the trash and think longingly of small new onions and little radishes left behind. If the latter is true— mid-winter and beastly cold—you set your teeth and remember early Christians who were burned at the stake or fed to the lions.
The first step in moving is to systematically and thoroughly wreck the present living quarters. Put away in boxes all loose articles. There is no set rule for this. Your wife will always put the best glass and china in a box in the bottom of the van and the movers will place the piano upon it. Your most cherished picture will be discovered in a box with the ice-tongs, the electric iron, and the portable typewriter, while Aunt Aurora’s vase—which she gave you for a wedding present and you detest and findly hope will be broken—is found packed in pillows and blankets.
You preach your last sermon where you are and Monday arrives. You wreck the house. The trucks are scheduled to appear on Tuesday morning. The stoves are down and there is no food. You wait for the vans in anxiety and dirt. They do not appear. You buy a chunk of bologny, some crackers and doughnuts which you eat wrapped in coats and rugs. (You wrapped in coats and rugs, not the bologny.)
Your wife says brightly, as she wipes Oswald Junior’s nose, “The trucks will be here soon, I know. And won’t it be lovely to see our nice, new home! I do hope someone asks us in to a good warm supper and to spend the night.”
One o’clock, six o’clock; comes the dusk. You eat more bologny and a bakery pie for supper and unroll the mattresses and drop down on them still wrapped in coats and rugs and as many quilts and comforts as can be found not in use around clocks, lamp shades, mirrors, and vases. Comes the dawn. You eat more bologny and an orange. Oswald Jr. says pathetically that he wishes he was at the South Pole; he couldn’t be much colder and at least he’d have the penguins to play with.
Mrs. Long, good soul, brings you a pot of soup at noon—which you, standing, eat out of glasses and teacups—and invites you over to her house for the afternoon and for the evening meal. You smile bravely and refuse; you might miss the trucks. You walk the floor and look down the street nervously; this for four hours. For supper you have cold soup, hamburgers and bananas. And so to bed.
At midnight the family is peacefully sleeping when with a dreadful clatter and honking the vans arrive.
You work feverishly in the dirt and cold. By two o’clock you are going to your new home as-tired, dirty and cold as it is possible for humans to be, but still game, still hopeful. You have forgotten the cat and little Oswald’s red wagon and the lawnmower, but you optimistically look forward to other” cats, other wagons, and other lawnmowers in the new home, so you say grandly, “Let it go.” And, oh yes, Oswald, -you will have forgotten to turn off the water thereby furnishing scandalized comment for the deacons’ meetings for months to come; and the wife forgot to turn the light out in the bathroom. Otherwise everything has been done and you go as blithely down the road as an undertaker walking down the aisle acting as an honorary pall-bearer at a funeral put on by his rival in business.
As you ride, your wife says her head feels as if one of her headaches was coming on; that she hopes all this will not make Junior sick. She remembers that Junior was exposed to mumps some days ago and counts back trying to fix his time if “they” should “take” and decides he might have them any time now. She believes she has fever. She hopes all this cold and hard work will not start up your neuritis again. She recalls that she has two teeth to be filled and that Junior’s tonsils must be taken out. She hopes that there are good doctors in the new town.
Junior says sleepily that his jaws hurt—”sorta funny and awful bad.” Mrs. Oswald says gloomily, “I told you so.”
"Oswald Jr. will have the mumps."
By this time you have arrived in the town where is located your new home. It will be almost morning, your wife will have a tearing headache and Junior will have been sick twice —what with the excitement, the cold and the bologny and the bananas. Because you are rather low in funds (preachers usually are) you ‘ decide to stop at a second or third class boarding house, sleep a few hours, get warm, eat a hot breakfast and be on hand to help unload the furniture in the new home.
After much knocking, ringing, and waiting, you finally gain admittance, somewhat grudgingly given on the part of the host—even though the sign plainly says “Rooms for Tourists.” The rooms are far worse than you expected but you assure yourself that it is “only for a few hours” and so to bed.
You oversleep, of course, and after a hasty breakfast of pale and unpalatable food washed down with quantities of bitter, thick fluid masquerading under the name of coffee, you hopefully drive to the parsonage.
Be assured of either of two things. It will be very large or very small. If your former house has been tiny, the new house will be vast; if you have lived in a big house you will have the excruciating pleasure of adjusting your furniture to four small rooms.
After your first startled and bitter realization that you will have to get rid of half your furniture or buy that much more, depending on the
house, you are aware of a line of children, round-eyed and staring, ready to burst into questions like pine shavings into flame when a match is applied. These are the neighbor’s children. One will have a dirty nose and one will be broken out with a rash. You hurry Junior in, hoping desperately for the best.
There is an unwonted activity and bustle in the church next door. It tears into your consciousness that eyes are following your every move. You learn later that the ladies decided to give the church a thorough cleaning on that day.
One comes forward to tell you (while others listen) that the van has already come and unloaded, that everything has been put into the house; and that the men dropped one box and something broke; the ladies heard the crash distinctly; and that you cannot get the bed springs up the narrow stairs but that they will have to be hoisted up to and in through the window.
You open the door and walk in. And, Oswald, ray boy, strong men have been known to weep at the sight! (Soft music here and beatthe drum slowly.)
True, the furniture is all unloaded and in— in confusion; and presents an intricate jig-saw puzzle, requiring the greatest measure of patience, research, lifting-power and endurance to solve. They have put the piano, Oswald, in the kitchen. The cook stove is in the parlor; the stove pipe has been carefully laid in the bathtub; and your books are all upstairs and the study is downstairs; the^ dining table is on the back porch and the garbage pail is in the front hall. You never find the ironing board or the top dresser drawer of your best dresser; and when you check up, your two best big pillows are missing.
If you have a stove, a new stove, Oswald, with six installments still due, the parsonage will have a furnace. If you have no stove and have had a furnace, the new house will have no furnace and you will be forced to buy a stove, a dollar down—easy payments.
Your rugs will be too big or too small. It is recorded that one preacher died of heart failure when he found that the kitchen linoleum from the old kitchen exactly fit the new. But do not worry, Oswald, this is an unusual case and will probably not come within your experience. The curtains, too, will not fit the windows. They are always too short, which will mean new curtains all around.
They do not ask you in for a good warm supper and a good bed. You finally get a fire going and a bed up and creep into it, bruised and weary in body and spirit.
Posted in Chapter Three
You may try to persuade yourself that this is an ordinary book — in order that you may find comfort in the persuasion - but you cannot do so and be fair to facts.