Communication Conundrum Resolved

The moving day communication conundrum began when the Russian movers arrived. Expository interlude ahead (possible spoiler alert). My son and his wife decided to move from SoCal to NorCal. (My son has a portable profession.) They sold their townhouse in SoCal and asked if they could move in with us while they explore communities, schools, housing prices, etc. in NorCal. My son wants to bring my five-month-old baby grandson to live with me; and he asks me if that’s OK? Seriously? How long has he had a Jewish mom? The answer was written in the Talmud hundreds of years ago. We have a win-win situation here. They get a landing pad while they regroup, and my husband and I get a baby. They had commitments in SoCal to finish up before making the exodus. Hence the moving van, with their belongings to stash in storage, would arrive in NorCal before them. Ron and I agreed to meet the movers at the storage unit to unlock it and keep track of the inventory during the load in. We recalled loading stage scenery on and off of trucks and in and out of theaters during our salad days as theater techies, and Ron went off in search of his adjustable crescent wrench.

Moving day dawned dark and stormy with sheets of rain pouring down. The movers, scheduled to arrive at the storage unit early in the morning, would call from the road one hour before anticipated arrival to give us a heads up. We roused ourselves at a demonically early hour on a morning made for lolling around in bed reading and listening to the tap-tap of raindrops, and stood by for the call, like Neo in The Matrix. Except when the call came, we did not get transported from one reality to another, like Neo. It only seemed like it.

We met the movers, Vladi and Andrei, at the storage facility. I told them right away that I’m hard of hearing, that I wear hearing aids, which help but aren’t all that, and so I would probably need to ask them to repeat what they said through a megaphone. Vladi, the lead mover, told us right away that he and his coworker Andrei are Russian and that he could speak English but Andrei was still learning. These guys were not throw-the-election-and-sabotage-America-so-it-loses-all-credibility-and-influence-on-the-world-stage Russians. They were simply your garden variety of hardworking Russian immigrants. Vladi walked us through the paperwork, which, fortunately, was in English. We and the movers each had a numbered inventory of every item on the truck. Each item had a magic green sticker with a corresponding number on it. Andrei lowered the elevator-tailgate and prepared to unload in the drenching rain. Luckily, only a few feet separated the truck from the hallway leading to the storage unit and the green number stickers seemed waterproof.

The storage unit did not have any lighting; but Vladi produced an excellent flashlight that Ron held up so we could see into the depths of the 10x10 unit. Ron has less than 20/20 vision, especially in dim light, so it was a good thing for him to control the flashlight so he could sidle up close to any object and look at it from three inches away to make sure it didn’t bite. The situation was shaping up as a potential comedy sketch in my imagination:  the woman who can’t hear, the man who can’t see, and the Russian movers unload a truck full of mystery objects in the pouring rain and stash them in a dark 10x10 space guided only by numbered green dots.

“I didn’t load the truck,” Vladi informed us worriedly, “so I don’t know how much I have here. I hope it will fit in that storage.” Our children’s belongings were not the only items on the truck. After unloading for us, the Russians would drive another 100 miles to unload the rest of the stuff for someone else. I tried to reassure them that my son knows what he’s doing and everything would fit. Vladi still looked skeptical in both Russian and English.

Necessity breeds invention, and we figured out a system for unloading and inventorying. Vladi remained on the truck and moved items to the tailgate (marking them off on his inventory list) while Andrei carried them into the storage. Vladi got to do this because he was the boss. Andrei did most of the heavy lifting. Ron said he felt like a supervisor (he even started to swagger a little). I looked for the green numbered sticker-dots while Andrei called out the numbers as he carried objects in. He had a Russian accent and didn’t always speak up so sometimes I understood him and sometimes I didn’t. If I didn’t hear him, and missed seeing the number, then the failsafe was Supervisor Ron, who made use of the flashlight to spot the numbers (often from two inches away) and repeat them to me or point them out to me. I marked off each number as it went by, which was a super-satisfying task for a Virgo, and I had to restrain myself from humming.

Andrei did his best to stack things sensibly to get the most out of the space, but in no time at all Supervisor Ron was moving things around and restacking them more efficiently when Andrei was out at the truck. Andrei didn’t seem to mind, or perhaps he didn’t notice the rearrangements. It’s interesting watching someone else’s possessions get stacked in a storage unit. I’m not judging, mind you; but I have to wonder why the kids have so many snowboards. The one I bought for my son was stolen from his room at the frat house when he was in college, so maybe he’s overcompensating.

When they had unloaded about half the items, Vladi came off the truck, looked into the storage unit, and panicked (in Russian and English). He didn’t think it would all fit. I talked him down off the ceiling (in English) and convinced him to keep unloading. I had faith in my son’s judgment. If he said it would fit, it would fit; and as we neared the end of the inventory, sure enough, it became apparent to Vladi that it would indeed fit. When he declared the inventory unloaded, Vladi and I compared notes about which items we had checked off our inventory lists. I had two things still missing and he swore he had unloaded them. One of them was identified as “framed pictures.” We had no framed pictures in the storage unit. Because the customer is always right, Vladi went back to look in the truck and he found both of the missing items. One of them was the framed pictures (camouflaged because they were wrapped in a protective pad). We almost wound up with a small plastic tub belonging to someone else, but Andrei caught it at the last minute and took it back to the truck. It didn’t look like something my children owned since we could see that it contained a mess of photos (of people we didn’t recognize), small tools, cat food (they don’t have cats), papers, and rubber bands randomly thrown into it. I could not imagine my well-organized daughter-in-law “packing” that disorderly box. Besides, it had no snowboards in it.

As the movers removed the padding from the last few pieces of furniture, I noticed that Andrei had a small, bleeding cut on his hand. I ducked into a nearby phone booth and emerged wearing my Jewish Supermom outfit and wielding antibiotic ointment and a bandaid, which I happened to have in my handbag, because that’s how Jewish moms roll. I ran an X-ray on the wound, tested it for mercury, reset the bone, doused the hand in antibiotic ointment, and bandaged him up. He was astonished. As I recall, Russia threw out all the Jews, so he probably had not yet experienced the awesome energy of a Jewish mom.

Before hopping on their truck and riding off into the pouring rain, Vladi showed me photos of his beautiful multiculti children on his phone. His wife is Korean/Russian. He has a little girl and a two-month-old son. Although he was supposed to remove the moving company pads from all the items and take them with him, he said he was leaving my children’s crib wrapped in the pads to protect it because he has a baby too. How sweet. I asked the Russians to teach me how to say “thank you” in Russian. Spasibo. Diversity rocks. I remain ever grateful for the goodness and kindness that I find everywhere around me in the many different people who touch my life.

Halloween Scrooge

I’m relieved to have survived another Halloween. I’m a Halloween scrooge and I don’t care who knows it. Surely my quarrel with Halloween has roots in trauma I experienced as a child from this holiday; trauma that has nothing to do with the undead and everything to do with myopia. I am comically nearsighted and, as a child, wore glasses with lenses thick enough to burn bugs. I have had contact lenses since the age of 16, but during my trick-or-treating years, I wore glasses. It doesn’t require rocket science to understand that when you put a plastic Halloween mask over a pair of glasses, they fog up. For this reason, I spent many a Halloween night stumbling over lawn furniture, falling in birdbaths, arguing with garden gnomes, and attempting to hack my way out of labyrinthine hedges and shrubbery with a plastic fairy wand. As my friends with 20/20 vision leapt joyously down the street, I was left in the dust extricating myself from the obstacle course of yard accoutrements and crawling through petunia beds retrieving my candy, which had spilled.

It took me years to wise up and wear costumes that did not require a mask. I’m not sure why I bothered to trick-or-treat anyway because I got to keep very little of my candy. One of my brothers has Celiac, and in order not to traumatize him alone with the unfairness of not being able to eat most of the loot we hauled in, my mother traumatized all three of us by restricting us to the same candy that my brother could eat, namely pure chocolate. So when we got home with our bulging bags, we poured the full colorful array of candy out on the kitchen table, separated the paltry few pure chocolate items from every other blessed treat, and got to keep that and that alone. My mother took our discarded candy to the local children’s rehabilitation center and gave it to the bedridden children who couldn’t go trick-or-treating. Now, all these years later, I appreciate my mother’s beautiful altruism and her brilliant system for preventing her own children from ingesting pounds of toxic junk. But as a child, I could not get on board with the good deed of treating all the little children at the rehab center to my hard-earned candy. I wonder how the nurses felt about Mom’s kindness since they had to deal with all those children jacked up on sugar who were stuck in bed. You can only play so many games of Parcheesi.

These days, as a nutritionist, I know that sugar is the devil’s brew, one of the most toxic substances in the universe, in the same league with radioactive waste and tweets from the Tyrannosaurus in the White House. Halloween is my personal nightmare on Elm St. When my children came home with their candy, I told them to throw out everything they didn’t like. “It’s not food,” I told them. “It’s garbage, so if you don’t like that kind of candy throw it away.” They sat at the kitchen table with a trash can and discarded at least half the loot because it was stuff they didn’t like. For a few years, when they were very little, I got away with telling them to choose a small selection to keep and that the rest was going to disappear to appease the candy ghost who would come during the night and look for candy to snatch instead of snatching little children. I managed to pare the stash down to a dull roar that way. But that didn’t last long because my children quickly figured out there’s no such thing as a candy ghost. They each had a bag of goodies and every evening after dinner for weeks they chose something for dessert. I couldn’t wait for those bags to dwindle. Unfortunately nothing keeps like sugar. That’s probably why dinosaurs had such bad teeth. Thousands of years from now, when humans have become extinct, candy will rule the Earth.

For a few years I handed out toothbrushes to trick-or-treaters. They looked somewhat confused. Only I could turn Halloween into a dental holiday. One year I gave out tangerines. I have a friend who worked as a doctor in a low-income community and she told me that she gave out condoms to all the teenagers who came trick-or-treating at her house. (I hope the teens didn’t try to eat them.)

The fact that I don’t like dressing up in a costume definitely poses a serious stumbling block for me when it comes to surviving Halloween. Weird and unfamiliar clothing makes me uncomfortable and self-conscious. I can never come up with good costume ideas anyway. My costuming efforts are too obscure for others to understand. One year I dressed in green and went as chlorophyll. When I told people what I was, they looked perplexed. One guy asked me if that’s an energy drink. I told him plants use it to conduct photosynthesis. He excused himself to talk to a woman in a revealing bodice about their favorite King Kong movies. It creeps me out to see other people looking strange in their get-ups. Too hallucinogenic.

The final nail in the Halloween coffin for me is that scary things actually scare me. I can’t watch horror movies because they give me nightmares. I can’t even watch normal movies with violence and torture in them. I hid under the table whenever the Wicked Witch of the West appeared in The Wizard of Oz, until I was eleven years old. My daughter watched every minute of that film at the age of two and laughed her head off (not literally). She couldn’t figure out why her mom cowered behind the couch whenever the flying monkeys appeared. I went to see the 1978 remake of The Invasion of the Body Snatchers because it was filmed in San Francisco and a lot of people I knew in the tech theater biz worked on the sets. Big mistake. I spent almost the entire film hiding my face in my husband’s shoulder and asking him what was happening. Some guy behind us finally told me in exasperation, “Just look at it, lady.” I had nightmares for weeks from listening to the soundtrack.

I don’t see the humor in fake blood and gore. It looks real to me. Zombies terrify me and I can’t understand what everyone else thinks is so funny about beyond-dead creatures. Space aliens better look benign because if they look like inside-out people then I am so not watching. When someone comes to my door with a pretend axe in their skull and fake blood dripping down, I run screaming to hide under the bed, even if it’s a fourth-grader and the fake blood looks like congealed BBQ sauce. Even if it actually is BBQ sauce. Even if it’s organic BBQ sauce. I don’t mind the fairy princesses and bumblebees, but the ghouls and serial killers terrify me. Masks creep me out. So if you come to my house on Halloween, you will find all the lights out. Perhaps a small pumpkin will grace my front porch; uncarved and still edible, later to be made into a pie sweetened with honey (not the evil-demon sugar). I will be nowhere in sight. Life is already scary enough, and getting scarier by the minute, without purposely finding more ways for us to scare ourselves. My costume for this year? Bacteria. Invisible to the naked eye. (Not an energy drink FYI.)

Benign picture. Not scary.