LSA News

No. 87, February 2008

Bruce Tabb
(continued)

The movers were pleasant enough to me, but not so to each other. As one was carrying boxed heavy mixers and large Cuprinox pans down the stairs, another would bump into him, intentionally and hard, as if in joust, to see if he could cause him to lose balance and crash, along with my kitchenware. Within an hour of their departure, the police were at my door. When the movers had driven off, the rig had caught on a cable leading into a neighbor's house. Not only had the cable been ripped from the house, but with it, the siding.

I packed my two cats, Stevie and Lilly, into carriers and with their constant guttural protest drove first to Ohio where I spent a day with a good friend (he now teaches sculpture at the Rhode Island School of Design), and then on to Cincinnati to visit another friend, a sax jazzer who is currently prominent in the Denver scene. Jonny Love (his stage name) had suggested a hotel right off an exit. The man behind the glass booth at the hotel, called something like the Pink Lady Chalet, looked at me strangely when I told him I had a reservation. He asked me for how many hours and I naively responded, "The whole night, what else?" I didn't get much sleep as there was much coming and going in the rooms around me. But Mr. Love enjoyed being able to visit with me and see the girls all in the same evening.

The next morning when I returned from a brief outing for coffee, the hotel room door had a boot on it with a note telling me to go to the office. This man, different from the one from the night before in that he had all his upper and lower front teeth, told me that there was a regulation against having pets in hotel rooms within the Cincinnati city limits and that I was going to have to pay to have the room fumigated. "No telling," I said, "what horrible diseases your clients could pick up from my cats, even in a half-hour stay." I was expecting the worst, but he told me it would cost me all of twenty dollars, cash. I have never wondered in whose pocket that twenty-dollar bill ended up.

The rest of my trip was pretty uneventful. I drove from 8:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m., regardless of a time change. From Cincinnati I drove around Indianapolis, over the green rolling hills of Iowa, through Nebraska, the flattest place on earth where I saw only mud and cows, through Wyoming, the northern tip of Utah (the Mormons knew what they were doing when they settled in Utah), across Idaho, Eastern Oregon around to Portland, and then south to Eugene. I remember how breathtaking the landscape was once I got out of Nebraska, so breathtaking it brought me to tears, and I kept thinking, "This is where I am going to live."

The first place I went upon my arrival in Eugene on a late Saturday afternoon, a week since my departure, was John and Normandy Helmer's house. I had declined their invitation to a chili cook-off, thinking I would still be sightseeing in Utah. Everyone was surprised to see me.

When I got the bill from the moving company, the charges were about three times the minimum. I paid the company the minimum, and the university backed me in my protests of how the representative and the movers had treated me. I believe this particular company was later removed from the Business Affairs Office's list of approved movers.

I've been in Eugene now for sixteen and a half years.

Return to LSA Newsletter