MOVING ON

After much consideration, W.S. decided to accept a civilian job working for the Navy. I didn’t care where we moved, as long as being downsized didn’t involve a firing squad. The job was located at the Naval Base in San Diego, California, one of the most beautiful cities in the United States. They were paying our moving expenses, so we purchased new furniture to go along with our new life, and recycled our college furniture back to the Salvation Army.

All of our friends were packing and looking forward to actual lives in the real world. Professor Seltzer donated his entire library to the university. He had read those books, and was on his way to Florida, where he planned to spend the rest of his days fishing off a boat named, “The Criterion.”

We hired the, “Get You There In One Piece Moving Company,” and the salesman assured us that their movers would treat our worldly belongings as lovingly as if they were moving their very own families. A week later, as soon as the truck was loaded, we began the 5-day drive across the U.S. in our
12-year-old Volkswagen Beetle.

W.S. assured me that the apartment he found for us was nicer than anything we had ever lived in before. “It’s airy and bright. The rooms are large, and it’s close to my office.” What he failed to tell me was that after looking at several apartments around town, the brakes on his rental car had failed. He would have gone over a cliff, but instead he had hit a dumpster at this particular apartment complex. It was then that he decided that, since he couldn’t go any further, this was the place we were going to call home.

After the first day of driving, eating catch-as-catch-can food, and experiencing gas station washrooms, I started whining, “Are we there yet?” W.S. told me that if I didn’t stop complaining, he’d turn around, go back to the university and enroll in law school.  I stopped!

We made pretty good time in our little Volkswagen, until we got to Texas. As soon as we crossed the border, we got stuck behind a rickety truck on a no-passing-zone stretch of highway. The driver was obviously in no hurry, because you can’t hit a fence post with a beer bottle while driving fast.

His cheering section, six, inbred, toothless progeny of first cousins, were sitting in the open bed of the truck, and they were facing us. For miles and miles, they stared at us, with the same familial expressionless expression. Unless W.S. wanted an encounter with the Texas Highway Patrol, he couldn’t pass that truck.
Fortunately, I could look at the sky, but he had to keep his eyes on the winding road and stay alert for beer-toss slow downs.

The driver finally drove off the highway onto a dirt road. The fellows in the back of the truck belched their “goodbyes,” and two days later we arrived in San Diego.
I was very happy that the brakes on W.S.’s rental car had failed at this particular apartment complex, because the grounds were beautiful and our apartment was bright and breezy. Since W.S. was now a Ph.D., I proudly taped, “Dr. W.S.” on our mailbox. Life was going to be conventional. W.S. had a nine-to-five job, which paid enough so I could finally concentrate on my writing. Now, all we had to do was to wait for the arrival of our furniture. Life was changing. “Normalcy” was the operative word.

There was a knock at the door. I opened it, and a young man said, “Is the doctor in? I have boils!”

Esther Blumenfeld, CROSSING WITH THE BLUE LIGHT, Blumenfeld, c. 2006

 EPILOGUE:   I was happy to share some stories with you from my unpublished book, CROSSING WITH THE BLUE LIGHT, Blumenfeld, c.2006.  It has not been published but now partially read. If I learned anything from writing this book, it is a certainty that people who value their lives no longer ask me to bake a pie for the potluck. Now they realize that my expertise is limited to mixed nuts. Esther

LOWER THE MOAT (Part Two)

One day, when the scythe man arrived at the Princess Garden Apartments, our neighbor began screaming, “Stop him! Stop him! Don’t let him start chopping the grass, I’ve lost my toddler.” We knew that things had gotten out-of-hand when the grass was taller than a child, but we linked arms and discovered the tike asleep in the grassland not far from his front door.

No one wanted to mess with the landlord. No one had ever seen the landlord. It was rumored that he wasn’t a very nice man, and had business connections with some other---not very nice men---so no one ever complained about anything. We tenants just mailed our rent checks on time and skipped through our meadow on the way to campus.

I was curious about our landlord. “Have you ever met him?” I asked W.S.
“Nope,” he mumbled. “Surely, when you rented the apartment you must have seen him?” I said.  “Nope,” he answered. I said, “How can that be?” W.S. replied, “I just called him on the phone. He sent me the paperwork. I signed it and that was that. Never met him. Never saw him.” So, I figured, our landlord was going to remain a mystery man forever, and I would probably never talk with him. But, that was before I knew that even when something is not probable--- anything is possible, and the possible was about to happen.

One winter morning, I awoke, crawled over W.S., and stepped onto the floor with my bare feet. “Oh,” I exclaimed, “the floor is so nice and warm.” W.S. rolled over, sat up, stretched, got out of bed and proceeded toward the bathroom. “What do you mean warm?” he shouted. “The floor isn’t warm. It’s hot!” I followed him into the bathroom and he was right. Not only was the floor hot, it was getting hotter.

“I think you’d better call the landlord.” W.S. suggested. I said, “Why me?” He lovingly replied, “Because I have to get to class, and he probably won’t kill a woman.” So I called the landlord. The phone rang once. He picked up and said, “Yeah?” Taken aback, I replied, “Yeah.” “Who is this?” he growled.
I said, “This is the tenant in the end apartment. The floor is hot, and I think maybe you’d better come check it out before we burn our feet,” and I hung up.

When I returned from campus that evening, a crew of workmen was digging a huge trench around the place. “What’s going on?” I asked W.S. “Is the landlord digging a moat?” “No.” he answered. “It’s a broken water line. You saved him big bucks with your phone call.”

During dinner, the phone rang. I answered, “Hello.” “What can I do for you?” said the man on the other end of the line. I had no idea who was calling, so I said, “What do you want to do for me?” He replied, “I’ll have somebody cut your grass,” and then he hung up.

I think it was the landlord calling, because from that day on, ours was the only apartment with a manicured lawn. It looked a little off-balance compared with the rest of the place, but no one had the guts to complain.

Esther Blumenfeld
CROSSING WITH THE BLUE LIGHT, Blumenfeld c. 2006

LOWER THE MOAT (Part One)

The dreaded day arrived when our clogging neighbor’s back healed, and she returned to her nightly overhead thumping. Our lease was up for renewal, and the landlord had decided to raise our rent beyond what we could afford. Although we dreaded the thought, we knew it was time to pack up and move again.

The apartment situation had gotten worse. The places we looked at were either too expensive or too dreadful to contemplate. Everyday after work, I packed a few boxes of our meager belongings, but had no idea where we were going to live. We had to give a one month vacate notice, and our situation was getting desperate.

One day, W.S. announced, “This is ridiculous. I am going to drive around and find us a place to live. If an old lady can live in a shoe, certainly I can find us someplace.” “I’m not living in footwear,” I shouted as he drove away. Three hours later, my hero returned and announced triumphantly, “I found us a place!”

So began our adventure at the Princess Garden Apartments on Kingdom Drive. The Princess Garden Apartments didn’t start out as apartments. The owner built the 20-unit strip as a motel, but when the neighbors in the residential neighborhood took him to court because of a zoning violation, he transformed the motel into apartments. Fortunately, W.S. arrived the day an end unit became available, and he grabbed it.

Kingdom Drive was a short street that dead-ended at the Princess Garden Apartments. Each apartment had a little walkway that led to the front door. W.S. warned me, “The rooms are kind of small, but it’s cozy,” as we stepped into the apartment. On the left was a living room big enough for two chairs and a coffee table; on the right was a kitchen that contained a very small bar sink, an even smaller stove, and a baby refrigerator. The bathroom had a toilet, a shower and a Lilliputian sink.

“Wait until you see the bedroom and study,” said, W.S. Actually, the bedroom was big enough for a double bed---assuming whomever slept next to the wall didn’t mind crawling over the person sleeping next to the entrance. And, technically, it wasn’t two rooms. It was one small room separated by a louvered wall, so when the light was on in the “study,” it gave the illusion of sleeping in a room with bars---kind of like being in a cozy prison cell. We squeezed a desk, a card table chair, a small television set and a battered Salvation Army sofa into that room.

“It’s stuffy in here,” I said. “Please open the window.” “Can’t, W.S. replied. “What do you mean, by ‘Can’t’” I asked. “They don’t open,” he replied. “But we can open the doors.” Turns out that our former motel-now-apartment had long-lasting, sturdy, inoperative Thermo pane windows, but it did have a front door and a back door. With all that said, it was, however, a cute little place and very quiet. Our neighbors were all graduate students whose main objective was to finish their course work, graduate, and escape.

The landlord never came around, not even to cut the grass, which grew as tall as a field of wheat. Occasionally, he’d send someone around to hack it down with a scythe. W.S. loved to sit amidst the stalks of grass, book in hand, waving at passing cars shouting, “Turista! Turista!”

One day when the scythe man arrived, our neighbor began screaming, “Stop him! Stop him! Don’t let him start chopping the grass. I’ve lost my toddler.”

Esther Blumenfeld (To be continued---)
CROSSING WITH THE BLUE LIGHT, Blumenfeld, c. 200

ONE MORE TIME

Two years can make a big difference with a population in flux, and that’s exactly what we found when we returned to campus. Most of the faculty was still all there, in a manner of speaking, and except for a few new buildings, the campus itself hadn’t changed, but the graduate students we had known were gone. Many of them had sent themselves through school on veteran’s allotments and had lived from hand to mouth.

This new group of scholars was young, rich and cocky. They were smart, not smarter, but smart, and had immediately matriculated to graduate school after graduating from various universities. A few students had been awarded scholarships and assistantships, but many were subsidized by the folks back home, and had few financial concerns. Also, this time, dynamic women had entered the mix and competition was keen.

Good jobs at the University were almost unobtainable, and I swore that this time I would find a job in this little college town rather than get stuck working for another Futzel. But first we had to find a place to live. Again, we were on a limited budget, since most of our savings had to go toward school. W.S. was awarded a graduate assistantship, which helped, but he could have earned more money raking leaves. Other than rent increases, the apartment situation hadn’t changed in the two years of our absence. However, we lucked out when one of the graduate students told W.S. that his place was available since he was getting married.

The apartment was on the ground floor of an old wooden house, and we were told that a single lady named, Mabel was moving in upstairs. The landlord put a fresh coat of cheap, glossy, dark gray paint on all of the walls, so it was kind of like living on a battleship without the booming canons---that is until Mabel finally arrived.

Our first encounter with Mabel was when we heard her dragging her grocery cart
up the 20 stairs to her apartment. Early on, W.S. had opened our door and said, “You look pretty saddled down. You need some help?” And Mabel responded, “Certainly Not!” He closed the door, turned to me and asked, “What’s her problem?” “She probably thinks you called her a horse,” I replied.

It was then that the upstairs furniture began to slide across our ceiling. “She’s probably getting settled in,” I shouted as I straightened the pictures on the walls.
However, two weeks later, as soon as she got home, Mabel began moving her furniture again. “What do you suppose she’s doing up there?” W.S. asked. “I haven’t the foggiest,” I replied. “I guess she can’t make up her mind.”

Then the stomping began. Every night, first we heard the sliding furniture, and then the stomping. “What the hell!” was W.S.’s nightly response. After two weeks of scraping, sliding and stomping, W.S. said, “I can’t take this anymore. Please, work your magic—Take Her A Pie!” I decided to follow his suggestion, more out of curiosity than neighborliness. So the next evening, when she came home, I took her a chocolate pie. When I knocked on her door, Mabel opened the door a crack and asked, “Who is it?”

“It’s your neighbor from downstairs, I’ve brought you a pie.” ‘What kind?” she asked. “Chocolate,” I answered. “I’m allergic to chocolate,” she replied, but she opened the door. “Sorry,” I lied. “I certainly don’t want to make you sick.” “That’s okay, I’ll take it to work tomorrow,” she said. “Those people will eat anything.”

When I entered the apartment, I saw that all of the living room furniture had been pushed to one side of the room, and on the wall, on the other side, hung three floor-to-ceiling mirrors. I spent just enough time with Mabel to get the scoop before returning downstairs. “So what’s the story?” asked W.S.

“She clogs,” I replied. “Does that have something to do with her pores or her kitchen sink?” he asked. “She takes clogging lessons,” I said, “You know, that stomp dancing. That’s why she moves the furniture to one side of the room every night.” “Why can’t she just leave it that way?” he groaned. “Because,” I said, “She doesn’t find it esthetic.” I told her that it was very disturbing.

“And?” he asked. “And, she said that moving the furniture doesn’t bother her at all and we will just have to get used to it.”  

Shortly after my visit, we were no longer bothered by the overhead cacophony of sound. Turns out that Mabel threw out her back. It must have been the furniture. Surely, my pie wasn’t that heavy!

Esther Blumenfeld
CROSSING WITH THE BLUE LIGHT, Blumenfeld c. 2006

A MOVING EXPERIENCE (PART TWO)

We didn’t miss the noise from downstairs---the shouting and falling bric-a-brac. No, we didn’t miss it one bit! Now the two brothers were our landlords. We got along with them just fine. The problem was that they couldn’t get along with each other. Consequently, the older brother, Angel lived downstairs, and Erik moved into the basement. It was a bit awkward, because every time I’d go downstairs to do the laundry, I’d have to yell, “Are you decent?” But, I got used to it, and most of the time he was.

I never saw Angel, because he had a night job and slept during the day. However, I felt sorry for Erik, the basement dweller, and would periodically take him leftovers, so he wouldn’t starve to death before my clothes dried. He was so appreciative, that one morning he left an unidentifiable blob in front of our door. His note said, “It’s a pecan pie, and I baked it myself.” I was glad he told me what it was so I wouldn’t have to guess. His creation was floating in grease. This was one movable feast that would never touch my lips. I wouldn’t even feed it to W.S., and he would eat almost anything.

W.S. took one look at it and said, “How do you suppose he did that?” ”I don’t know,” I said, “but I have never seen anything quite like it.” We watched with fascination as Erik’s labor of love began to coagulate. “How are we going to get rid of this thing?” I asked. We didn’t have a garbage disposal, and we shared the garbage can with Angel and Erik.

“I know,” said W.S. He found an old box and some gift wrap and advised “We simply wrap it up, and throw it away.” When it got dark, I snuck outside, and buried the pie under some pizza boxes. I prayed that the pie wouldn’t leak and corrode the can before the garbage men arrived in the morning.

We spent a blissful six months in that apartment. We had adjusted to the peculiarities of our landlords, and we had finally found a place we could stay for a few years.

One night we drove into the city and went to The Black Orchid. It was a famous club and it was closing. “Nothing is forever,” I sighed wistfully. “You’re right,” said W.S. “I have something to discuss with you. How upset would you be if I didn’t renew my contract the end of the year, and we’d return to cow dung country so I could get my PhD?”

“How did this come about?” I asked. “Professor Taser was invited to speak at a meeting that I attended, and I ran into him today in the Men’s Room. He suggested that if I were going to get my degree, I’d better “shit or get off the pot.”
“Did he know who you were?” I asked. “I think so,” said W.S., “I stood on the right side of the urinal.”

“What do you think?” said W.S. “Do you mind moving again and going back to working at a menial job for a few years?” “I married you for better or worse,” I replied. “I just have one question---Which part is this?”

Esther Blumenfeld
CROSSING WITH THE BLUE LIGHT, Blumenfeld c. 2006