Farewells

“Dude.  Where the heck are you?”

No reply.

It was 5:05pm and my boss promised that our meeting would start at 5:00pm sharp and last no longer than five minutes.  He said it was urgent. 

But I knew it could not possibly be more urgent than the reason I was in a rush to leave: it was my last track practice before my move to London (where there is no such thing as track practice with post-workout $2 Tecates).  I’ve compared Tuesday track practice to Sunday mass and I would have a hard time disputing anyone who might accuse me of having a cultish obsession with going.  My teammates are my brethren and Tuesday was my last chance to say goodbye.  Explaining to my boss why I needed to go to practice would have been like a toddler explaining to an adult why he needs to sleep with his binky.  It’s just mine and I love it and you’ll never understand.  So I didn’t mention practice but I had made it clear that I needed to leave for an extremely important appointment. 

While he blathered on about the key differences in US vs EMEA markets and other notedly un-urgent nonsense, I was not-so-subtly packing up my things from the conference room and mentally mapping out possible shortcuts I could take on my bike route to the track.  He was still talking when I actually walked out of the conference room, nodding in agreement to what I hoped were his concluding remarks and thinking, I can take the sidewalk up 3rd street, cut over at Harrison and —

“SURPRISE!!”

iPhone cameras.  Applause.  A giant “Bon Voyage!” banner.  A full catered banquet of tacos.  Thirty Ta-da! faces beaming at me.

Before I could even make the palm-on-heart “You really shouldn’t have” gesture, I was being presented with presents and a card signed by all of my coworkers.

“Speech!  Speech!  Speech!” They gleamed. 

My palm instead went straight to my forehead for the “Oh sh*t” gesture and I smiled the squinty-eyed guilt grin of a child unwrapping a book from his grandma for Christmas.  “Wow, this is so nice… But the thing is… I’ve gotta go…”

“We know!  That’s why we’re here!  We’ll miss you!”  They glowed. 

“No, what I mean is… I actually have to leave right now…”  They dimmed.  I cooked in the simmering awkwardness of the collective confusion and disappointment for a few minutes and even managed to eat half a taco and say a few thank you's.  Then, while everyone was sufficiently distracted piling food on their plates, I slipped out through the hallway.

The thing about moving is that it is an inherently unbalanced event.  A person is expected to take the world they have built up, one piece at a time, over months and years and then deconstruct the entire thing in a matter of days.  Collateral damage is inevitable.  You spend the few pre-departure weeks floating between procrastination and denial, telling yourself it’s more important to enjoy your last days with the people you love than to waste precious time fretting about the logistics of canceling Comcast subscriptions and fitting sentimentally valuable coffee mugs into your duffle bag.  

And then suddenly you have 72 hours before you leave the country and there are still three cabinets full of old mason jars.  

I got back from practice on Tuesday night with a nice $2 Tecate buzz and started doing the math.  I could fit maximum 10 jars in my backpack.  Once I factored in the miscellaneous pots, plants, fishbowls and other sundries that had -- at some unknown moment in the past two years -- furtively sidled into my ownership below my radar, I had a at least 15 backpack loads of stuff to get rid of.  The donation center was only a few blocks away but 15 round-trips would take at least an hour and the center closed at 7:00pm.  Fantasies of arson began to play in my mind’s eye.  Just as I was cackling at the thought of my laundry purgatory lamp shade going up in flames, another idea came to me.  And by 6:45pm the following night, my apartment was essentially empty.

I have three websites to thank for this spring cleaning miracle: Pinterest, Craigslist and Songza.  I thank Pinterest for making masons jars 2014’s trendiest dish.  I thank Craigslist for the creation of the “Free stuff” category.  And I thank Songza, for providing the bumpin’ “Moving Out” soundtrack that I played while enjoying a cold beer and a bowl of popcorn, watching dozens of thrilled strangers raid my trash for treasures.

They came in droves.  Little Asian ladies packed roller suitcases to the brim with spices, half empty bottles of olive oil, and mini cans of ginger ale that I never got around to using to make whisky-gingers.  The hipsters didn’t care that the mason jars still had polenta and Craisins in them — they gladly shoved them into their burlap backpacks, along with with my yoga mat and foam roller and crusty paint brushes.  I made everyone who found something they liked also take something they didn’t like (e.g. the printer, the paperback books, the leather boots) and, like a picnic attacked by an ant swarm, the only thing left after they all scuttled away were some pickles and a few plastic bags. 

At one point, I had ambitions of hosting a send-off party for myself on the 4th of July.  But when I no longer had any dishes or paper towels or ginger ale to mix with the whiskey (which I later realized had also been snagged in the raid without me noticing), the prospect of throwing a party felt unreasonably complicated.  And the prospect of generating any more trash on this earth felt downright sinful.  

So instead I opted to skip town on my last day and go spend quality friend and family time in Marin.  No to-do lists, no errands, no cleaning, no stress-eating raw tortillas from the fridge while rearranging contents of suitcases.  Just bikes and trails and dogs and wine and drunk-eating Ben and Jerry's Milk and Cookies straight from the tub.  

I saved the trip to Comcast for the 11th hour, expecting the worst.  It was, as predicted, the worst.  (The story is not even worth telling, but I’ll share the photos of the good bill-paying citizens of San Francisco, commiserating in our mutual loathing for this country’s scummiest company.)

At 2:30pm, I closed the gate on Sumner street for the last time and attempted to inhale all the air of home, like I could somehow vacuum pack my deconstructed world into my chest so I wouldn’t have to leave it behind.  But, just like my red hoodie and my trombazoo and my stuffed E.T. wouldn’t fit in my suitcase, the breath was overfilling my lungs.  I exhaled.  Then I got in the car and drove away.