Moving Day

Navigating disparities one day at a time, we are all moving into a new landscape

Everywhere I look, people are moving.

Right in my own community, half of the households in Altadena have moved into rentals, hotels, or in with family or friends after their houses have burnt down. Also burning down on a greater scale, as I write this, an authoritarian has just moved into the White House and some terrifying stuff is afoot.

I also moved last week. We are getting work done on our house of 18 years, and it’s big enough of a job that we really needed to move out. We just emptied the place and set ourselves up in a rental several blocks down the road. We’ve been planning this move for almost three years, a duration ensured by kafkaesque permitting process of our fair city. The moment just so happened to land at a time when everybody else is moving too. Unlike everybody else a few blocks up the hill, we have the extremely good fortune of having furniture, books, instruments, kitchen supplies, and clothes to move. It’s all very hard to process, even if the direct harm we’ve experienced is negligible.

Not long ago, I and my siblings went through the process of sifting through the collected treasures and detritus of the house where my parents lived for 45 years. There was far more detritus than treasure. Not long before that, on the other side of the family, we went through the equally heartrending experience of downscaling the parental home of my spouse, which was settled into in the same year as my parents’. We took this temporary relocation as a moment to prune away old stuff of all kinds that would only be a weight or burden for ourselves or others.

Like nearly all academics in the US, even though I’ve stayed put for quite a while, I have ample experience with moving. When I went to grad school, a friend dropped me off with a carload of stuff. When I went to my postdoc, my spouse and I drove a U-haul trailer.

When I left my postdoc for a Visiting Assistant Professor position, I got The Full Move. Have you ever had The Full Move? It’s quite something. That said, I would have taken the cash and done it myself, but they would only reimburse me, or pay for the full move. So of course, we chose The Full Move. Having grown up in a working-class household where we rarely ate out, and never ever hired anybody to do something for us that we could do ourselves, The Full Move was a new experience for me. One of my mom’s regular stories was marveling at the tremendous efficiency and comprehensiveness when the military moved the family (about a decade before I was born), when my dad was in the merchant marines (which, to be clear, is not the Marines). They even removed the handle from my older brother’s little red wagon before they boxed it up, and reassembled the wagon on the other side of the move, she would say.

It’s was kind of comical to receive The Full Move as a postdoc moving across the country, when the cost of transporting our thrifted and Ikea furniture was probably an order of magnitude greater than the value of the furniture itself. But nonetheless they had a full crew of three people show up with a stack of new cardboard boxes. Within a couple hours, everything we owned was safely ensconsed in neatly arranged boxes labeled for the room from which they came. A couple hours later, all of those boxes and all of our tragically cheap furnishings were embedded in a huge moving truck. We gave them the address of our apartment on the other side of the country, and they said, “See you in a week.”

When they unloaded in our new apartment, they even took everything out and distributed stuff in a vague facsimile of how it was arranged in our last place. The only thing we had to worry about was what do with all of the empty cardboard boxes, which were themselves a valuable commodity. We put them down in the basement of the duplex we were staying in, only for them to decompose to the point of uselessness when we were moving away one year later. The wetness on the eastern side of the 100th meridian wasn’t something us westerners were used to.

I realize that in wealthier industries, The Full Move is a regular thing, but like for most people, this is an astounding luxury. When we left for my postdoc, I bought pizzas for my friends from grad school and they helped us get stuff down from the third floor down to the U-haul.

When we were getting The Full Move, I asked the crew what I should be doing. They basically told me, just stay out of they way, and if they had any questions they’d let me know, and if I had any particular concerns about something, to point it out to them. But they knew how to safety pack stuff like delicate dishes and framed art, and made sure to protect the walls and the floor as stuff was being moved around. They were pros. I mean, literally, they were professionals. This was their job and they were doing it well. This didn’t stop me from being anxious about socioeconomic disparities at work, and the differences between the people who lift heavy stuff for a living and the people who write at their computers, do science experiments, and teach for a living. My dad was the guy who worked long hot hours in the engine room of big container ships and oil tankers, and now was a guy who watches people move his iMac that he used to write journal articles (that almost nobody reads). I didn’t try to pick up and carry boxes for them, but I felt like I wanted to. It just didn’t feel right.

The Full Move felt wrong to me, at the time.

As I moved to my first tenure track job, then to the one where I currently am, my employers paid for the move, but they basically gave us some cash and told us to figure it out on our own. So we did these moves rather cheaply as we could, though we hired folks to help load and unload. The next move was piecemeal as we were waiting to close escrow, so we loaded up some of those pod containers, on our own.

This time, we didn’t do The Full Move, as doing so just to move down the block would have felt absurd. But we still needed to move most everything. We packed our boxes ourselves because it gave us the opportunity to prune, over the course of a couple months. Then we found ourselves living in a house full of boxes, and full of very heavy furniture, some inherited from parents, some of those inherited from their parents. We were not going to be moving it ourselves. And even if so many of our friends were not fully burned out of their homes just days earlier, we were never going to be asking our friends to move all of our possessions in exchange for pizza. (I can’t believe I can write a sentence like that so casually. How is your city burning down supposed to be processed?)

For this time, we just hired movers to take everything from one place and move it to the other. When putting desks, bookcases, and couches down, they asked us what the best places were. These guys were professionals. Let me tell you, this time I felt none of the awkwardness or economic weirdness that I felt when I was the benefactor of The Full Move the last time. I’ve learned a lot since then, and gained lots of perspective.

I don’t think I realized it at the time, but when I was a postdoc getting The Full Move, I would be willing to bet that if there were any economic disparities, I was the one on the harsher side of the deal. They were doing their job, and my role in that situation is to allow them to do their job professionally. If a company wants to pay them to move people, then these folks are the ones to receive the cash and do the moving. My job was to science, their job is to move. Both of these are valuable and important to society, and how fricking elitist was it of me to be uncomfortable simply because they work more with their muscles than I do? Also, considering that tipping these folks an appropriate amount was a stretch beyond what we could even afford at the time, my earlier misgivings seem downright silly.

Last week’s move was magical. These guys showed up at 8 am, and then by 3 in the afternoon, everything was moved into our rental place down the block. Not a wall was scratched, not a thing was broken. Did I stand around uncomfortably while they were working, anxious about what I should be doing? Not at all. This time I was just packing the stuff from the fridge and freezer into coolers so I could repack the fridge once it got set up. When I wasn’t doing that, I was doing my best to stay out their way and point out anything that needed to be pointed out. I took care of a few emails. Those emails were my job, and moving the stuff was their job, and I was comfortable with it. If I had any misgivings about any disparities, I could account for this by compensating them with a more substantial tip. As I was watching them work, I was more appreciative at the equipment, skill, and experience involved. Even we had everything they had available to them, it would have taken us days to do what they had done in hours. I was thankful that I was able to hire pros to do the job. What I really felt, and continue to feel, is thankfulness that we had a home full of stuff to move, when friends are sharing with us pictures of their homes which are comprised of lone chimneys surrounded by ash.

In this country, this is a new beginning for all of us. We are living in a new landscape.

I fear that a lot of us are naive to the scope of the devastation that we are out to experience, and are all too willing to look the other way as harm happens to those around us. Are we capable of expanding the scope of who we consider to be members of own community so that we can protect those who are targeted by our new government? Have you drawn your own lines that will not be crossed when it comes to the inclusion of trans people, the belongingness of immigrants, the safety of people with uteruses, and the expression of dissent? If our social fabric is so tightly interweaved with the tools of the oligarchs who have bought our administration, then what are we doing to foster community where we can freely express ourselves. You can’t even discuss the existence of fascism anymore on TikTok. On the social network formerly known as twitter, referring to yourself as cisgender is labelled hate speech. And Facebook and Instagram have removed fact-checking because the administration wants to use these platforms to spread disinformation. We need more than ever to interact with one another as individuals, accept one another for who we are, and lean into our reliance on one another. Let’s all foster spaces where we can do that. It’s moving day. Where are we moving ourselves to be better connected and more genuine with others?