“I need a small piece of luggage, about this big.” My wife holds up her hands to indicate how big of a piece of luggage she wants.
“And where would said piece of luggage be?” I ask.
In the back bedroom closet,” she replies.
Right. The one part of the house that requires months of planning on a scale that would make the most ardent archeologists pause. But my wife wants her piece of luggage, and I don’t have months. I do what Indy would do. I make it up as I go along.
I stop at the doorway to the back bedroom. There is enough room to take a few steps into the room. Then there are all the boxes. The boxes are filled with stuff that my wife wants to hold on to.
Beyond the boxes is the closet. That is where I need to be. Now the room becomes a giant puzzle. How do I move, shift, shove, lift or otherwise relocate all the boxes given the small amount of space I have to work with so I can make a path to the closet? This is sort of like a real life version of Tetris.
I start moving the boxes around, shoving one into the space to my left, stacking one box on top of another box, then manhandling a heavy box into the space I just vacated. I continue in this manner, making my way through the room and managing to not injure myself in the process.
I open the closet door and turn on the light. There is a piece of luggage against the back wall, behind a few other boxes. The other boxes are low enough that I could lift the luggage out over them. The difficulty comes from not having good leverage to grab the luggage and lift. I have to lean over the boxes in front of it. I do so, manage to grab the handle of the luggage, then lift it and try to bring it forward. It takes a few tries but I finally get the luggage out of the closet.
Now, I have to take the same route back out of the room. We went on an Alaskan cruise a number of years ago. During the cruise we had a side excursion to see the glaciers calving. We were in a tiny boat and passed a lot of floating ice chinks on our way out. Then when it was time to return, the ice chunks had come back together, blocking our way. This is what I faced now. All the moving of the boxes had closed off the route behind me to get out of the room.
Again I start shoving, lifting and moving boxes.The process is complicated because I have a little less room to use, due to the luggage taking up some of the available space, than I did the first time. Finally, I managed to get a path back out of the room, dragging the luggage with me.
I haul the luggage before my wife. “Here’s your luggage. Is this the one you want? The correct response is ‘Yes’.”
“Yes,” she says, and means it.
All I needed was a fedora and a bullwhip.
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