Leavetaking
Sunday morning I meant to work on edits, but instead did this and that. I don't remember what. Early afternoon I drove up to Berkeley to help Karen and Pär (and The Mighty Tot) move. It was a bright warm sunny afternoon, and I couldn't help grinning as I carried things out of the apartment to the giant moving-vehicle parked at the curb. There were other folks there too, some of whom I'd met at various parties, and they were friendly and smiling, and it all had a somewhat festive air. Everyone kept busy: eating pizza, running to the store for soda, going off to the hardware store for boxes and lumber and stuff. It was easy to forget that this wasn't some ordinary little crosstown move, that we weren't going to be there to help unpack at the other end.
(Apparently the other end is going to involve getting everything up a flight of stairs, and they won't have anyone to help them unload the truck. Susan and I attempted to provide helpful advice on this front: first we suggested that they could just keep the truck until May, when various of us will be out Madison way for Wiscon and can help them unpack; then Susan pointed out that an even better plan would be for K & P to wait until May to leave. Alas, K & P didn't go for either of these ideas. Not sure why; both plans seemed reasonable to me. As did Mary Anne's recommendation that they stick around until she arrives in town on Friday, which they also (oddly) vetoed. Maybe we should've just taken the direct route and hidden their keys.)
The evening was particularly nice, after it was decided that we'd done all the packing and moving we were gonna do for the day; sat, played with Tot a little, ate good food, talked. Science fiction, Evita and feminism and fascism, Sweden, terrible Thanksgiving dinners, introverts and extroverts. That kind of thing.
It's hard not to be happy for K & P; this is obviously the right thing for them. But it's also hard not to be sad that they're going.
Sigh. Oh, well; there's always Wiscon. And email, and telephone.