Moving Once Again

A week ago Mark and I moved into our new condo. It’s been a week of the usual chaos – still not entirely resolved though the spaces have been made livable. It’s a bit like camping out for the first while. Let’s see: where did we put that? How does this stove work? And so on. It’s a homey space, our accumulated possessions more or less having found their own appropriate spots. We purchased a number of book shelves, a couch, two desks, and a small chest of drawers from IKEA. They arrived on Tuesday. Yesterday afternoon a handyman named Ata – found on Google under “IKEA assembly” – arrived to tackle our new furniture. He made his way through all but the book shelves and will return today. 

Ata was born in Iran but moved with his family to Turkey when just a baby, growing up in Istanbul. While a university student he acted as a guide in the city and on the tour boats that ply the waters of the Bosporus, the Golden Horn, and the Black Sea. Two or three years ago he immigrated here with his wife – also Iranian but brought up in Istanbul. They have a one month old son. When I told Ata that we will be in Istanbul for about a week in December, he said jokingly that he could give us a lot of numbers to call! His family, still in Istanbul, have told him that his recent immigration was fortuitous as Turkey is changing so rapidly right now. The country and the city are inundated with refugees as are most countries anywhere near sites of conflict in the Middle East and North Africa. I’m certain that we will see the ramifications of this tide of humanity while we are there.

Our third floor condo has a small patio which faces north and east. As we are at the back of the building we are sheltered from most of the street noises of Christie St. Looking straight ahead from the vantage point that it affords are several large trees sheltering a line of garages along the laneway between Christie and Clinton Sts. To the left is the backside and parking lot of a fairly new seniors’ home. My friends have kidded me about being carried over there when I get too old to manage my space here. My intention though, is to pass that part of my life in Puerto Vallarta where I can go out or at least sit out daily in the lovely ocean air and sunshine, cared for by kindly Mexican women, who like the Philippian women who come to Canada as caretakers, enter in such a loving manner into the lives of their charges.

Each day when I sit on the Christie St. patio to eat my breakfast or lunch, I witness pieces of the organizational life of the seniors’ home being enacted in the parking lot area: staff coming or going from a shift drive in or away with their cars; enormous waste management trucks come to spear dumpsters with a set of forks on a moveable forward platform, lifting them high into the air to pour their contents into the trucks’ interiors. Delivery trucks back into a loading dock. The driver alights, opens the sliding rear door, pushes a button that releases a folded platform; another button lifts the platform to the level of the truck’s carriage; hopping up, the driver manoeuvres a flat of boxes onto a wheeled trolley, pulls it onto the platform, and pushes another button to lower his cargo to the yard level; he moves the cart into the building’s interior, returning shortly to replace his cart in the truck; taking the manifest from the cab of the truck, he retraces his steps to confirm the delivery and get a signature from some unseen person within. Job completed, he manipulates the rear platform into place, pulls the sliding back door down, locks it, and in a moment is back in the truck and gone. These activities are unremarkable but they interest me nonetheless, as they are reflections of processes repeated in so many places in the city to keep wheels moving along.

To the right from the patio I can see a line of eight tall and slender town houses on Clinton, built sometime in the last couple of decades. In the mid-1980s I lived briefly in a house on Barton Ave and regularly passed by that site on my way to the Christie subway. An abattoir, undoubtedly grandfathered in as the area was developed during the early 20^th century, continued to assert its powerful olfactory presence. Particularly when the atmosphere was muggy, the odour given from its processes permeated the air for blocks around. It was staggeringly repulsive. Local citizens had lobbied the city council for years to rescind the abattoir’s licence. The only way to rid the area of its activities and its perfumes, however, was to buy the owners out; they were demanding over a million dollars. I moved before the issue was settled but clearly it did happen and voila, town houses. I smile over at them, wondering how many of their inhabitants know the history of the site: the squealing and crying of pigs and lambs brought by truck-loads to the slaughter; the pernicious odours that blighted the entire area; and, the struggle of locals and council members to rid that little corner of the city of a business which had been entirely respectable and necessary in earlier days.

So here I sit in my partially organized new home, quite pleased with its long term possibilities, aware that my habits of cyclical moves have pretty much come to an end for the foreseeable long term. The body and the mind begin to rebel against so much upheaval. I have friends who have lived in their homes for the past thirty-plus years. I recommend that they give themselves months before any actual move to sort the accumulated possessions of those decades into their essentials. Bette Davis (or possibly some other wit) is reputed to have said, “Old age is not for sissies.” A move in the middle-senior stage of one’s life is a clear challenge to intestinal fortitude!