A Farewell to Pittsburgh

Eight years, nineteen days ago, I arrived in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in a convoy from Atlanta consisting of a ten-foot cargo truck and a slightly battered green '95 Honda Civic with about ninety thousand miles on it, and moved into a seven hundred square foot third-floor walk-up with central air one block off Walnut in Shadyside with my fiancée.

Most of the contents of that truck are gone now, and the Civic was totaled in a relatively minor accident last spring. My fiancée became my wife became my ex. And I'm back in Shadyside, staying at a hotel built where a car dealership's stock overflow lot stood on my arrival.

Tomorrow, I drive back to Memphis, in a fifteen-foot cargo truck carrying somewhat less, by volume, than what I came in with. There I'll store the stuff I couldn't bring myself to sell, or throw away, before flying off to Zürich via Atlanta and, er, Newark. From a purely material point of view, these eight years have netted me as near to zero as is measurable, until you count the outstanding house debt, that is.

From a material point of view, it's weird the things I'm taking away from here. It's especially weird when I see it all listed out nice and neat, which it turns out I have to do if I want to enter Switzerland with my stuff without paying 7.6% MwSt as import duty. From the manifest of box A101: "...1 box Staedtler colored pencils. 1 HP 48G calculator. 1 glass coin dish. 1 bicycle tire inner tube..." This is as much an organized projection of my inner lack of organization as it is anything else.

But it's not the material point of view that's the important one. Pittsburgh's taught me a lot of things, some of which I even bothered to learn. It's introduced me to people I'm glad to know, or to have known. Thank you, to those of you who made my time here more interesting. And thank you especially to those of you who, over the past few weeks, have helped me to leave.

In A Moving State Of Mind

I think it's safe to say it's crunch time now. I've got a little more than a hundred hours left here in Pittsburgh, the final details of my arrival in Zürich are very nearly sorted out, and now it's down to the disposition of individual boxes and the things in them.

Things. It strikes me that if I only owned the things I actually used, the whole act of moving across the ocean would be, aside from the unavoidable bureaucracy, not all that difficult. There's the cliché, of course, that you don't own your things, your things own you, but I'd always sort of taken that as a warning about your more advanced stages of materialism, that if you find yourself rubbing down your Murciélago with a diaper each Sunday morning, you've taken things too far. One of the many things the move to Zürich has taught me so far before it's even happened is that this is not the case. Indeed, your things begin to own you as soon as you assign value to them, regardless of the value they actually hold.

I shall pledge now (and hope not to break said pledge immediately) that I'll remember this feeling every time I'm about to acquire yet more stuff.

And yet... there's still the little whining voice in the back of my head pointing out all the additional photographs I could take more easily by shifting a few hundred dollars of the money I've made selling all my stuff into bringing yet a third camera with me.

Flexibility, I've Heard of It

Every so often, I run a 5k. By "every so often," I mean "about once a year." This one 5k is pretty much all the running I do, outside, of course, of the occasional Four Concourse Dash at Atlanta Hartsfield-Jackson International. The rest of my exercise has been decidedly lower impact -walking, cycling, kayaking, wall-climbing, and the ever-so-important Biannual Headboard Toss (see below). So pretty much every time I do run, I'm a stiff, aching mess for quite some time afterward.

I ran in the Race for the Cure in Schenley Park on Sunday morning. My gun time was a respectable thirty-six minutes even, which worked out to 32:40 line to line. I did have to slow down to a walk to rest a bit after the second mile, which is better than usual; I tend to sprint off the line and gasp my way through the middle of the race; in last year's Great Race I ran a 7:45 first mile on the way to a 31:09 finish.

(In other words, a winter of indulging the Inner Fat Kid that started with quite excellent New Mexican food in Albuquerque last October and has not really let up since has added a minute thirty-one to my 5k time.)

And am I paying for it today. My hamstrings and calves have tightened up to the point I'm lucky I can touch my knees, much less my toes, and if my quads could talk, they'd be saying "take the elevator."

On Tourists

Another day, another set of tourists through the house. This group stayed two full minutes, which is I think a new record. I can barely get from the basement to the top floor via each room in two minutes, and I live here.

Of course, I didn't actually get to see this batch of tourists, because I was up on the roof of my front porch at the time, working with Phil to throw my headboard over the edge. Gently, but still.

Hm. Maybe that had something to do with it.

(Many thanks to Phil, John, Tony, and Paul for helping me move all the heavy crap down to the first floor, where it will be carted away by its respective new owner(s) next weekend.)

Twenty-one Fourteen Forty-two and Counting

Time, it feels, is running out.

My standard policy with respect to moving is basically not to move, which given that I've moved once every two years or so pretty reliably since 1995, is probably not a good standard policy. What this means is that I generally leave the actual mechanics of moving off to the last minute, madly throwing things into boxes when the truck pulls up downstairs, and utterly failing to sort out the mess after the fact. (This should perhaps be an indication that I have no real use for most of my stuff, but that's another issue entirely.)

So it is this time. Twenty-one days is not at all last-minute given my history, but given the somewhat different logistics of crossing the ocean, feels it. I've tried tricking myself into moving by pulling the art off the walls (always the last to go in the past) and I think it seems to be working. Indeed, I probably would have gotten some packing done last night had it not been for Game 1 of the Yuengling Conference Finals, absolutely worth it in every way, especially considering the result.

(Speaking of, Malkin's shortie last night, I must say, was not only poetic payback for the mugging he took on his short-handed attempt of a few seconds before, but also made up nicely for his penalty "shot" against the Rangers last series, and beyond that, was one of the prettiest goals I've seen this year in its simplicity. But reviewing individual goals in pretentious art-critic style isn't getting any furniture down my stairs, so I digress...)

Another Sunday morning at the Six One Charlie

At the corner of Murray and Bartlett in Squirrel Hill lies the 61C Cafe, named after the bus route that stops at its front door; it has come to be my standard weekend morning hangout these last days in Pittsburgh. This is largely because, invariably, someone wants to come by at some insane hour of the morning to see the house. I've actually been woken up one Sunday morning by the sound of people in my living room due to a terrible misunderstanding between the realtors involved. And if I have to hide away from my house for half an hour on a Sunday morning, there might as well be some damn good coffee involved.

I suppose I should be happy that my house is still showing at such a healthy clip eight months in, especially in a market we're all told is bad, bad, bad, but I'd be much happier if some of the people stopping by had giant piles of cash (francs preferred, dollars accepted... for now); instead, I have the distinct impression that I'm running a relatively low-volume, somewhat disappointing tourist attraction free of charge.