Taking It All Apart

So our life is now for sale on craigslist -- want to buy a piece of it? It's being disassembled, deconstructed.

We're downsizing. We're moving from a four-bedroom, two-bath house to a two-bedroom, one-bath "Victorian cottage." You know what "cottage" means in real estate jargon, right? SHACK. It's a SHACK, with lovely mouldings and original fixtures, and probably mice. It's amazing how my values change when the Japanese government will no longer pay most of my rent.

It was built in 1906 -- before or after the great earthquake, I know not.

You know how I can tell I lived in Japan too long? I hear "1906" and I think, whoa, that's not even Taisho --- that's MEIJI!

In my head, I maintain a long, complicated, continuously updated list of the stuff that's not coming back to Tokyo with us. Our possessions are all mentally pre-sorted into "to be brought back," "to be discarded," and "undecided." In some ways, this interim move will make our inevitable trans-Pacific move a little easier, because it will eliminate many"to be discarded's" early, and force me to cull some of the "undecided's," too.

But today I spontaneously got rid of some "to be discarded" bedding, and I was surprised at how wrenching it was.

We had a black, metal frame bunk bed. I had offered it to friends, but didn't hear from them, so I posted it on craigslist today, as an experiment, to see it anyone would actually pay money for it. I listed it for a hundred bucks, and amazingly enough, within a couple of hours, I had two queries.

The first guy wanted it immediately, and came with a truck to take it away. I said he could have the mattresses that came with it, too. "Yeah, I want them, please," he said. "And I'll take any other bedding you're getting rid of -- I have a lot of friends."

Great, I thought. This would save me a trip to the Salvation Army, because I did indeed plan to get rid of some old comforters.

He was young, very overweight and somewhat sweaty. A student, maybe? I sure wouldn't want him sleeping in the top bunk over me.

He brought an older Hispanic man to help him dissemble the bed. The older man said to him, "This will cost you extra," and the heavy, sweaty man said, "Fine."

The old man said he needed an Allen wrench.

"I'm not sure we have..." -- I started to say, but Big Son cut me off.

"Here you go," he said to the older man, after pulling one out of a box of toys.

The man was impressed. "Wow, he has tools and he keeps them handy! Good boy!"

Big Son proceeded to help the older man with the bed, even offering useful advice about the easiest way to take the pieces apart.

Meanwhile, I went upstairs to get the mattresses and extra bedding, and that's when I started getting upset.

I had decided to get rid of the black corduroy comforter that Hub and I had slept under since coming to San Francisco, and also an ugly flowered comforter that had been my late grandmother's. They were cheap, not so warm, fraying around the edges, steeped in pain and seeped with tears many times over. They were the two blankets I crawled under whenever I was having a bad day after we moved here.

The bunk bed mattress wasn't in the bed frame -- it was up in the kid's room, on the floor, because it was comfortable and lately it had been Little Son's bed of choice. In fact, I had laid beside him last night and read him a story, on that very mattress. I had just washed the flannel sheets yesterday, not knowing I was about to sell the bed, so it still smelled of fabric softener and my little boy's hair -- that fruity kids' shampoo he uses. Clean scents of warmth and comfort.

Here I was, handing all of this over to the heavy, sweaty man.

I helped him carry it to his truck, and he set the mattress down in the street to make room in the truck bed. There was something so jarring about seeing my little boy's mattress, with its fragrant sheets with moons and stars on them, on which less than 24 hours ago I had been lying with him....IN THE STREET. My brain screamed, "WRONG! This is just WRONG! This does not belong out here! Put it BACK!"

Tears sprang into my eyes. I knew it was silly --- hey, I still have the little boy himself, the center of all the warmth and comfort, without whom the mattress would be devoid of meaning. It wasn't Little Son in the truck bed, just a replaceable thing with a superficial connection to him.

But it made me realize how transient and illusionary our stability is. One night I'm snuggled up next to Little Son in a warm, cozy bed, and the next afternoon, due to the unconventional, unstable circumstances of our current life, that very bed is unexpectedly out in the street, about to go home with a heavy, sweaty stranger who will probably be the one sleeping on it tonight.

The younger man asked me, "You okay?"

"Sorry," I said. "I lost my grandmother."

This was true, except it happened a dozen years ago. Today, I was just losing her ugly, flowered comforter and some other bedding that we didn't need, anyway. I couldn't even begin to explain to him all the stuff about our unstable life.

"Aw, sorry, ma'am," he said quietly, before we loaded the rest of the bed frame into the truck.

The older man came up to me and said, in his thick accent, "Your big boy is good with tools. He helped me a lot. He's a very good boy."

"Yes, he is. Thank you," I said.

I stood in the street and watched them as they drove around the corner, taking little pieces of our life away in their truck, flowers and flannel stars flapping in the breeze.

So...........anyone out there want a dining room table?