Mobilizing the Retreat

Mobilizing the Retreat

This morning we enjoyed a life event. Charlotte and Evelyn planned and orchestrated a wedding of their two new stuffed kittens, Brownie and Coconut. I’m not sure what occasioned the event, but it was a full orchestration set up on the deck replete with bride and groom seating for friends, a stuffed croissant officiating, a red carpet of red towels, wedding music, a wedding cake and a full ceremony with ring-bearers. I induced the officiate to begin the proceedings with the classic Mr. Bean line, “Mawidge!”, so it all felt very regal and special. Pete and Nancy joined for the service and we all chose to use the time together to plan out the final dismantling of Homeward Bound. It felt like the appropriate time for that sense of renewal and rebirth that come with moving out the old and taking on the new. It was also good to have everyone there to make efficient decisions.

I walked through each room of the house and carriage house, including the outdoor areas of the pool, the deck, the porch and the yard. We literally reviewed each and every piece in this systematic manner, differentiating what was being taken by whom and what would be left for disposal through some combination of estate sale company, Ithaca ReUse Center and the sixteen foot dumpster that Pete planned to source. Very little of this will happen between now and October, but since we have to deliver the house broom clean a the end of October, that will be the busy month for the majority of the mobilization.

The plan calls for the place to be used by Carolyn in July, Carol in August, Thomas around Labor Day and Carol again in later September. Then, anyone who comes up in October takes whatever they get. I have asked my two sons (sounds almost like Fred MacMurray, right?) to agree on a date in mid-October to come up when I will rent them two U-Haul trucks to take the things they want back home. Thomas will take his, his mother’s and his sister’s stuff back to NYC while Roger will travel back to Delaware. Given the amount of stuff to be moved, I am planning to hire two big strong moving guys to do the heavy toting and lifting for the day. That way, they can get the trucks loaded with minimal pain and suffering and Pete can get some help filling the dumpster with the heaviest objects that need to get tossed. As they all drive away in their trucks to their respective homes, the estate sale company that I plan to enlist to buy the larger pieces of furniture will come and move out all of what they plan to purchase, leaving just those few bits and pieces that Pete will take over to the Ithaca ReUse Center or toss into that big bad dumpster in the sky.

Pete will have a few vestigial things to send to me in California which are things that I prefer to leave here until the end. That includes the seventeen flags of the Contrade of Siena that hang on cherry poles in the kitchen. There are also miscellaneous photographs and pictures that I prefer to leave up until the end. All of the heavy items will go into the car with us for the drive cross-country. That heavy stuff includes a hundred pound glass cannon in two pieces that sits on a wooden base. It was bought by my in 1997 in Murano on a very expensive lark and then shipped to me for God knows how much in shipping cost. That item has become a family joke, a sort of cautionary tale of excess at my expense. I also have three large metal garden butterflies (does that remind you of In a Gadda Da Vida?), two Asian stone statues, a terracotta Frank Lloyd Wright statue of a curled-up agonized bald man (don’t ask, but trust me, it’s cool) and a special bronze statue of Ezra Cornell, a replica of the life-sized one on the Arts Quad that is given to Foremost Benefactors of the University at their induction ceremony (mine was bestowed in 2000). I am driving the heavy stuff back for some silly reason like I think it is more economical than shipping it and then being left to lugging back less hefty stuff. Sometimes I drive myself crazy with the contradictions of my own making.

Carolyn and I just dismantled our memorabilia wall. I say “our” because it was my memorabilia, but she did it for me when she was thirteen or something like that. We used the memorabilia wall at Applebee’s as a model and it was a random collage of photos, certificates, name tags, newspaper articles and miscellaneous stuff like a college paper (in that case, about Nathanael West’s Miss Lonelyhearts) and, or course, Cornell banners and pennants. It created a nice wall mural in the lower room of the carriage house which has stood the test of time and been a fixture in the house for over twenty years. I came apart easily enough and between Kim, Carolyn and me, we made quick work of sorting out all the stuff stored under the stairs of the carriage house. We are immune enough at this stage to keep only a few things (still more than we should probably) and the rest is getting relegated to the garbage bags.

There were five bankers boxes with documents from a failed hedge fund effort (strangely enough we had $1.5B in funding and a verbal agreement with the FHA to sell us defaulted mortgages, but in 2012 the election year craziness caused the FHA to renege on their agreement so we had to give the money back and shut down). That was a poignant and disappointing episode, but was an interesting learning process to go through negotiations with the U.S. Government and to raise money from large institutional private equity players. That is the sort of docuementation that some people might choose to shred, but with a decade between me and those times, I am more inclined to just put those five boxes right into the recycle bin. Anyone wanting to sort through all that legal garbage would be wasting their time seeking hidden value in all of it. I am reminded of when PanAm 103 out of London crashed in Lockerbie, Scotland due to a terrorist bomb aboard. We lost one colleague on that flight and the entire day’s London to NYC document pouch as well. Six months later we were sent a plastic bag with all the mud-covered documents that were retrieved from the crash site, reminding us how unimportant papers are relative to human life.

We probably have a few nits and ants to deal with later in the week before we load up on Saturday and depart westward on Sunday morning. Between now and then we have a side trip to Delaware to see son Roger and his wife, Valene and their new digs in Lewes. I am treating that like a warm-up for the return cross-country trek, which will take nine days because we are stopping to see a few sights and stay with a few friends in Wyoming, Bear Lake, Salt Lake City and Sonoma. Compared to the forced 40 hour march I have done in less than three days, this will be a walk in the park. We will have mailed off, about seventeen boxes which will await us in the garage and give us a task of dispersing around casa Moonstruck in August. We will have donated tons of clothes as miscellaneous junk. And we will have tossed out several SUV’s full of garbage and recyclables along the way. The cleansing process is cathartic and the achievement satisfaction will be high that we have ended our twenty-six years of keeping a house in Ithaca in an orderly manner, keeping the memories and jettisoning the detritus. We will have succeeded in mobilizing our retreat.