Good morning, all! The bass part to go and then a day typing up all of my edits.
BK, I wasn't apathetic about yesterday's topic. I had nothing to report, not that I was unwlling, but romance and I are strangers. I haven't necessarily wanted to be single for the past 30 years. It wasn't to be and I say this with no self pity.
I do like DR George's proposed topic today. I've had two grisly moves, one from Oxford OH and grad school to Pennsylvania to a teaching job was I pressured into taking and the various moves about New York before I found an apartment. I'll write about the move in 1971 and save the New York stories for the next tiem the topic comes up.
In 1970, after grad school, I worked at Miami University on the library staff. I had a nice second-floor apartment on High Street, which became the place for any of my friends to stop by whenever they left the campus and went into town. My academic seniors, mainly the theatre dept faculty, kept pressuring me to find a "real" job, meaning a teaching position and I finally accepted one that was handed to me, I had to be in Pennsylvania by Sept 1, 1971. Around 11 am, early in August, a friend came into the Miami U library and told me the building at the end of my block was on fire; it had started in the basement dry cleaning business and was quickly taking the building down.
On the advice of my fellow staff members, I ran uptown, parked my car in front of my building and started evacuating. I also called my mother, who told me she and my brother Randy would be over to help me clear out what I could. Since it was about a 40-minute drive, I started carrying priorities - manuscripts of music, books and records mostly - down to my car and dumping it in the trunk. By the time my mother arrived, High Street was closed off, more fire departments were arriving, and my building was closed by the Oxford fire dept.
For the next several hours, my mother, Randy and I stood in a crowd about 2 blocks from the fire and watched a building collapse, killing a couple of firemen, and watched the various fire departments' attempts to put out the fire in the building next to mine. Around 4 pm, the fire was under control, my apartment building was condemned and no one could enter it, I had only what I had removed from it, none of it clothing, and I had no place to live. So I moved home to Middletown and drove back to Oxford every morning. My days were a mess of attempts to get into the building to empty it by Aug. 15 and giving up a job I really liked for a move to an unkown experience I was dreading. I must have at some point purchased new clothes, but I have no memory of it.
When I was finally allowed back into the building, it was a Saturday morning and I was accompanied by the fire marshall. I removed everything I wanted to keep and left the rest for the landlord to remove. All my clothes were smoke damaged and needed dry cleaning. A lot of it was tossed when the dry cleaning was returned, I rented a U-haul truck, packed it and moved to Chambersburg, PA, for a disastrous year of academia. I remember being stopped by a cop for driving the wrong way down a one-way street during my apartment search in Chambersburg, I remember that the Pennsylvania turnpike is endless and always provides its drivers with rain or other precipitation, if not fog as well, and I remember how lonely I was away from friends and family for the first couple of months. What I learned in Pennsylvania was that one tiny second-rate college theatre program is much like the other and that leaving Oxford OH for a job in the "real" world was only moving from one hornet's nest to another.
In retrospect, I should never have taken the job, but I would not be the person I am today if I had stayed on the library staff. God alone knows what I would be doing today instead of editing THE MOST HAPPY FELLA and writing these notes to you DRs.
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Topic: GAS (Read 10768 times)