Personal Drive Story I

This is a true story.

W recently relocated from Place P to World W.

Like any man who raised a family and then found his nest gone empty, W had a lot of stuff. Worse, he was a keeper. He was apparently proud to be so, as he rattled off a long list of his collection of kids' items. An infant's bath tub, a baby's crib, a toddler's stroller, a terrible-two's tricycle, a kindergartner's bike equipped with training wheels, a tween's 5-speed bicycle... Well, perhaps now you can imagine how big a mountain of stuff W faced.

W thought himself as a young fellow, in spirit anyway. He was determined to move the mountain on his own, with a rental U-Haul truck as his only helper.

On that personal D-Day of his, W got up at 6:00 a.m. He made an online reservation for the truck. Reply came back just minutes later: A truck would be forthcoming, but not until 6:45 p.m.

He spent the interim 12 hours, among other things, sorting, dumping, packing, loading and then unloading two car loads.

Then, W did the same for another 12 hours with the truck until 7 a.m.

After less than two hours of sleep and after having returned the truck, he was at the routine again, with his car, except for a two-hour afternoon nap, until 4 a.m.

By then, the mountain was essentially reduced to a molehill in Place P and established its subdued version in World W.

Four hours later, W was seen again out and about, as if his 42-hr mountain-transferring labor, interrupted by merely a couple of 2-hr naps, had not just happened.

That is the true story. It is true as it so happened. But it was probably not as interesting while it happened as when you read it now. In that sense, like all stories, it is not a carbon copy of the original event.