Antiques Journal: Your's Sincerely

I’d rented a 24-foot straight truck. It felt far more than 10-feet larger than our 14-foot box van, and was a pig to drive – I stood on the gas, the diesel whined – and nothing happened. Then, eventually, slowly, I began to feel the speed increasing. But once the speed was up, on the highway, we were fine.

Big Truck and I were going to New Jersey to pick up five crates of furniture that had just arrived from England. At the warehouse, among the 53-foot behemoths, Big Truck suddenly seemed Little Truck. I was routed to Gate 33 – I have no idea how many gates there were.
The warehouse was a twilight world unto itself, so huge that I couldn’t see any of the other walls in the half light. I felt as though I was inside one of Coleridge’s “caverns measureless to man” - very eerie. The cavern was inhabited by swarms of silent, swirling, insect-like forklifts whose head lights were set close together, high up, like monstrous eyes. It needed Dante to describe it adequately.

I did the paperwork in the office, and waited at Gate 33. Eventually, a pair of eyes headed straight for me, and the forklift gently lowered a huge crate onto the back of Little Truck. The driver was a chubby man with a big grin.

“Can you push it to the front of the truck?” I asked.
“No me. You,” he said, grinning friendlily.
“I can’t move that, it weighs 400 pounds!”
“Where your pay-it yak?” he asked. His accent was a mixture of New Jersey and Spanish. Mine is Yankee and English. Not much overlap. My pay-it yak? Hmmm…My mind raced with possibilities, but whatever I came up with, I didn’t have it.
“Pay-it yak,” he said again, helpfully.
“Pay-it yak,” I repeated helplessly.

Taking pity on this New Englander who spoke neither New Jersey nor Spanish, he led me through the gloom to a man sitting at a desk at the foot of a pillar. Beside him was our quarry, a pallet jack. For those of you who don’t know it, a pallet jack is a man-powered fork lift, and in my case the man was a bit short of power. I struggled mightily and clumsily, but eventually I managed to maneuver all five crates inside Little Truck.

First thing next morning, I drove Big Truck (as it had become once again) up to the end of our driveway and backed our little box van up to it so the ramp could span the gap between the two. Kevin, a barista at Zumi’s, my indispensable coffee shop, and his friend Dan, dismantled the heavy wooden crates. Lisa cut off all the multiple layers of packing and padding and then the guys carried the furniture across the ramp into our van where I padded and strapped it for the short trip to our shop. It took three shuttle trips, but by lunch we were done.

The final job was to load all the pieces of the crates and the vast volume of packing paper, foam and bubbles into our van, and take it to the dump – which charged me $90 to dispose of it.

Oh, the joys of dealing in antiques. And some people do it as a retirement pastime - like bridge.