I See Dead People, Part Two

 

Haley Joel Osment
and Bruce Willis in
"The Sixth Sense"

I moved on October 3rd. I had moved all my stuff out of my apartment while I was staying with Chayie and Dave and put it in storage. That was a helluva lot cheaper than paying rent on my old place, and the consensus in the medical community was that as far as I was concerned, that apartment was uninhabitable anyway. The guy I hired to do the move was a man named Milton Thompson whom I'd used several times before. He's always been reliable and cheap, a great combination. Once again he moved me efficiently and affordably, this time to a Public Storage facility on Rockaway Avenue in Brooklyn. So I've been in my new apartment for five weeks and change, and I finally finished unpacking. For those of you out there who might be uninitiated, I collect turtles. No, not live ones, silly, figurines. I have wood, metal, ceramic, glass, crystal, stone and I'm sure a few materials that I haven't mentioned. They range in size anywhere from half an inch to I guess about 15 or 16 inches. A lot of them are quite fragile, so they need to be packed carefully as well as unpacked carefully. And there are approximately 500 of them! So that slows things down considerably. Another reason it took me a while to unpack is simply that I'm not as fast as I used to be. Heavy boxes are a problem. I huff and puff a lot. I tire very easily. But now that I'm done, the place looks great, except for one thing. You know those blankets that movers use to cover furniture? Well, I've got a bunch of them. You see, I didn't use Mr. Thompson to move me from the storage place to this apartment. I used the son-in-law of a friend. So I have all of Mr. Thompson's blankets. And they're big and bulky and all over the place. I'd been meaning to call him for a while now to have him come and pick them up, but I never got around to it. Until yesterday. A woman answered his cell phone, which was pretty odd. I asked for Mr. Thompson. "You want Mister Thompson?" Um, yes, I said, Mr. Thompson. "I'm sorry," she said, "Mr. Thompson is deceased." Say WHAT?! Now let me tell you a bit about this guy. He was a very nice man from Barbados so he had that charming Caribbean accent. I always figured him to be around my age. He was strong as an ox. He would show up with two or three strapping young guys and he would more than hold his own, shlepping tons of furniture. He wasn't just there as a supervisor; he worked his butt off. It turned out that the voice on the phone was his daughter. He died two weeks ago. Massive heart attack. Never had a heart condition. He was sixty-one. I think this one effected me even more than Luzer at Orange Findings. Luzer had cancer. People in the best of health get cancer, at any age. Strong, vibrant, healthy-as-a-horse people are not supposed to just drop dead. So, being the newly minted spiritualist that I've become, the musar haskail* here was crystal clear to me. Nothing very profound, just another little reminder from G-d:

                                                             There is no "supposed to."
                                     There is no rhyme or reason to many aspects of our lives,
                                                          or, for that matter, our deaths.
                                                        When it's our time, it's our time.

I'll end this with some lyrics from the song "Dust in the Wind":

Don't hang on,
Nothing lasts forever but the earth and sky,
It slips away,
And all your money won't another minute buy.
Dust in the wind,
All we are is dust in the wind.
Dust in the wind,
Everything is dust in the wind.

* Musar Haskail = Moral of the story.