Vancouver Province
for August 4, 2000

We’re moving. I say we advisedly – Wendy’s doing most of the moving while Clancy and I look on. We were to have been four but Leicester, the bird destroying cat, got one too many and she’s now an ex-cat. Nearly $140 that cost me – that was for a public cremation. God only knows what it would have cost with a service.

A nerve-wracking business selling and buying. Especially if you find the townhouse of your dreams before you sell the house of your nightmares. We elected to buy and hope for the best assuming that having two places at the same time was no worse than having none, in which case we’d need a place that took Clancy – and had a pool. Clancy is used to that and for 11 year old chocolate Labradors it’s dangerous to alter the habits of a lifetime.

There was then, in Mair Manor, a certain anxiety in the air until as if by magic the house sold – the buyers did very well, as buyers always do when owners want to sell, and we had nearly matching vacating and take-over dates.

Now come two things. First you sit around the pool watching grandkids and Clancy frolic therein and know you’ll miss this very much. Miss everything but the horrendous cost, that is. Second comes the realization that you’ve collected a lot of stuff over the years.

I started with my library and after stuffing 25 huge boxes with only those books I couldn’t do without, saw that I had, perhaps, packed 50%. And of course, after getting all this done found that I had forgotten a few places – like the "throne" reading in three bathrooms … the shelf behind the bed … and that wicker basket in the living-room the Toronto kids gave us a few years back that’s a bottomless pit of unfinished books. And I completely overlooked the ones in the front sunroom. Bookaholics hide books like alcoholics hide bottles. Between Wendy and me I calculate that 1000 books remain to be disposed of in the next three weeks.

Then it was my 300 plus CDs. I had four with unmatching cases which meant as I packed them I had to check each one. I got three of them matched but wound up with two more unmatched for my pains. And how could I possibly have two of the same Stan Kenton CDs, two of the famous Norman Granz’ 1948 Jazz at the Philharmonic Concert and three, count ‘em, of Nat King Cole’s "Unforgettable" album, probably my least favourite? And how does Wendy – who has 300 of her own - have her Bing Crosby CD in my Connie Francis case?

Now the fun. If you think bookaholics and CD collectors are a lot of laughs you’ve never lived with a fly-fisherman. Some of the stuff is pretty straight forward. The rods all have cases and they can be bundled together with stout tape. And the reels can be packed into the duffle bags you’ve accumulated over the years. But it’s the fly-tying stuff that’s tough. Fly-tying involves saving pieces of rope, for example, because the strands are just the right colour for caddis flies in the Tauranga-Taupo River in New Zealand. Some wool you bought in a wool shop because the colour is just perfect for your version of that fly for Scottish Highland lochs you read about. Gillions of patterns clipped from fly-fishing magazines over the years. And, of course, the magazines themselves.

But all the foregoing is mere child’s play compared to the shelves in that dark, dank corner, right beside the furnace, where all the stuff you dared not throw out, but is utterly useless, is stored. The first wedding pictures of an earlier wife with an even earlier husband, for example. You throw out the pictures but the binders don’t match the ones Wendy has faithfully kept for the last wonderful 7 years so out they go. There are partial cans of paint, two old portable backgammon games and dozens of framed pictures that you don’t want but neither does anyone else. And who the hell wants an IBM Selectrix typewriter? There’s that far corner that the flashlight tells you is occupied, but with what? Probably the late Leicester’s dead birds.

A garage sale? To be avoided, we hope. But it’s a hope, once all is uncovered, that may well be forlorn.