Truckin'

"Come on, let's get this square peg into that round hole!"

Given the complexity of my hare-brained moving and travel schemes, it was a pretty minor problem.

Still, I had to confront the sad truth that I just wasn't going to sell this couch -- and that we had to put it back in the truck and lift it again.

Six years after becoming the owner of a wonderfully comfortable leather sofabed, I was sure it was time to free myself of my heaviest possessions and move to my new home in Colorado with a much less cumbersome collection of stuff.

So it was that I found myself with my good friend Jeff trying to get this heavy piece of furniture through the door of my friend Steve's apartment in Springfield, New Jersey. Steve had promised me a handsome sum for the couch, and I had arranged to get it in my rented truck and haul it up there for the equivalent of my plane ticket to Argentina.

"You told me it was 34 inches! It's clearly 35 inches!"

Steve was yelling in exasperation, and I was dumbfoundedly trying to figure out what on earth I was going to do with this thing. "We just have to rotate it all the way over --"

"It's not going to work! It's an inch too much!"

Well, that was depressing. We gave it the old college try, in Steve's words, when Jeff called it a square peg.

Putting it back in the truck was pretty annoying, as was Jeff and I lifting it out of the truck and into my parents' basement by ourselves. I was amazed we managed to pull that off given that five people were involved in originally putting it in the truck.

In the end, though, I got all my stuff in my parents' house. I was free.

Homeless, in a sense. I was going back to my apartment for another four nights and sleeping on a borrowed air mattress under a borrowed blanket. After that, it's couches and hotels for the next three months.

It felt liberating, but odd. My routines had been my rock for six years. No matter what, I always had my bed and couch and TV where they were and the job I kept going to.

It's time to move on, though. Time to explore. Time to try -- and possibly fail -- to move more furniture. The symbolism hit me over the head like the couch did one of the times I picked it up.