Perfectly Packed

Week from hell, really. I'm feeling better, keeping food down, massive quantities of plain yogurt to keep some bugs in my gut. Three more days of antibiotics. Slept on the sofa last night, so I could learn the patterns of this new slanted light, and I needed to be in town early, to rent the truck, open the museum. Sue and Brent, a couple from the cirque, driver and navigator for the trip to Mansfield, arrived, James came in to help load. Everyone brought me boxes and I packed the truck. This is an art form. At Janitor College, there was a required course in packing, taught by a wizened retired Merchant Mariner: "No Wasted Space", and the final was to take the contents from a truck packed completely full and fit them into the next size smaller truck. In the Merchant Marine, they learn how to pack. 10 or 12 boxes were labeled Fragile: Nothing On Top, which I could pretty much ignore because I knew what was in every box and knew how it was packed. So many very light things, some boxes with a large footprint didn't weight a pound, you could rest them on a pier of eggs. The front two-thirds of the bed I stacked two and three high to achieve a level and carefully wedged surface, I covered them with packing blankets, tucked at the front and draped at the rear in a way that the next boxes, the final third, wedged the blankets in place, securing that part of the load really well; then the very fragile items at the rear, spaced with folded blankets where necessary, topped with the rolled goods, which spanned many boxes, and were therefore almost weightless. The footprint is all, look at the way the load is distributed, the last ten minutes spent finding the correct solution with the last layer so that the door would open. It was so perfectly packed there was no place to put any straps. It was a lovely thing, I wanted to keep it, as an example of maybe my best work. It was like a block of fiction or that first all white canvas that Russian did. There was no applause, but everyone said, "Jeeze, that's perfect." I like moments like that, work toward them. Last night I agonized over getting them on the road by 10, they were off by a quarter till. Good when a plan comes together. This week, maybe it's the drugs, I want to assume more responsibility at the museum, stage-manage a transition, but I don't have the authority, AND I don't want to hurt anyone's feelings, nor overstep my bounds, and, because this is this best job I've ever had. Being surrounded by art all the time, like it's your job, you know? Putting on cotton gloves and handling artifacts. I had a friend once, maybe I make friendships too easily, make a note to think about that, but this friend knew a great deal about mushrooms, whatever you call those guys, and he had a theory about lines of latitude. I understood nothing he said, but we shared a similar taste for walks and bourbon. And he had a great deep voice: Now Tom, he'd say, did you really expect they'd cut you any slack? I believe I'm back, rereading to see what I was saying. Of course there's a thread, my job is to do this, think about that. Consider that there are a dozen people that read me closely. That's fine with me.