Monday, May 23, 2016

Down and Up and Movin' on

No Sunday run for me this week. My workout was lots more interesting and more breathtaking.

It began where my grandson, David James had lived with Clint and Nick for three years as they worked toward degrees from the Gabelli School of Business at Fordham University.

The school is in the Bronx, NY and that’s also where this threesome lived in an old third-floor walk-up apartment, within walking distance of their classes. They studied and ate and slept in the place and there wasn’t much time set aside for cleaning and tidying up. Why would there be?

Saturday’s graduation was a glorious affair. The weather was comfortably cool and the rains held off, according to the college president because a couple thousand Catholic mothers prayed hard that it would. David and his, parents, grandparents and siblings had a wonderful barbecue dinner together afterwards.

And then it was Sunday morning. Parents and siblings had a midday plane to catch and the new graduate had one day to get physically moved to a new walk-up. Dad rented a truck for a few hours. The family had to be at the airport by 1 p.m. That left just a couple of hours to complete the move.

In his new place in the Chelsea area of  New York City. The rent is way higher but the three flights totalling 50 steps up to his door are more uniform and less slippery. You get what you pay for. Well maybe.  His room is window-free and smaller than the one he left..  It’s a location thing.

The altitude is the same.  In the old place, once the bed and desk were dismantled, the clothes, posters, books and “stuff” were tossed into boxes, we carried everything down to the street to be loaded into a rented truck.

What goes down, eventually had to go up. That’s when it got interesting and when the workout really began. I know, I live where it’s a mile above sea-level and having an aversion to elevators, I’ve chosen to use the stairs whenever I could all my life.

Even so, I was huffing and puffing every time I reached apartment six with a load. But after a while, the routine took on a certain rhythm and it got a bit easier.  David and Clint, who carried most of the heavy stuff, were actually sprinting when their load was light enough. They’ve had lots of practice with flights of steep, narrow stairs.

David will be able to walk to his new job with a small, up-and-coming high-finance firm involved with transactions I don’t even try to understand. It’s a dream job for him that happily grew out of an internship during the school year. Who knows where the next move will take him?

He’s grandkid #5 to earn a degree. Seven more coming up. What fun to watch the moves they will be making.


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