Your Move. Our Reputation. That's the slogan of A-1 Freeman Moving Group, the folks in charge of our move from Texas to Georgia. Insert negative words of your choice before "Reputation," and you'll get a feel for my attitude toward the company. Our furniture has arrived in Georgia smashed or missing or generally in worse shape than before it was loaded up on a North American Van Lines truck at the end of June. In the ten moves that my husband and I have made in twenty-nine years of marriage, this has been the worst one.
The guys who loaded the van in Texas did so in about five hours, carrying huge pieces of antique furniture on their backs. The truck driver didn't know what to do with the hardware. "Ma'am," he addressed me at one point while I was briefly off the telephone from dealing with roofers who wouldn't show up to finish their work. "Ma'am, what do you want me to do with these pieces of your bookcases?" He held out the pins that hold the shelves in place.
I looked at him in surprise. The last truck driver who moved us from Georgia to Texas had everything in order: hardware taped to furniture in places easy to find or stored in a hardware box. This man didn't have tape or a hardware box. At one point, we gave him an envelope and box tape to affix some hardware to a table.
When the truck driver and his hired movers were taking apart an antique table top with original hardware, my husband cautioned the driver not to lose the parts, as they were impossible to replace. Of course, the parts are missing--although the driver carefully taped (with borrowed box tape) to a part of the table the cheap, plastic buffers for the feet. We have the linch pins that attach the lid of our 1907 Steinway & Sons grand piano only because my husband found them on the living room floor where the movers had dropped them in Texas.
A wheel of an antique tea cart is smashed to smithereens, the trim on our daughter's dresser is broken and missing, our daughter's antique washstand that she uses as a bedside table has missing parts and broken wooden support that is meant to hold up a marble top, one of the wheels of her antique twin bed is missing, one of the legs to her secretary's desk is off and missing screws, and a five-foot round antique dining room table top has been lost between our former home and our new abode in Georgia.
The missing dining room table top is the piece we mourn the most; it belongs to a dining set that Tom's grandmother had as early as the 1920s when she married. It might have belonged to HER parents. The pedestal legs and the table inserts arrived, but not the huge table top.
And this is just the short list.
Instead of unscrewing parts, the movers just yanked apart furniture pieces, taking along flaky bits of wood, making re-attaching the screws in their original holes impossible.
We had heard horror stories of Gorilla Movers but had never experienced such horror first hand. Now we've been initiated, and our feelings are those of anger, betrayal, and grief.
I've talked to a person in the warehouse in Atlanta where our furniture was housed, to a person in charge of the relocation, and I'm supposed to talk with two different people in charge of claims. These companies seem to work on the premise that if they pass along dissatisfied customers to enough unknowledgeable people that the customer will eventually give up the claims--or give up the ghost, whichever comes first!
No one will take responsibility: "Oh, that was the responsibility of the driver on the Texas end!" "Oh, you need to talk to so-and-so and fill out claim forms after we e-mail you the forms if we remember to do so."
As I told my daughter yesterday, we can get angry and try to receive recompense for the damage, but we will accomplish little if we stay in a stew about the Move from Hell. We have to look forward and begin to enjoy our new community.
M-M was upset because all of her bedroom furniture--all antiques--are so damaged that repairs will have to be made before she can organize her bedroom and all her stuff. She had thought she would finish the process before school started next week. Anxious about beginning her sophomore year in a new high school, missing her friends in Texas, she sought the comfort of an organized bedroom, a safe place to think and to read where she could hold chaos at bay. But now she can't unpack clothes until her dresser and washstand are repaired, and she can't place knick-knacks on the shelves of her desk until her desk is re-assembled with its legs.
"It's okay to grieve and to be angry at the incompetence of the movers," I told M-M. "But last night when I was wondering if we had made a mistake in moving, I thought of the 50,000 Iraqis who are fleeing their homes every month to take up temporary quarters as refugees in neighboring countries. Thinking of their situation put my own in perspective."
Then this morning after registering M-M in her new school, I took my bowl of Cornflakes on the patio and sat in a patio chair to eat a delayed breakfast. Birds were singing: a cardinal in the distance, a nuthatch somewhere closer. The trees in the backyards of the neighborhood were a-twitter with chickadees, tit mice, robins, and perhaps a thrush or two. One of our cats had escaped outside with me, and she rolled ecstatically on the sidewalk before setting off to explore our carport, stacked with boxes of stuff for Good Will and of packing paper to be recycled.
Every move is difficult. One hand slowly lets go of what's being left behind; the other opens to receive what is to come. And our neighbors next door, Karen, Scott, and their two daughters, knocked on our door last night to place their welcome in our open hands: four home-baked cupcakes.
I think that's a first in all our moves.
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