My family was baptized into life in Houston on June 15, 1976—the only time in history that a game at the Astrodome was ever rained out. In the early afternoon, a storm dropped almost 13 inches of water on the city in about three hours. Flooding and traffic were so bad that the [...]]]> Water, Water Everywhere

My family was baptized into life in Houston on June 15, 1976—the only time in history that a game at the Astrodome was ever rained out. In the early afternoon, a storm dropped almost 13 inches of water on the city in about three hours. Flooding and traffic were so bad that the players couldn’t make it to the legendary domed stadium, much less the fans. We didn’t know that factoid until much later. The news the next day focused, of course, on the eight lives lost and on the damage to the Texas Medical Center and several of the city’s art museums.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. My story starts earlier in the day, on the last leg of a four-day trip from our previous home in the suburbs of Philadelphia. We’d spent a night each in Roanoke, Virginia, Chattanooga, Tennessee, and Jackson, Mississippi. It was slow going in a station wagon pulling a tent trailer camper and bearing a kayak on top. The car carried two adults, six children between the ages of 15 and five, and the family dog. (I have four sisters. I think we made a potty stop about once an hour.)

On the fourth day, we were eager for the trip to be over. We’d seen some photos of our new house in the Westbury area of southwest Houston, but only Mom and Dad had been there. We would all have new schools in our new city in the fantastical state of Texas. We would have a new landscape to explore and new friends to make. I was even going to have a room of my own!

After a lunch stop, Dad turned on the radio and searched the dial for music. He stopped for a couple of minutes to listen to an enthusiastic voice preaching that Jesus lay in the tomb “for thuh-REE days and thuh-REE naaahts!” The Southern accent and the strange diction puzzled our Yankee ears as much as his confusing argument. At least three or four squeaky voices pleaded for a channel change. Next up was a weather report—severe thunderstorms in the Houston area. Someone asked, “How bad can it be?” We kept going.

By the time we reached Beaumont, we heard that the rain was starting to let up, so Dad stuck with the plan. We could expect to reach our new home by mid-afternoon! But he made an adjustment to his proposed route. He’d spent a few months in Houston, so he knew that traffic on the west side of Loop 610 could be unmanageable even in good weather. In that boom year of 1976, the city was growing up and spreading out, and the west side was a focus of expanding population, development, and traffic. So instead of taking the most direct route, we’d circle south around downtown on 610.

The storm clouds were breaking apart when we exited Interstate 10 and made the turn onto the southbound feeder road for Loop 610. The exit ramp from freeway to freeway was under construction. The feeder road ahead of us disappeared into a pool of rising floodwater that lapped over the curbs on both sides. Dad pulled into the right lane for a moment. The freeway onramp was only a couple of hundred feet ahead on our left. We watched an 18-wheeler in the left lane muscle its way through the water. When another big truck turned the corner behind us, Dad stepped on the gas and followed in its wake. Mom breathed a sigh of relief when we reached the safety of the elevated Loop.

About a minute later, all four lanes of traffic came to a complete stop in front of us.

[To be continued….]

I promise that I’ll come back and finish this soon!

© 2008 Edward F. Gumnick

In April 2007, I decided to sell my house so I could run around the world and play. I didn’t reach this decision lightly; it was the culmination of a lot of agonizing and soul-searching and talking with friends and coaches about [...]]]> My first night at David’s house was the day we sold his coffee pot.

In April 2007, I decided to sell my house so I could run around the world and play. I didn’t reach this decision lightly; it was the culmination of a lot of agonizing and soul-searching and talking with friends and coaches about what it would take to give up the old bungalow where I’d lived for 16 years and housed my business for the last eight.

I asked my friend David how he’d feel about having a roommate. With his consent, I started plans to make his spare bedroom my pied-a-terre in Houston—a home base for whatever globe-trotting playboy lifestyle might come next. And I went to work on getting my house ready to sell.

It took eight frantic weeks to empty the house. With the help of my future roommate, my sister (Anne), my ex (M.), a professional-organizer friend (Gayle), and an underemployed new friend who was willing to work cheap (Julie), I buried myself in the process of sorting through 16 years’ worth of accumulated stuff.

Julie took away a couple of pieces of furniture to dress up her sparsely furnished apartment, and Anne took custody of a few family-heirloom pieces for which I wouldn’t have room. M. took some of the mementos and decorative objects that wouldn’t fit in my smaller space. We pared the contents of two overloaded filing cabinets down to three file drawers. Anne and Julie and I hauled load after load of paper and cardboard to the recycling center. I culled my thousands of books to keep only the ones that I could reasonably say I was still eager to read in the next year or two—a few hundred. The rest went either to friends or to the Half-Price Books store. The spare bookcases went to the former tenant of my garage apartment, who’d bought a house soon after I told her that the place would be going on the market. David and I made a couple of trips to the city dump, the back of his pickup truck loaded down with debris.

Gayle and I worked long hours sticking labels on everything that couldn’t easily be stuffed into a box: “Moving,” “Garage sale,” “Craig’s List,” “Freecycle.” We assembled goody bags for a dozen or so of my friends—items they’d lent me and never retrieved, or things that I thought they might like to have. One evening, David and M. tore through my kitchen to identify appliances and gadgets and cookware that were duplicated in David’s kitchen, and we either gave the duplicates to M. to stock his apartment kitchen, or we put them aside for a garage sale.

As the sorting proceeded, we packed boxes and bags and hauled them one car- or van-load at a time from my house in Brookesmith to David’s place in Timbergrove. As we emptied the old place, we started setting up my new space. The new bedroom wasn’t large enough for my king-size bed, so a friend offered me a queen-size one that he’d recently replaced. (After the move, I gave the old bed away to a grateful Freecycle member. It was pouring rain the day I helped her cram it into the back of her ancient Suburban.)

Near the end of the process, we disassembled the office and reconstituted it in a leaner, cleaner form in David’s giant living room. The supplies and paper and equipment and furniture that had taken over most of three rooms in the old place were reduced to a large, well-organized supply cabinet and one tidy, efficient desk in the new digs.

When the purge was nearly finished, we made plans for a mammoth garage sale. All the help she’d given me had inspired Anne to do some downsizing, too, so she brought a load of stuff to sell, and David shuttled over a couple of dozen boxes of surplus material that we tucked away in the garage to await the sale.

With all the work to be done and decisions to be made about what to keep, what to give away, what to throw away, what to sell, I never gave much thought to when I would make the “official” move—on what day I would wake up in my old house and go to sleep in my new place.

Then on the morning of the second day of the garage sale, David brought his coffee maker to my house. “We’re keeping yours, so we can go ahead and sell this one,” he explained. As soon as he said those words, the reality struck me: if we sold David’s coffee maker, mine would have to go home with him at the end of the day.

And so would I.