Leaving HomeYou know things have been going terribly wrong when you are looking forward to 14 hours in coach with a pair of seven-month-old kids. But that's where we were; anticipating the flight as if it were a rainy fall weekend spent in a slightly tattered bed and breakfast somewhere upstate. A month ago everything felt under control. Plans were in place, the move was going forward, it would be a bit hectic but nothing unmanageable. I guess the beginning of our troubles was the accident. We had been on the road for something like 14 hours, through the night, through Canada, through Buffalo, through Albany and now through Hartford and some heavy rain. I was just thinking what a great car our little Toyota All-Trac was. 160,000 miles on it and heavily loaded - the roof rack filled, the kids in the back seat, the dog in the way back, and Amy and I swapping time behind the wheel -- it was moving like an aging champ. Sure it had lost a little bounce in its step but after 11 rounds who hasn't and technique can make up for a lot of physical short comings in the sweet science. We were going to sell the car to Betsy the Baby-sitter once we got back and I was sure it would serve her well for years to come. But then we hit that slick patch of road. So when I think about it, I would have to say things started getting out of control about the time we were fishtailing along interstate 91.
The immediate aftermath wasn’t that bad. After a quarter mile of frantic wheel work, the nose of the car hit the median and we spun our way back across 4 lanes of highway and ended up on the far shoulder. The boys were screaming in back, but thank god for car seats. Maggie was frantic and scrambling over the seats. We got out, called 911, and had gotten one of the boys out with us when we heard the crash and looked up to see a Ford Explorer, doing exactly what we had done just minutes before, spinning its way right at us. It stopped about 20 yards before it reached us. We checked that the other driver was okay, grabbed both kids and Maggie and climbed over the cement wall and guardrail to wait for the troopers. Which is how they found us 10 minutes later, in the rain, shivering despite the fact that it was a warm day, reluctant to get back on that side of the rail until the flares were set. They piled all of us, Amy, Atticus, Zeke, Maggie, me and the stroller into the ambulance and we spent most of the day hanging around the emergency room. A very nice nurse let Maggie curl up under her desk. A fairly inept set of residents eventually got around to telling Amy that she had a cracked sternum. And a wildly inefficient sales clerk rented me a Buick to take us the rest of the way home. A cracked sternum is not so bad if you rest it and don’t do anything strenuous. It will only really hurt when you pick something up or move around. But when you are breast feeding twins and packing a house and an office to move halfway around the world, picking things up is how you spend a lot of your time. In the next month we had to: get our stuff out of the Toyota, which was now destined for the junk yard; pick up the black car from the shop; sell the black car; ship the stuff we wanted to Hanoi; ship the stuff we were putting in storage to Cleveland; get rid of everything else; sell our house; cancel all the utilities, phones, dsl, cable, newspapers, etc.; close our bank accounts; forward our mail; change the addresses for all the important bills; and say goodbye to our friends and family and to Maggie. We also had a friend from Viet Nam coming to stay with us for 2 weeks, for one of which her husband would join her, Amy's parents coming for a long weekend, Amy's sister in for another long weekend and my mom coming for a week as well. And Amy had 3 trips to Washington scheduled before we left. That is what we knew. What we didn't know was: the black car would be back in the shop for 3 of the next 4 weeks waiting for a drive shaft to be shipped over from Japan; that we'd have to settle the lawsuit with our neighbors before we could sell the house -- they would take the opportunity to screw us over yet again by not only requiring that we pay them $1,500 for the privilege of giving them our land but also sitting on the paper work for 2 weeks, which delayed the closing of our house until a week after we had already left the country; there would be a dispute with the buyers over a clause in the contract which we couldn't successfully argue from 12 time zones away; the black car, which we got back 3 days before we were to leave town, would need to go back to the shop the next day; while driving from Connecticut to DC 4 days before we were to leave the country we would find out that Amy's grandmother had died and the next two days would be spent in Ohio; and that we would be racing to get out of DC hours before hurricane Isabel would arrive and shut the capitol down for 72 hours. So fourteen hours of sitting in cramped seats, changing diapers, feeding our boys mashed bananas and eating lousy plane food felt like a breather. |
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