I once, as a favor to my sister, transported her cat in my car about ninety miles to her new apartment. Naturally it turned out that the only place in the entire car that the cat wanted to be was directly under the brake pedal, which meant that if I needed to slow down, I had to reach down there and grab the cat without looking—an activity comparable to groping around for a moray eel in a dark underwater cave filled with barbed wire—and then I’d hurl the cat, still clinging to pieces of my flesh, into the backseat, and then I’d hit the brakes, and then the cat would scuttle back under the pedal. As you can imagine, this cat and I were the best of friends by the time we arrived at my sister’s apartment, and I only hope that I see it again someday when my hand has healed to the point where I can aim a dart gun.

How To Move Children

Children are more difficult to move than pets. You can’t just put a child in a crate and stick him on an airplane. God knows I have tried.

The important thing is preparation. Psychologists stress that you should break the news of the move to the child as soon as possible, ideally at birth. “We’re going to move!” you should shout gaily, the instant the child’s head emerges from the mother. The child will probably cry at this news, but this is normal. Most children are unhappy about moving, which is why it is so important, at each stage in the move preparation process, to sit down with them, one on one, and lie to them.

“It’s going to be such fun!” you should tell them. “You’re going to make lots of new friends!”

Of course this is probably not true. Probably they will wind up in a school where all the really good social cliques have already reached their full membership quotas and have long waiting lists. Probably your children will immediately be branded with lifelong unflattering nicknames such as Goat Booger. But there is no point in telling them this now.

A Smart Moving Idea For Two-Car Families

If you’re moving a long distance, you’re probably wondering what’s the best way to get both cars to your new home. One way, of course, is for the wife to drive one car and the husband to drive the other, but this can be lonely and tiring, especially if there are small children, who will of course be clawing foot-long strips of each other’s flesh off before you have pulled out of the driveway. So what modern moving professionals recommend is that you let the children drive one of the cars. This way, the adults, in Car A, can relax and talk or listen to classical music, while the children, in Car B, can amuse themselves by playing imaginative highway games such as Death Avengers of the Interstate, and you can all arrive at the motel in a good mood, ready to enjoy a relaxed and happy evening together until the police come.

Moving Your Possessions Into Your New Home

If you are moving yourself, you simply wait for the most humid day in the history of the world, pull your truck up outside your new home, and start carrying your possessions inside. Every hour or so you should take a break, which will give your possessions an opportunity to scurry, giggling, back out to the truck, so that you may carry them inside again.

If you are using professional movers, the correct procedure is as follows:

1. You stand in the middle of the living room.

2. Hundreds of burly, impatient, sweating moving company men come swarming at you from all directions carrying identical brown cardboard boxes, each of which has your last name written on it in a helpful manner.

3. “WHERE DO YOU WANT THIS?” say the burly, impatient men, making it clear by their tone of voice that if you do not answer them within two seconds, they will sweat so hard that they warp your floor.

4. You pick a room at random. “That goes in the spare bedroom,” you say. Or:

“In the dining room, please.” It makes no difference. They will put it wherever they want. Sometimes, for fun, the movers will completely fill up a room, floor to ceiling, with boxes, thus creating a humongous Rubik’s Cube out of your worldly goods, so that to get to any one box, you have to move 1,357 others in exactly the right pattern. I warned you, way back at the beginning of this chapter, that it would be easier to just set fire to everything, but of course you wouldn’t listen.

Unpacking

It is best not to attempt this all at once. It is best to space it out over a period of several years, so that you may savor the joy of discovering the kinds of comical items you chose to pack and, at great cost in money and effort, move to your new home. You can even make this a traditional nightly family event, with everybody gathering around a packing box and laughing festively as you unwrap 750 square feet of wrapping paper to discover, say, the key that operates the radiator of your former home.

What Condition The Previous Owners Will Have Left Your New Home In

They will have left it in roughly the same condition as the Visigoths left Rome in. When you open the refrigerator, life-threatening molds will try to grasp you with their tentacles. But do not judge the previous owners too harshly; remember that when they left, they were in the same subhuman, totally amoral moving-induced state of mind that you were in when you moved out of your house without so much as a backward glance at the inch-thick layer of crud that got baked onto the sides of your former oven when the lasagna exploded.

Getting Your New Phone, Gas, Electricity, Appliances, Cable Television, And Water Hooked Up

The important thing to understand is that all these things are done by the same person. Yes, homeowners: there is only one Hookup Man in the entire world, sort of like Santa Claus, and as you can imagine, he is very, very busy. This is why, when you call up the telephone company to find out when the Hookup Man will visit your house, they cannot pinpoint the exact time. “Right now,” they will say, “it looks like it will probably be an even-numbered year.” In fact most people have never seen the Hookup Man, and some say he is only a legend. But many of us believe in him, because we have seen the jolly pranks and tricks he likes to play, our favorite being the one where we have been waiting for him in our house for days, and finally we must go out for food, and the instant we are gone he comes bounding out of the bushes, where he has been hiding, and leaves a cheerful note on our door that says: “Sorry We Missed You!” Ha ha! Such a card, that Hookup Man!

Chapter 5. Making New Enemies

Probably the most important thing, in settling into a new home, is to establish good relationships with your neighbors. The reason for this is best summarized by the moving words of the famous English poet John Donne, who wrote:

No man is an island unto his own personal self,Each man is more of a subcontinent, So never send to ask for whom the doorbell tolls Because more than likely it is your neighbor Come to see if you have a plumber’s snake he can borrow So he can attempt to unclog the hall toilet Which he suspects his son has flushed His daughter’s Rainbow Brite doll down.

Idealistic? Sure it is, but it still has meaning today. We live in a complex, interconnected society, and sometimes we must call upon our neighbors to help us, to stand by us, to comfort us, or at very least to try not to back their recreational vehicle into our jacuzzi. So as soon as you get to your new home, you want to Reach Out. You want to march right next door, put on your very nicest smile, ring the doorbell, and ...