I’ve been neglecting this blog for the past few weeks because I’ve been caught up in getting moved. It’s been a bit of an ordeal. The place I was so excited about last time I posted (the cottage in Berkeley) fell through – the landlord had a family emergency and couldn’t get the place ready to rent out. But by the time it fell through, I had already made plans to move, and there was already someone slated to move into my old room by Dec 16. So, I was in a bit of a bind… which is a far more delicate way of expressing it than what I actually had to say about various parts of this moving %$#&%.
So, I ended up putting all my stuff in storage and I’m staying with K for a few weeks, to give me more than just a week to find a new place.
I hired movers from the La Raza Day Labor Program, and, as always, they were fantastic. The two men both had names starting with R, which confounds my semi-anonymity habits on this blog, as calling them R1 and R2 seems either impersonal or Seussian. Both men introduced themselves at the start of the day, but after that, their limited English and my limited Spanish constrained our conversations to “Are these going?” and “Las muebles aqui, si.” They worked for eight hours loading and unloading and loading and playing a fabulous game of tetris with my furniture. My friend V drove them from one location to the other, while K rode with me in the truck. After it was all done, V was asking me where I’d hired them from, and I was explaining about the Day Labor Program. I mentioned that I’d used workers from this program a few times before. My first move, the movers handed me their phone numbers at the end, asking me to call them directly if I had any work in the future. Each time after that, the movers hadn’t done that, which made me worry that I hadn’t been a satisfactory employer. Had I not given them enough breaks, or had they not liked the lunch I provided? Had I been annoyingly unclear in my instructions or hovered too much? Maybe the stairs were too steep and windy, and they just didn’t want to deal with that property again. I voiced these fears to V, and she made a confused, dismissive face. “But R said he worked with you last time, moving you out of Market Street.”
My first reaction was to feel shitty – I had clearly spent a whole day with this man before, and I didn’t remember it at all. I nervously, with a cringing feeling of guilt, ran a quick “-ism”-check. Did I not remember him because all Latinos look the same? Did I pay insufficient attention to him as a person because he was working in a service job? It took me a minute to remember my beard, to remember that there were various imbalances in our experience of each other – that we had non-equal positions based on race, class, and employer/employee dynamics, but also on freakishness.
But, I still feel a little sheepish for not remembering him.
beardstories 