TheMommyBlog

Wednesday, September 26, 2007 Me, Me, Me, Familybits

Forty-one boxes of crap in the car
Forty-one boxes of crap
Take one out
Throw your back out
Forty more boxes of crap in the car

Today, I helped my mother moved all of the records for the nonprofit organization she directs. They were in an office roughly an hour away, past San Francisco, through rush hour traffic. There had been no administrative staff for a couple of years, so all the files, books, floppy discs—and I mean the FIVE INCH ones—slide carousels, and a kitchen sink or two, oh, and a computer, a monitor (circa 1988), CPU, and laser printer were in an office waiting to be adopted, sorted, filed, archived, and digitized.

Thank God I have a hand truck and a car
Big enough to carry all this
But just in case
We get to this place
And find more, we have mom’s SUV to help out

So there I was, with mom (who is kicking my ass fitness-wise, incidentally) and her colleagues, sorting through nearly fifty boxes that hadn’t been disturbed in a couple of years. All we knew is that we needed the information inside of them. Well, maybe just what’s inside the ones from the last couple of years. That would be determined by careful dissection later, probably in her living room or garden shed.

Remember to bend at the knees, not the waist
Try not to damage the goods
You’ve got a family of four
You have to care for
You’re not quite out of the woods so make haste

At one point, the hand-truck with four boxes of art books stacked on it fell over sideways and landed on my big toe. Miraculously, my new Birkenstocks saved me from what would definitely have been a much bloodier episode. Must remember to bring steel-toed boots next time.

Now that you’ve driven them to the South Bay
Now that they’re all safe and sound
Take them out
Throw your back out
And stack them all safely away from wet ground

I have never crated, stacked, and hoisted so many flippin’ banker’s boxes in my life. Not even when a former employer moved my office four times. (I never bothered to unpack that last time. I just flicked the motivational rubber duckys out of the blinds and never looked back.)

Forty-one boxes we loaded up north
Forty-one had to go south
Back right in
Watching the trim
Truck each one back into stacks on the porch

I worked at a foundation for twelve years, and though I had an intellectual appreciation for the hardships and scarce resources of the organizations we funded, I was still staggered what all of this material meant for my mom: hours and days and perhaps weeks of sorting, saving, tossing, and organizing, all in her living and dining rooms, mind you, before making sense of it all and organizing it into a proper enterprise.

I think I’ll help her apply for a grant. Call it organizational effectiveness and capacity building.