Category Archives: Posts

SMYRNA, Del.–When I came to Delaware to visit my mother, Emma, I found her in the early stages of dementia. There was no one to care for her but me. I had to stay. I left everything behind in Southern California. I was between apartments, my personal and household belongings were in storage. I thought I was coming for a visit. I hadn’t known I would stay so long. I didn’t even have a winter coat.

For nearly 20 years now I’ve lived in a house with my mother’s glassware, my mother’s dishes and pots and pans, my mother’s table and bath linens, my mother’s color schemes, her furniture, the flowers she chose to plant and her favorite butterfly patterns in wall art, in towels, on clothes. I have lived as a ghost in my own home.

COVID-19 relief plans and the federal stimulus have given me the funds to finally move my things out of storage and have them delivered to me.

I googled, phoned and got moving estimates. I thought I was hiring North American Van Lines to move my belongings. It turns out that this North American is North American Moving, a broker who hired Konami, a moving company I’d never heard of. I only heard of them after I had paid North American Marketing my $789 deposit on November 12, 2020.

Konami Moving picked up my household belongings from a storage unit in El Segundo, California, on November 17. I paid them by credit card half the balance due, $1,157.50, per their contract. They transported my things to a warehouse in Las Vegas where the items languished for 21 days. I didn’t know this would happen. I have moved across country and up and down the East Coast, and the way it worked was that they picked up your stuff one day, put it on a truck and drove as many days as it took to traverse the distance, from door to door and delivered it, carefully placing your individual items in the rooms of your choice. Nobody took it off a truck and left it in a warehouse in a sleezy town in the middle of a desert. Needless to say, I hounded the warehouse over the phone: where are my things? what is the status? On the rare occasions I reached them, your things are in the manifest process, they said. What does this mean? How long does this take? It just depends, they don’t know, they said. The “they” being the young girls of the Tiffany generation: there’s finding a driver without COVID, there are interstate tariffs, there’s the weather, there are other deliveries, there’s….

A week went by, then two. I continually called Konami dispatch. I’d wait sometimes 45 minutes for someone to answer the phone, having to endure four bars of garbled music looping. On the rare occasions someone answered, they exhibited ennui, offhandedly telling me they had no idea where my things were, that they were with the driver and they couldn’t reach the driver because he was driving and would not answer his phone. They kept me in the dark for two months about moving status and delivery date. Over the course, I spoke with Ashley, Destiny, Amber, and one young girl who sounded like she’d just gotten out of bed after the boss’s wife caught her in the act with the boss.

During the course, Konami said they had 21 days from pickup in El Segundo to get my move on the road.

They finally told me they were loading it from the warehouse onto a truck the weekend of December 12-13, it would take five to seven days to deliver it and the driver would call me 24 hours before he arrived here.

What a joy to finally get my things—my essential self—back after all these years and before Christmas.

The driver called me on December 22 and said he’d be at my home at 8 a.m. December 23. He told me I owed a cash balance of $1,157.50. I told him I’d already paid it by credit card on December 11, to Moving Services US, when Konami wanted CASH upon delivery and I insisted I pay only by credit card. He said he’d have to call the office. He never showed. When I called dispatch they said they couldn’t reach him and didn’t know where he was. “Well, he has eight other deliveries to make,” the girl said, “and it could be the weather.” “The weather’s beautiful here and all around us and has been for days,” I told her.

I continually called Konami Moving to find out where my things were and when they would be delivered. At one call, on hearing my name, the young woman on the other end said, “Oh, I’m so sorry your things are broken and lost.” I hadn’t even seen my things, still trying to find out where they were; so, how would I know they were broken, and I hoped they were not lost.

December 28, 2020: I call Konami. Destiny says she has my number and she’s going to text the driver now. These drivers are independent contractors, it turns out, and they can make their own decisions on how long it takes to get to you. She said it could be weather related but she will get back to me today. No rain, no snow, no phone call.

January 14, 2021: Dispatch phones me from Las Vegas and tells me the driver will deliver my things the next day. The driver calls on the afternoon of the 15th and says he will be here that evening at 5:22. He and his helper arrive at 5:45, having driven the truck containing my things down from Secaucus, New Jersey, near New York City, a little over two hours north of my home in central Delaware. Had my precious, long lost belongings sat in his truck in Secaucus for a month, beneath a murky overpass? Is there anything left?

When the two guys arrive they unload my belongings on the sidewalk and grass in the dark. They insist on setting my five pieces of furniture in the living room and dumping my 50-plus cartons of books, phonograph records, china, glassware and clothing in the entrance hall, just inside the front door. The driver says he has another delivery that night, so we have to rush. He refuses to place my items in the designated rooms on all three floors, the third floor being the attic. It doesn’t have lights. He has the contract, he says, producing some crinkled, smudged papers, lays them on the sill and runs his arm over them to smooth them. “Here, this is your contract! This is your signature, right?” He waves it in my face. “It doesn’t say we have to put things in rooms.” “No, this is not my signature,” I say. “This is a copy of the legal document for pickup of my things in El Segundo, that my designated proxy there signed. Here is a copy of the contract I signed,” I say, showing him the copy in my cellphone.

The two then placed my goods in the designated rooms as best I could direct them, for they did not give me time to examine each carton to determine its contents. I instructed them to place and stack the cartons in the center of the rooms, leaving me a path to reach lamps, windows and doors. They stacked items in front of exit doors; they stacked boxes in my living room leaving me no path to get to the lamp in the corner to turn it off. The driver refused to move the boxes. Some were too heavy for me to lift. “Do you want to keep your job?” I asked the driver. “I don’t care,” he said. Finally the helper moved a few boxes to create a path to the lamp. The two were at my home until 7:45 p.m., two hours. They had stacked cartons upside down and cartons of books on top of cartons marked fragile. I have lost count of how many cup handles are broken.

Three pieces of my furniture are missing, one a family heirloom, and a fourth piece, a cabinet, has a leg splintered and broken off. I cannot repair it. My friend Joe and I set it out at the curb. One of those people who drives around in pickups looking for stuff came along and took it. Other items of value are broken or missing. My solid wood bookcase is missing. As a writer, I have a library of books and no place to shelve them. At least I have my books. I bought a new five-shelf bookcase from Amazon. I thought it would be delivered as a solid piece. It wasn’t. It came in a box full of boards and screws and nails with instructions that said to use a number 2 Phillips head screwdriver. I’m more adept at telling you what is a number 2 can of beans than a number 2 Phillips head screwdriver. Fortunately when Emma and my stepfather got divorced in their 70s, he gave her a toolbox. I found a screwdriver in there that fit. Joe is helping me assemble it. It’s taking several sessions because he has a job and other responsibilities and has to do it in his spare time.

I phoned Konami Moving in Las Vegas regarding the missing items. Amber, a young woman I had spoken to previously, upon hearing my name, said, flatly, “Yes. We got your email.” I had not sent an email. When I asked her to send me a copy, she said they couldn’t find it. She told me they do a sweep of their warehouse every Friday and IF they find my things they will call me – not whether or not, just IF. “What if they’re on one of your trucks?” I ask. She does not answer. I have not heard from them.

It happens there’s a class action lawsuit against Konami Moving and Storage with over 100 claimants, all in recent months, as well as an equal number of complaints to the Better Business Bureau, of which Konami is not a member. I have filed with both. One claimant said she actually went to the Konami Las Vegas warehouse to find her things, and found the facility strewn with beer cans and debris.

–Samantha Mozart
March 7, 2021

June 28, 1914 — A dustup in Sarajevo. Someone shot dead Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie, Duchess of Hohenberg. That tragedy triggered a Great World War. While the Industrial Revolution had been changing the way we do things, first in Britain and then in America, trains speeding up travel, factory chimneys polluting the air, the changes were gradual. The First World War produced a shock wave, crumbling the cultural towers of society, changing our ways suddenly, unexpectedly and forever.

June 28, 1919 — The signing of the Treaty of Versailles: The Germans were peeved. For some twenty years thereafter they held a grudge. With so many of our faces buried in our smart devices, it might be expected someone will soon start marketing screen savers for our noses. Do we think about the causes and effects of these events leading from one Great War to the next and to the insidious spread of Communism and the Cold War, and on and on and on and on? You know how it goes. Or we should; alas, most of us, no. The interweaving of events of the 20th century and into the 21st has produced one long fugue.

June 28, 2020 — Today a new enemy has ambushed us, one trenchantly parallel to that other, insidious killer of 1918-1919, the Spanish flu pandemic. Our new one is COVID-19. We have to go out in public attired in battle gear – gas masks, pith helmets, gauntlets, germ killers, or something akin to these; at least, that’s what it feels like. And then when we come home, to meticulously shed our attire and shower seems like dismantling a live bomb. In 1918-19 the Spanish flu was spread in large part by the mobilized troops in Europe, and when they returned home, injured, they spread it here in the United States. So many individuals were living young, healthy, vibrant lives; then they got the flu and they died. My grandparents told the stories of their close relatives who died. In 2020, we must be cognizant of history lest we be doomed to repeat the past.

The New York Times published a beautiful and thought-provoking photo essay and story on June 26, 2014: “The War to End All Wars? Hardly. But It Did Change Them Forever.”

My friend R wrote a poem that I want to share here, lest we forget the deeper implications, lest we fail to recognize the profound parallels to our lives today, lest we forget to remain vigilant:

SHADOWS OF WARS

The shadow of war
Revolution, no more
The lesson unlearned
Power, Privilege and Wealth soar
Senate and Congress do hoar
King, Czar, Sultan returned
Tell who’s who and what’s for
 
Observation towers and bunkers
To profits old clunkers
Enslaving the poor
Through to the core
From battlefield to graveyard
The law defines who’s ward
To die on your own
And be buried unknown
 

World War II Observation Towers on the Delaware Bay. From these we watched for German submarines coming up the United States East Coast, from the Atlantic Ocean, up the bay to the chemical plants and refineries lining the Delaware River from Wilmington, Del., to Philadelphia, Pa. Photo by Robert Pennington Price

This poem is thought provoking vis-à-vis the 28 June 1919 signing of the Treaty of Versailles, the 100th anniversary of the First World War; and of the 70th anniversary of the Second World War Western Allies landing on Omaha Beach, D-Day and the Battle of Normandy. Today the battle of COVID.

Poppies grow in the French fields now, shrouding where the unknown soldiers missing in action rest. When will they ever learn? When will they ever learn…?

I watched a 1984 TV series recently, based on the M. M. Kaye novel, The Far Pavilions, set in 1870s India. In the end the Brits crossed the Indian-Afghan border to engage in battle at Kabul to prevent the Russians from taking rule of Afghanistan.  1870s. This 1870s British-Russian standoff was called, not the great war, but The Great Game, a term Rudyard Kipling’s 1901 novel, Kim, made popular, a scenario made even more popular when the Russians invaded Afghanistan in 1979. Where are the poppies of peace in the killing fields of life? Harvested in Afghanistan for opium, one medium of numbing ourselves to events…. How lovely. It’s the human condition. It is as with unresearched declarations on social media, harvested by the masses too lazy to rise from their saddles to research what’s really going on, to ferret out the truth. Rather, let’s educate ourselves, and, then, build our fortifications and defend them.

This fugue interweaving battles and disease plays across the centuries. We cannot flee it. It is never ending. I, for one, am tired of being locked in my cabin. I do go out, but not often, attired in my battle gear, but I don’t do masks well. I can’t breathe, I can’t see over them, so I’m afraid of tripping and falling. At my age I could fracture things and that might even prove fatal. Besides, the mask steams up my glasses.

COVID pandemic, where are the poppies in the fields of wheat? When is VC-Day (victory over COVID)? When will this end? When will this ever end…?

—Samantha Mozart
for June 28, 2014
Revisited & Revised July 25, 2020

Thursday, April 23, 2020—In the Eastern High Sierra Nevada Mountains of California, the dry air smells of pine sap and granite dust. Hiking up the mountainside, at 9,000 feet altitude and higher, I round a bend, unexpectedly to come upon a waterfall. I stand in awe, mesmerized, watching it shift and lift and change, sonorous, a white lacey veil played by the fingers of the wind. I move on, tripping the light fantastic along the banks of a glacier lake, taking care not to stumble over the plumbing, the pipes running from that lake down to the next and the next, ultimately to supply water for the town of Mammoth Lakes and other California places. The long arm of mankind reaches into the backcountry.

Even so, the place is alive with nature mankind has not touched, yet. It is real, not virtual. All one has to do is be there, be among it. Glaciers, like the one that carved Yosemite Valley where the incense cedars grow along the green Merced, recede, recede. They feed the water that cascades with grace over the sheer cliff face. The ground beneath my feet shifts and even the formidable granite mountain walls grow with every earthquake, and there are many, mostly small, imperceptible tremors.

Unless you’re in a dark closet, be aware of your surroundings. Is your neighbor really cooking dog or does it just smell like that? I don’t know what they were cooking in that California apartment below me, but I didn’t want to eat it. Here, outside my window the vermillion dogwood leaves burnished by golden October sun, against a slate-gray wind cloud backdrop, quiver in the breeze surfeiting a corner of my mind with abundant beauty as I type this, filling the white page with black words in Times typeface.

In the High Sierra, sometimes I hiked with companions; sometimes I hiked alone. Always I listened, felt, watched, sensed, sniffed the air. The pine sap I touched made my fingers swell a little. High above, the sun glinted off an airplane, a silver sliver aloft in the blue, the singular sound of its jet engines in the high dry atmosphere, a sound that carries me back to the Sierra on the rare occasions the humidity is low here on the East Coast and I hear that sound again. Hiking in the Sierra, I didn’t take a cell phone, though always a camera, a bottle of water and a snack. The wildlife was different there from at home in Southern California; there were blue stellar jays, marmots and mule deer. The marmots resemble miniature bears, really miniature; I steered clear of real bears, which at close encounter appear way bigger than portrayed in photographs

Now, here, in middle Delaware, I take a walk on an autumn afternoon. I leave my cell phone home. With my face aglow in the light of the smart phone I’ve buried my nose in, I’d miss my natural surroundings—the golds and reds and browns of the fallen maple leaves and the dry, smoky aroma rising from them as I shuffle through them; the venerable bald cypress incensing my hair and ears and shoulders with exotic fragrance as I walk in the cathedral of its graceful arms and hear the chittering and chirping of the many, busy little lives sheltered deep within.

As I walk, I walk through the gateway joining earth and heaven. As I recall these times, I walk there still.

–Excerpted and developed from CXIV: “A Treat for the Senses,” October 24, 2013

Sunday, December 10, 2017 —Yesterday came cold and blustery. Flurries of Christmas shoppers arrived at the store where I work, and I felt good to be out among the people and greet them. Children, their animation electrified, anticipated Santa Claus’s coming to town.

It began to snow. The purity of the white is centering. Snow falling is quiet, peaceful. I think I will decorate for Christmas this year simply with only a few greens and bows and candlelight. It will be a quiet observance, the halls of my home dressed in a raiment of soft, warm light.

It is Sunday. The bell in the little Episcopal church across the street rang this morning, as it does every Sunday. It is a real bell, in the steeple, that somebody rings. This little historic church recalls all the chapels in all the English villages, meadows and dales that I see in all the British dramas I watch. They don’t ring the bell long in this Episcopal church – eight times for the eight o’clock service and ten for the ten o’clock service.

One Sunday morning, I was walking in front of the Methodist church down the street when suddenly the bell tolled. I rose several feet off the sidewalk and I suspect not lifted on angel wings. In fact, I exclaimed, “Holy [expletive].” This is a real bell, too, and apparently a good sized one; it is loud, and it goes on ringing for eons. It’s a big church and the congregation continues arriving for ages.

Snowflakes alight briefly in flurries or waltz in endless patterns bending, swirling, reaching and touching everything all the dull gray day and into the deep blue night, well beyond three o’clock in the morning.

Prose arabesques from the pens of writers ornament the characteristics and romance of snowflakes. Each snowflake is uniquely shaped. The flakes fall softly, individually, in pairs and in gatherings. Yet they all come from the same source and are composed of the same matter. Snowflakes have a mission: they fall out of the clouds and they land on black slick streets, red-brick sidewalks, brown winter grass, mounds of dried leaves blown into corners of flower beds and on the bare dogwood branches outside my window. Sometimes the snowflakes melt on contact, sometimes they pile up. And then everything turns white. Watching them fall, we become quiet, meditative, nostalgic, always a little awestruck. We watch snow fall with anticipation: snowfall shatters our routines, like a snowball walloped against the surface of a frozen pond, makes us turn to something new, view life with a fresh perspective. Sometimes each snowflake makes a light ticking sound as it touches down. The birds get quiet when it snows. I watch the squirrels and the birds and I can predict the weather. The squirrels bustle gathering nuts in advance of the coming cold. Birds flock and chatter and then get quiet. Birds have different songs for different types of weather and different times of day. They have their cheery morning song, their spring song for temperatures mounting on soft southern breezes; they have their evensong.

Mothers bring their young children outside to witness the first snowfall of the season. I observe one child extend her arm to watch the snow accumulate in her pink mittened palm.

I like driving in a car when it is snowing. I love being in the magic of the snow flying at me, the cypress and cedars and oaks lining the road, their branches laden with snow, the padding of the car tires on the snow, the few other cars on the road all traveling slowly as in a dream, and the tire tracks of an unseen car gone before me.

Snow fulfills its own purpose. Snow comes softly; it piles on tree limbs, bushes, holly berries and cars. Snow comes softly, like a gentle soul, filling in the footprints on our paths. It stays for a while, and then it is gone.

—Samantha Mozart