Hold Me

Storage spaces I have known...

“I really like what you’ve done with the place,” I say to Eric as he raises the door of the storage space. The storage space sounds like there’s only one in our lives but the truth is there are many: past, present and —oh god no, but it’s inevitable— future.

You could map our relationship in grim metal boxes, some climate-controlled, some little more than padlocked sheds.

First, there was Cleveland. Back in 2006, before Hazel went off to college, she and I emptied our temporary digs, a cute apartment on Mayfield Road, into ExtraSpace Storage a ways up Mayfield Road. Was it east or west, I can barely remember. I know it wasn’t north because…that would’ve been in Lake Erie. South and you were on your way to Akron. So, east it was, cause west was downtown, reached by a deadly curve somewhere near the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Browns stadium. Having grown up in Pittsburgh I was predisposed to despising Cleveland—that terrible Browns vs Steelers rivalry has its own Wikipedia page! But I actually grew quite fond of it for the year and a half I spent in exile there (you’ll need to read my next book to get some of that story). ExtraSpace Storage was my first storage space experience and I went into it bright-eyed. It would be our base while Hazel and I went off on our separate adventures, she to Chicago and me to…rural France.

How many times from deep in the French countryside did I think of a piece of paperwork, household item or bit of memorabilia and remember “oh right…it’s in Cleveland.” Once or twice a kind friend even braved the void to extract something vital for me. When Hazel moved into her own place, we excavated even more: furniture, old wardrobe items she suddenly saw the value of.

But I’m getting ahead of myself here because shortly after we moved into Mayfield ExtraSpace there was also:

Eric’s short term storage space outside of Norwich in Norfolk, England. This was the shed in a fly by night boatyard ringed by a not very secure looking fence and run by a guy who was either a posh criminal or a man doing the best he could after a bad divorce. Sometimes me and Eric joke that for our third date we moved to France. If that’s true I kind of think our second date was loading the contents of his house into the boatyard shed (after he helped me and Hazel load into ExtraSpace Storage in Cleveland). Do you ever really know someone if you haven’t sweated beside them in the dim confines of a a few sheets of corrugated metal? We executed parachute rolls to thwart the potentially lethal security gate and celebrated when we ended our brief tenure in this spot across from the local Sainsbury’s, vowing “never again.”

Not counting, of course, ExtraSpace, which was a home away from home for five years. No trip to America was complete without a stop in Cleveland to extract amps, keyboards and extra merch from Mayfield Road. For a little while we discussed moving the contents to a more convenient location on the East Coast, as there were no direct flights from Europe to Cleveland, but it was closer to Hazel in Chicago and saying goodbye to Cleveland would’ve meant not getting to see that awesome weapons display at the airport anymore and well, ExtraSpace and Mayfield just felt oddly like home.

The move from France to the US required shuffling into not one but two spaces, both in England. I can’t get into the lunacy of container shipping here but the bureaucracy of France didn’t support a household move from one of their ports, so we heaved a few loads via van and cross channel Ferry to a friend’s alleyway garage in Kent, then learned it would all need to go to a space big enough to allow a semi tractor trailer access, where we’d be able to load everything up into the container on the back of the semi, so we moved it again. Both of those storage spaces were very short-lived so maybe they don’t really count. If you’re not paying double what you started by the time you extract your stuff, have you truly had a relationship with a place?

The day I emptied the space in Cleveland a few months later was momentous. A lot of the things I imagined I’d find (the good iron, a decent toaster oven; my brother’s green Greco guitar) had either vaporized or were never there in the first place. It was hard admitting I was as whole as I was ever going to be. That sense of completion and total fulfillment always feels like more of a possibility when you have stuff in storage. I took the money I was saving each month and invested some of it in a Planet Fitness membership: ten dollars a month until the day you die or walk in there like a man and end things face to face. I do go to the gym occasionally so it’s not a total waste of money. Or so I tell myself!

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Eric’s mother Dorothy passed away five years ago this month and Ready Steady Store in Shoreham saved us when we needed to empty and sell her place. Just a short term solution til we get that chance to sift through and…hello pandemic, March 2020.

RSS kept in touch via monthly emails, usually mentioning a “slight increase in your bill— we do apologize during this challenging time!”

Three years later Eric was finally able to get in there and move everything to a location more convenient to the Norfolk seaside town where we’ve been fixing up a flat. Does it sound crazy to say I felt a little let down he did it on his own, like if your spouse suddenly wanted to go get coffee on Sunday morning without you? “Wait — I thought that was something we do together!”

But needs must and there was really no reason to go to Shoreham anymore. So now we’re here at the storage space in Norfolk. It’s a little more rustic than Ready Steady Store, without the charm of Cleveland’s Extra Space Storage, but feels more legit than that boatyard one. I see not one but two vacuum cleaners…there’s a drumkit and the old Roland JX8P keyboard. And this bowl of Dorothy’s and…shouldn’t we try to sell some of the nicer stuff? Or maybe take it to the charity shop? But that would mean renting a van and we already have too much to do. I’ll just take this bowl with me. And while we’re at it why don’t we store those extra pillows and that amplifier here? We’ll come back later and sort it all out…

Thanks so much for reading! Along with shuffling old stuff around, I’ve got gigs coming up in Sept-Nov, click the photo for some of the show info