A moving experience

KINGSTON, JAMAICA—In 1988, former fugitive and sometimes-Chelsea, Que., resident Randy Quaid appeared as the villain in the film Moving. It stars Richard Pryor as a man who loses his job, and has to move his family from New Jersey to Idaho for the prospect of a new gig. Along the way, the movers he hires to ferry his belongings from the East Coast to what colloquially became known as fly-over country go AWOL, and Pryor takes things into his own hands to get his stuff back. The film is both a screwball comedy that would never get made today, and a celebration of capitalist attachment to “our” things. It currently has a 33 per cent rating on Rotten Tomatoes. No matter, I still laugh out loud thinking about the scene where Pryor’s character gets fired; it’s comedy gold. Growing up we had a copy of the movie on VHS, and it got played a lot. Probably for the double hit that we’d recorded it off “First Choice Superchannel”—it paid for itself—and that my parents could never figure out the Motion Picture Association film rating system. “R” meant regular. More than anything, it got that rating for the explicit language, which anyone who has ever moved a family becomes overly familiar with using. As a kid, I never moved. I spent all my formative years in the same semi-detached house off Montreal Road near Beacon Hill in Ottawa. “Moving”—outside of the colourful vocabulary every kid finds hilarious—also provided a fantasy that was wholly ethereal: getting out of my hometown. I’ve spent my entire adult life leaving and returning to Ottawa. While my current situation is the first as a dependent of a Global Affairs Canada employee, I have become an old hand at packing up a home and setting up a new one over the last 20 years—yet each occasion brings a new set of challenges. As we careen through June, hundreds of Canadian families at home and abroad are preparing to resettle during the annual diplomatic rotation season. Think cicadas, only noisier and slightly more entitled. Thankfully, my family doesn’t have to step into the fray this go around. Relocating under the benevolent watch of the federal government is an experience that harkens back to the plot of Moving. You have a new job to go to, very far away from your old one. You have a tight timeline, at best eight months from finding out about your new posting to getting on a plane. Your spouse likely has to leave their job, and your kids have to leave their friends and go to new schools. When you arrive, you don’t pick your neighbours since your accommodation has likely been chosen for you. The only real difference is that Pryor’s character selected his own movers—to his chagrin, and the comedic effect of the film. When you move courtesy of the feds, they pick the movers. Contracts have been signed, and companies procured. Not all procurements are equal, especially during a time crunch, which these movers are under. You are told the day they will be showing up—no window, simply told. After this, it’s advised you have everything separated into piles: stuff that is going with you, and stuff that is staying in storage. During our packing ahead of our current posting, we were informed by other diplomats to make sure we didn’t have garbage anywhere near our belongings, noting that we’d be better off if we could use our neighbour’s trash. Asked why, they told us flat out: “The movers will pack your garbage”. We laughed. We laughed less when four months into our time in Jamaica, our stuff arrived and one of our boxes contained garbage. I should have clued in, when in Ottawa, they packed the licence plates off our car. Posting season is hectic. It’s like regular moving, only more so. From all the government agencies involved, to all the companies contracted out, getting people from A to B hasn’t gotten any easier. To everyone who is relocating—to another country or otherwise—I offer up three pieces of advice. First, the move is all part of the adventure, embrace it. It won’t hug back, but at least you’re trying. The movers will pack your trash—they really, really will. Finally, there is no way Randy Quaid will be your neighbour—unless you move to Burlington, Vt., where he owns a home on Randy Lane. Andrew Elliott has spent two decades hosting radio shows around the world, most recently in Ottawa, and now writes stuff from his home in Kingston, Jamaica. The Hill Times

A moving experience

This June, hundreds of Canadian families at home and abroad are preparing to resettle during the annual diplomatic rotation season.

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A moving experience

This June, hundreds of Canadian families at home and abroad are preparing to resettle during the annual diplomatic rotation season.

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