Champagne, a missing cat and Abbott & Costello

We moved last weekend. Actually, the process has been ongoing in earnest for a few months now, but Saturday morning the actual movers came with the truck. We’d hired them to move the big stuff—furniture, mainly. That meant we were moving everything else, carload by exhausting carload.

Friday night we made two runs, then packed the car again to drive it full when we led the movers to the new place. We ended up getting to bed at 3 o’clock Saturday morning and got up at 7:30 to finish getting ready for the movers arriving at 9.

I don’t recommend moving on four and a half hours’ sleep.

We’d heard and read all kinds of horror stories about movers showing up late or not at all, but our crew arrived about 15 minutes early. Which was the cue for our 17-year-old cat Cosmo to add to the drama of the day by disappearing. He’s been an indoor only cat for the last ten years, but springtime always awakens the prowling gene in him, and he starts hanging out around windows and doors, sniffing the air and looking hopeful. We were afraid he’d already managed to slip out somehow—or would do so once the movers were going in and out. Finally, though, he nonchalantly sauntered out of a room we had each searched top to bottom, twice. How the hell do they do that? We promptly confined him in the room he’d just exited, and the move got under way.

The movers were amazingly efficient; when they finished unloading on the other end, it was only noon. And Marion and I were only getting started. We made another run to the old place, picking up another load, this one including Cosmo. Once he was safely installed in the new place, we unpacked boxes for a few hours, then made a run to what I’ve dubbed the holy trinity: Target, Home Depot and Petsmart [otherwise known as the cat food store in our household]. By the time we’d hit all three, it was eight o’clock and no dinner plans had been made, other than we needed to eat some. Fast.

With much of our kitchen still in boxes and all of our energy pretty much spent, cooking was not going to happen. After rejecting a number of carry-out choices—based on everything from fat content to geography to “not that again”—we settled on Nick’s Pit Stop.

A favorite in Chicago’s lively Bucktown neighborhood, Nick’s cooks up dozens of chickens at a time on a vast grill behind the counter of the friendly mostly take-out place. There are also a half dozen or so tiny tables, at least one of which is usually occupied by some of Chicago’s finest—Nick’s flavorful, juicy chicken is a hit with them too.

In addition to delicious grilled chicken at bargain prices [1/4 dark plus warm pita bread and your choice of salsa or barbecue sauce, $2.99; a buck more for white meat], they offer a tempting array of sides: Spanish rice, mac and cheese, mashed potatoes, pasta salad and cole slaw. We found parking right out front—and right behind a squad car, naturally—and left minutes later with styrofoam containers of chicken, mashed potatoes & gravy and cole slaw. That we didn’t just sit in the car and devour it with our bare hands on the spot is a testament to our self-restraint.

Instead, we took it home and served it up on actual plates Marion had unpacked and opened up a bottle of bubbly I’d popped in the fridge earlier in the blur of a day. Then we plopped down on the couch in our new living room and turned on the TV, prepared to stare blankly and cheerfully at anything at all.

What we found was Abbott & Costello Meet The Killer, a slapstick detective B-movie starring Boris Karloff. I’m not even that big a fan of Abbott & Costello, and this was pretty much standard fare for them. But operating on four and a half hours’ sleep and having heaping plates of well-made comfort food and glasses of champagne in front of us, we saw the movie as just a wonderfully goofy added touch to our first night in our new home.

The movers were incredible, by the way—Moishe’s Moving Systems, a New York company that has also been in Chicago for about five years now. I can’t begin to say enough about what a wonderful job they did. Careful, efficient, friendly. And fast—what had been quoted as a five-hour move, they accomplished in three hours.