Bi-coastal Issues; A Meditation on Underwear and Cheese

Today, a transition post, and it'll be short, because I have a ton of things I'm supposed to be doing, if only I knew what they should be.  It's the kind of crazed day I experience once every couple of months or so, when we move from one coast to the other.  Everybody always says how cool and glamorous it sounds to live on both coasts...the Jet Set, and all..., but it's not.  Primarily, it boils down to a collection of little annoyances, like Parmesan and underpants.

What bi-coastalism really involves is a lot of time cleaning out the refrigerator; a lot of trips to the grocery store on the other end to fill a refrigerator that I cleaned out two months ago; and an enormous amount of not having what you need where you need it.  I can never remember anymore what I left where.  Like underpants, for example...a category of clothing that I tend to play favorites on.  And this really does relate to getting older, so bear with me.  Cheese may or may not make it into the final draft, but, as of the end of this paragraph,  I was still intending to include it in this post. I've left myself a handy image reminder above.

On underwear, then. I lack consistency where underpants are involved. I may have twenty pairs of things that more or less qualify as underpants in a given locale, but fifteen of those are just Not Right, which, some mornings, makes for difficult decisions that only the elderly  and new inductees into potty training face. There's so many considerations: hip hugging or waist-high; granola cotton, familiar nylon, or sleek microweave; boy-cut (at my age!) or that Bridget Jones style?  Honestly, I never expected I'd still be trying to deal with underwear decisions again after that landmark day I decided that thongs were a tactical error. Yet, indecision can still follow me from one side of the continent to the other.

Naturally, there's the fortune-telling aspect of underwear selection.  Is this likely to be a Best Underpants kind of day or a day where I might decide to cancel everything I was supposed to do outside the house, and just veg out as only retirees can, in which case Mediocre-Or-Worse underwear will do fine? Although it has no right to, this sort of decision can eat up several minutes even on a day that doesn't involve packing. When you see an elderly woman standing frozen in front of her chest of drawers, drool hanging from her bottom lip, there's likely a big underwear issue up for internal debate.

And, when I do buy some new underwear that appears to have all the ideally desired characteristics, they often don't measure up once I get them home. (They don't let you try these things on, do they? There's a disconcerting lack of standardization in brand sizing: a pair of 6's made in China differs considerably from a pair made in, say, Czechoslovakia. Got that visual?) There's some danger that the new purchases will be so perfect that I decide to pitch all the Lesser Candidates. Or take the Lesser Candidates to the opposite coast in a fit of frugality and underpants-procrastination.  And leave them there, of course, but not be able to recall that I did, in which case, I must run out and buy some new ones, because nobody should pack to go away for 6-8 weeks without packing underpants. My mother would spin in her grave.

When I get to the opposite coast, will I have a confusingly varied number of underwear decisions to make on a given day, or will I find that I have to wash and dry the pair I wore on the plane in order to go out and buy some new ones? Right here, you can see that the first day back on the Other Coast is already shaping up for a Retiree Veg-out.  I may blame jet-lag, but you'll know better.

Parmesan presents a challenge equal to the underwear dilemma, and not entirely antithetical, but with nuances of its own.  Veteran Mature Landscapers will recall that, whatever my dietary whims of the moment, Parmesan cheese is always included. Even when I'm trying to go vegan. Unlike my Underpants Policy, which is likely to change about every two months, my Parmesan Policy is a firm and consistent thing: I try never to be without some.

 I like to invest in Parmesan by buying those huge Costco cheeses that would take a real Italian family of eight an entire year to use...none of those pre-shredded types in the plastic shaker bottles for a foodie like me.  I like the real deal, the kind you can hurt yourself trying to grate.  The ones we buy are so hefty, so costly, and so un-food-like, they remind me of the weighted hockey-puckish things they move down the ice in the curling competition at the winter Olympics.  I've usually got one on each coast...occasionally even leaving the East Coast Parmesan in the otherwise empty refrigerator, actually expecting it to be its usual, un-blemished, creamy self when I get back all those weeks later. Ew. Or vice versa. Other times, however, I recall that even cheeses the size of a dorm-room refrigerator can mold, and I gift them to an acquaintance on refrigerator-cleaning day...tax deductible.

There are so many bi-coastal land mines, I've been forced to  project them all onto cheese and underwear in the interest of time.  But this stuff is anxiety-producing; I start worrying about the Parmesan in one house while cleaning the refrigerator out in the other one.  I wish I didn't fret so.  And please, don't suggest I write it down.  I've already thought of that, but I'm afraid my kids will find a note in my cardigan pocket when they're cleaning out the house after the funeral:  "Left half a Parmesan in California, but all the underpants are on the East Coast."

I'd ask my husband again what he recalls on the cheese front from our last migration, but he's never yet guessed right on cheese; he seems to have aged out of a good, intuitive grasp of Parmesan.  It would wind up being like the five jars of olives in the refrigerator...he buys a new one every week because ,whenever he's at the store, "olives" keeps turning up as a trace memory.  And I would hate to have to call my Other Coast friends and poll them:  Did I, by any chance, give you a cheese before I left last time?  I didn't?  Fabulous!  Thank you so much!  I didn't happen to mention a sudden, radical rethinking of underwear at the time, did I?

[image credit: cache.daylife.com/.../09Cm1tOdyS4OF/610x.jpg, farm1.static.flickr.com/184/442466500_6e20887]