Schlepping Across America

Brooklyn, Ohio, an airport suburb west of Cleveland, shares a name with the brassy borough in New York, but the similarity ends there. We're staying at a hotel at a flat, open highway crossroads with every kind of shopping mall restaurant clustered at the corners. Two weeks into our road trip, we've already left pieces of ourselves and our possessions scattered across the midatlantic states. We left our schlepper (pet name for a wheeled cart) in Virginia, when a well-meaning fan brought it to the stage to help with our amps, which we instead hand carried to the car. We were so intent on getting through the mountains before dark, we drove off, leaving the lonesome schlepper (the cart, not the guy) by the stage, still waiting to serve us.
The handtruck has special significance in the jumble of non-musical equipment carried by the traveling musician. We have to do most of our own booking, managing, driving, loading and unloading - usually four times a day, sometimes more, setting up, playing, booking hotels, and finding restaurants on the road, so a cart with wheels is like a little helper who travels with us and doesn't ask for its own room or to turn on the air conditioning in the car.
It seemed to us that we were destined to leave the schlep (for short) behind. It wasn't our usual schlepper. Paul got the original schlepper over 10 years ago, as a Christmas gift from his wife, and he has rolled it in and out of hotels and clubs all over the U.S. and Canada since then, stacking the amps on it and giving it an affectionate pat now and then. But he wanted something different for our big road trip, something wider, perhaps lighter, something more manageable. We ran through Staples on our last-minute errand run before leaving, and found the new, sleek black schlepper. Paul was pretty happy with it, but he had no time to bond. So it was no surprise that we forgot to account for it only a few gigs later. We hadn't registered the imprint. We didn't mourn for long, though, as it had been a very short relationship without memorable moments.
Today in Brooklyn we drove by a Staples on our way to the gig at the Winchester Tavern in Lakewood. On the way back from the sound check, I swung the car into the parking lot and went in to find a new schlepper. Success! This one is even better than the last. The last one consisted of open gridwork, which is lighter, but you worry about catching your fingers in the overlapping grids, a thought that makes me queasy. The new one has a solid base and tubular construction. It's heavy, but it has personality. This is a schlepper whose praises you can sing, a schlepper you could maybe even - dare I say? - Love.
However, my heart still belongs to the old, silvery, experienced one resting up at home this summer. You never forget your first schlepper.