Years ago, in 1979, when Marcia and I took the cross-country trip that landed us on the West Coast, we were in Marcia’s parents’ Brooklyn backyard assembling a roof-top luggage rack for our luggage-challenged Toyota Celica. The contraption was cheap, which meant that the parts only approximated alignment and necessitated bending, hammering, pulling, screaming, and cursing to get mthe thing assembled. Nugget, the family dog, assisted by barking at recalcitrant bits of metal. The Toyota ended up looking like it needed baryatric surgery, and that was my last attempt at packing.

So now flash forward 36 years, and I am watching Marcia packing for our trip. So far, she has packed and unpacked twice. She is aiming for perfection – the perfect pack–a topological solution efficiency, wherein each sock, pant leg, and shirt sleeve is tessellated to its neighbors. Not that Marcia is being overly obsessive, but she is actually taking photos of each packing attempt so she can replicate and/or improve upon it the next time around.

Unlike the family dog so long ago, our cats are less interested in the act of packing the luggage, than in the luggage itself. The female cat has found a comfy spot in which to sit and pose (“I’m ready for my closeup now, Mr. DeMille.”) The male cat has blindly inserted his paw into one of the partially zippered compartments, trying to see what he can fish out.

One of the true miracles of nature is how cats continually reach into blind crevices or underneath objects and always emerge with their paws intact. I mean, you would figure that the world should be teeming with limping hoardes of 3-legged felines.

Update: Despite starting six days before departure, Marcia still was up to 4am the night before.
After ruthlessly discarding essentials like my prized mineral collection, each bag weighed in at 45 pounds–slightly less than the pack animal we will need to haul the things around. Still, from an airline standpoint we are not overweight. But what do companies that treat their passengers as cargo and pretzels as dinner know?