Fifteen blocks into my walk home from shopping at Bed, Bath and Beyond I came to a full understanding of the term my Boston friend, Anne, uses frequently -- schlepping.
Lugging my New York carry-all bag on my left shoulder, a shopping bag full of queen size bed sheets in my left hand, and a clumsy box containing a luggage rack for my guest room under my right arm, it came to me that there was no other word for it. . . I was schlepping. What a great word. . . defined as an "arduous journey or procedure," the word without the suffix means "to carry clumsily or with difficulty, to lug, to move slowly or laboriously." Yep, that's what I was doing, the New York Schlep. I then did something I'm not proud of. I found a bench, removed the luggage rack from it's big box with all the thick packaging and discarded it next to a trash can on the sidewalk. Nobody knows me in New York, yet.
