When I was in college in the sixties, one of my dorm buddies and I were watching the news showing American dead on the tarmac in Vietnam. Stan suddenly said, “This is too sanitized. We’re sitting here munching on popcorn and drinking chocolate milk watching kids our age die. The Vietcong should invade San Francisco. Then the powers that be will end the war. It is just too neat. It is like that Star Trek episode where two planets are at war for millennia because they have made pain and suffering too clean and easy.”
I watch the news every night now and feel the same way. For some of us lucky people it is all too far away.
When I taught five high school English classes, the pace was fast and furious. Grader of hundreds of tests and papers each week, creator of dozens of lesson plans each week, form filler and recommendation writer made the days twenty-five hours long…often longer. Retirement is different. My lesson plan for the day might be simply, “Get a haircut.” Still, even without the professional commitments, some days are more hectic than others. Take last Tuesday.
Polley and I fill the car with gas, a more infrequent event because of the corona virus, go to the gym for our twice weekly workouts, then have to stop at the grocery store, Food Are Us, to pick up meals for the weekend. My oldest daughter, her husband, and her children, Daniel and Sofia, are coming down from Connecticut to celebrate their twelfth birthday. We discuss culinary strategy. Should we make barbequed chicken on Saturday or roast pork? How about Friday’s dinner? Sausage and peppers or a pasta dish? No, we always seem to serve pasta when they visit. How about pork roast on Friday and chicken on Saturday? What’s the weather forecast? It is hard to barbeque in a torrential downpour. We decide to not decide and buy two roasting chicken, a pork roast, and sausage and peppers. Oh, and what kind of cereal do the grandchildren like? All of it goes into the shopping cart.
Our next stop is the Dollar Spree store to purchase birthday plates and napkins. These were necessary items for the birthday celebration. We spent considerable time debating the aesthetic values of the birthday napkins, purple and yellow with a Minions theme or the pink and white Minnie Mouse ones. Daniel likes the Minions, Sofia, Minnie Mouse. We buy both and the matching paper plates. Cruising down the toy aisle we spot a jigsaw puzzle of the United States, an activity that Sofia might like, a trio of water pistols (hey, three for a dollar can’t be bad!), a Minions ball that Daniel might like and a container of heavy duty drain declogger. We both agreed that our drains were draining much too slow.
We got in line, following the directions on the floor to maintain the proper distance. There was only one person ahead of us in line. Suddenly a woman about our age, whose body formed an almost perfect “C,” stepped in front of us and through her mask asked, “Excuse me. Do you mind if I step in front of you just to ask the cashier if this is the line where I can purchase some helium balloons?”
Polley replied through her mask, “Sure. Go ahead.”
“Thank you.” The woman turned to the cashier, a teenage girl, and all we could hear was a muffled request. We could see both women nodding their heads.
The lady turned to us. “My mother is ninety-two and she is coming home from the hospital today. She had the covid virus, but she got better…thank God.”
Polley said, “I am glad your mother is okay. Why don’t you go ahead of us?”
“No, I can’t do that. That is so nice of you though.”
“No. I insist. We are not in a rush.”
“Oh, thank you. I appreciate it. Can I pay for your purchases?”
“Oh, no. no.”
So the lady with the bent back, bent perhaps from the weight of taking care of her mother, picked out two balloons. It was obvious to us that the teenage cashier had missed the Dollar Spree orientation program’s lesson on inflating helium balloons. After she failed several times, we looked over at the line next to us which held only one customer whose cart was already filled. We switched lines.
Bad move.
The lady with the cart already filled with plastic bags was counting out change from her purse. I examined her cart. Two half gallons of milk, a loaf of bread on day-old- sale, two cans of tomato soup, two large cans of Hunter’s Stew, a package of diapers, a roll of paper towels, three cans of peas, and some other canned items I could not discern. The teenage cashier had five stacks of coins in front of her….several stacks of quarters, dimes, nickels and a pile of pennies. She seemed overwhelmed with the counting.
She looked up from the four crinkled dollar bills and the stacks of coins and told the customer, “You’re ninety three cents short.”
The lady of the cart looked around and even through her mask we could sense her embarrassment. She was a large person with a stretched out gray T-shirt and black pants with the tiniest hole in the right knee. She looked like one of those school cafeteria food workers who winked and gave you an extra two chicken nuggets. She reached into her purse and pulled out a small handful of coins and passed them over to the cashier who cupped them in her hand and started counting the pennies.
I mentally counted with her as she took each penny and balanced it on one of her fingers. She got completely thrown off when a dime materialized from the pile and she began recounting. Polley and I looked at each other and shrugged. I was wondering about the disposition of the two chickens and pork roast in our car being cooked by the ninety degree plus heat. I have this prejudice against food poisoning.
It seemed as if the entire milky way galaxy had revolved around its center twice before the cashier said, “You’re eighty cents short.”
The lady looked at her cart, trying to decide what to return.
Polley said, “I have eighty cents.”
“Oh, no. I can’t let you do that.”
“Please. I have been in the same situation.”
I could see the woman’s eyes moisten.
“Thank you.”
“No problem.”
Before the lady was even out the door, the cashier had bagged our items and Polley had paid with a debit card.
As I walked to the car, I looked at both plastic bags. Somehow the essentials in them did not seem so essential anymore. Somehow the slow drainage of our plumbing system did not seem that important. Somehow the reality that there is real and deep pain out there beyond our sheltered universe seemed more real. Somehow I realized that not all shopping sprees are the same.
“To the people who think, the world is comic. To the people who feel, the world is tragic.” Horace Walpole
I saw the giant blue and red monster truck rumble down my street and slowly back into my driveway. The Just Junksters were here and they lowered the massive pod onto the black surface where our car was usually parked. Hours seemed to go by before two burly young men, men whose muscles had muscles, exited the cab and introduced themselves. Polite as can be.
“Yes, sir. So where is the stuff?”
The stuff was in the basement…unknowing…innocent….comfortable.
My children had chipped in and arranged for Just Junksters to haul away the forty years of toys and games and old computers and ping pong table and play kitchens that had entertained them for years. My son had driven up from Maryland to help his mother sort and bag many of the items that the Just Junkster guys would carry up out of their home in the basement and into the dumpster. My children had committed acts of kindness, thoughtfulness, and charity since they obviously cared about our health (the basement had developed a serious mold problem). They wanted us to enjoy the paneled basement as our recreation area.
So why was I having such a hard time with this? I have this sentimental attachment to things. I always have, and it is a colossal weakness. Growing up I cherished my two groups of toys—-plastic army men and my Lionel train set.
They were my prime instruments of my youthful fancy. When the real world of my Bronx elementary school became too much for me, I found comfort in the psychic bubble created by using my toy men to re-enact battles of the French and Indian War or losing myself in developing a transportation system in the town of Plasticvillle.
Animism is the belief that all objects, places, creatures possess a “spiritual essence.” Many cultures throughout time have addressed mountains, streams, trees, and even rocks as items inhabited by spirits. I believe that if many modern policy makers shared this concept, they would be less likely to tear those mountains apart, pollute those streams, and chop down all those oxygen giving trees.
As a Zen Buddhist koan postulates, “water does not know it is water.” We assign qualities to water from our provincial perspective as human beings. We see what we can see, hear what we can hear, sense only what our five senses can determine. On another planet in another part of the galaxy, water might be a living thing. Another way to mentally juggle this concept of things as having spirit is to consider string theory. All material things are forms of energy, and energy can be interchangeable. The same atoms that make up our bodies were the same atoms at the beginning of the universe. . Rearrange those atoms and you have another life form, or even an “inanimate” object.
During my teaching career I remember a debate in class on what marriage means. As one young man argued, “So what does putting on a ring, a piece of metal mean? Why do two people who love each other have to get married?”
A young lady stood and rebutted, “the ring has no meaning unless you put meaning into it. It’s like all symbols.”
That was my problem. I invested too much meaning in things, made too many associations with items that had lost their function. I saw the Just Junkster guys carry out the toy kitchen, a multi-colored plastic amalgam of stove, fridge and microwave upon which my children had cooked plastic pancakes for me. Up the stairs and into the dumpster went the rocking chair that our first child rocked to and fro, Madame Alexander doll lovingly caressed in her small arms as she watched Sesame Street.
The basement gave up the cardboard boxes of games that occupied the minds of Christie, Becky, Meredith and Jim during their childhood summers: Life, Masterpiece, Monopoly, Scattergories, Operation. On the way out the front door, a blue token from Risk tried to make its escape by leaping from the bag.
The board games were followed by the toy cameras and the electronic games, the joysticks and controllers and switches for Nintendo. Up out of the basement and into the junk pile in the driveway went thousands of plastic pieces, plastic tokens, plastic doughnuts, plastic fried eggs, plastic spatulas, plastic medical kits, plastic pumpkins, trophies earned for achievement and trophies earned for participation…Up out of the basement and into the junk pile went thousands of memories.
I remember a moment when the truth associated with a thing destroyed a far bigger and more important belief. One day when I was about fifteen or so, I was working in my father’s basement helping him with installing some outlets on his workbench. He pointed to a square item he had suspended by a string from a wooden beam.
“See that hanging from the beam?”
I nodded.
“Take it down and look at it.”
I obeyed. It was a piece of hammered copper art. I recognized it. The image was of a deer standing sideways to the viewer.
My father stripped another piece of wire. “See the name hammered at the bottom? That is my brother’s name. He made that.”
My dad’s brother had died way before I was born, the uncle whom I had never met and for whom I was named.
My dad continued. “I don’t have many things from him. Just a couple of pictures. So I am glad I found that.”
I looked up. “Dad. I made this…in shop class.”
I will never forget the look of disappointment on his face, and I regret, will forever regret, telling him the truth. I had destroyed my dad’s association with that thing.
The dumpster was almost full. I went outside just in time to see one of the Just Junkster guys toss a small wooden cradle that a relative, now deceased, had constructed for my second oldest onto the junk pile. That one item was one of my Rosebuds. There were many Rosebuds in that discard pile that day. Things evoke memories, and memories recall stories, and, as the protagonist says in the movie, Memorial Day, “things inspire stories, and stories last forever, but only if you tell them.” Up into the Junk Junkster went things, memories and stories, all into the eternity of oblivion.
I stood in the doorway in the front of my home, hands braced on the frame and watched as the two men plugged themselves in the cab of the truck, watched the red brake lights come on, watched as the Just Junksters truck pulled out of my driveway. I exhaled, sighed, and whispered, “Goodbye, stuff.”
One of the more painful parts of growing old is losing. Losing things, losing physical abilities, losing memories, losing people.
My wife asked me, “You want to see the basement now?”
I didn’t want to see the basement. There was nothing in the basement for me. The basement was empty…..so was I…..well, emptier.
Disposing of all that stuff was the right thing to do, but doing the right thing is often the hardest thing to do. The junk had to go…..I guess it just depends on what one thinks junk is.
