Stuff
(page 2 of 5)
I don't think we always lived like this. I can't remember—I was away for ten years, preoccupied with moving my own possessions all over the Northeastern United States. But it seems to me that, for one thing, the paper plates were an innovation introduced in my absence. As were the frozen food packages, which have become more readily available since the widespread popularity of the microwave (which, as it happens, we do not own).
“My father believed it was my mother's job to clean up, and his job to make sure there was something to clean up.”
When I was a kid, we mostly ate canned Spaghetti-O's and Tang (which I mistook for orange juice until I was around thirteen). But I seem to remember that the cans were thrown away, and the dishes were washed on a semi-regular basis. (Even then, though, my mother had perversely used the dishwasher as a spare cabinet.) Back in those days, if memory serves, my mother made a sincere and regular effort to clean the kitchen. As a matter of fact, she did all the housework, picking up after her grubby children and husband and daily finding places to put all the stuff everyone had already begun collecting. She made many futile attempts to recruit the aid her children, but we followed my father's example, who believed that it was my mother's job to clean up, and his job to make sure that there was something to clean up. Driven to the point of despair, she finally gave up, and began buying paperware.
Well, it happened something like that, anyway.
When I first returned to this house, I decided I would help my family break out of this terrible dish-and-garbage cycle. I suggested the large garbage-can, and finally, surreptitiously, I bought a small garbage can, with an attractive lid that could be opened by means of a foot-pedal, and placed it in a discrete corner of the kitchen. It has never been used, and has become yet another useless object taking up space in our house.
photo: Tyler Gore
The other suggestion I made was to pack away half of the dishes and glasses and put them in the attic. This idea, which I had thought sensible and sane, provoked even more hostility than the garbage-can idea. Now you don't want me to have dishes? my mother cried in disbelief. Admittedly, a reaction colored by my incessant and obnoxious pestering for her to get rid of certain other non-dish items in the house.
Most of them, really.
The childhood games and toys, for example, the sad, battered boxes of Chinese Checkers and Life and Connect-4, the ancient Atari cartridges, the Stretch Armstrong, the wizened stuffed animals and their missing eyes, the broken crayons, the rumpled Twister mat, its optimistically colored circles now pathetic with neglect. The bright playthings that started us all on the road of acquisition now lie (for some reason) in a melancholy heap in our basement, the junkyard of our childhoods. Some of them my mother hopes to give to her future grandchildren, although this hope recedes a little farther with every passing year. Some of them have too much sentimental value to throw away, and my brother and mother consider my suggestion to cart them all off to the Salvation army a blasphemy and a betrayal. Others still, the ones that are missing pieces, or are too broken for the unborn grandchildren, are being saved for the garage sale my mother has been planning for years.
And there's more, more, more, in the family room, the attic, the vestibules, the bedrooms, more stuff, more things that I find just too disheartening to name. I don't where all this crap came from, or why we have it. I wander though the wreckage of my house pondering the mystery of it.
