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Tuesday July 18, 2000 "A committee is a cul-de-sac down which ideas are lured and then quietly strangled." Sir Barnett Cocks
'this is more valuable than anything...'
lost and found
Wearing: For moving activity: Jeans, oldest hiking boots, Ballet Austin 'We've got Mills' T-shirt (backwards for half the day until I notice it!); after moving activity and a welcome shower: T-shirt with legend 'In Dog Years, I'm Dead' and snakeskin print California Crazee Wear Shorts. Physically: I have developed an odd rash on both legs above the sock line; rather ugly but no burning or itching. It's just there. Hmm... Emotionally: Feeling in control and on top of things when, in fact, I'm clearly not!
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moving stuff I get up and get dressed. Southwestern Bell wil be at the parent's house between 8 and 5 (so precise!) and the first maid is going to show up around 9. I get some Capresso and take the Monday newspapers and go off to the parents' house alone. It is still and quiet. I try to imagine this being my parents' house, full of their things that we are about to bring in from the garage. The maid comes. She spends a few minutes admiring the house and then falls in scrubbing and vacuuming. The house was pretty clean to start with but it's good to attack it while it's empty. Mom and Dad arrive. Eager to be helpful but, mostly, at loose ends. I have to go to a committee meeting so I leave the house of the parents, a place I will call 'chaos central' more than once in the ensuing hours. The committee meeting is a video conference. Houston, Austin, Tel Aviv, Waltham (MA), San Jose. Houston is trying to fire up a presentation. I slip out and get a sandwich and Fritos. "Austin...mute the mike." Another location shows a guy furiously working on something else, another an empty room, another a guy who gets up, hitches his pants and tucks in his shirt. Finally, we roll. I try to concentrate on my responsibilites while worrying about chaos central. Back at the parents' house. Alive with activity. Cleaners clean and the furniture starts to be placed and the stuff organized. The film girls come and tackle shelf paper. Personally, I hate shelf paper. But my mother likes it so that's that. We move stuff. We puzzle over parts of furniture. Bed frames are assembled. Slats here. Slats there. The day wears on. I'm in the garage trying to be sure every box is at least considered for opening. I make a pile with ones that say 'yarn' or'projects' and open the lamps and such. By turns my parents' posssessions seem impossibly vast and niggardly and strange. At one point we unwrap a painting done by the person my dad called 'Auntie Jen.' She wasn't really his aunt. His real aunt married and died leaving a couple of kids. Her husband remarried this woman. She raised his cousins and some children of her own. She lived to the grand age of 95 or 96 and she painted. Dad says, "This is more valuable than anything." Not to a collector. But to family, yes. At the end of the day, my mom is disconsolate because a piece of wood about an inch and a half long with January stenciled on one side and February on the other is, apparently, lost. The hired hands are scavenging in the packing paper. The thing completes a little advertising give-away that lets you represent the date. A couple of things have been broken, in moving or in unpacking. But January/February seems to be the biggest loss to my mom. It reminds me of when I was a kid and she would say, after something broke or was spilled, "I wouldn't have had that happen for the world. " Ideally, getting enough money would inure one to that kind of feeling for material things. I hope I've reached that point. My attitude is: buy a new one My parents are still trying to preserve stuff. Recycle, reuse, recover and all that junk. The depression. This feeling was passed along to me, but I fight against it.
Finally, we decide that we should shut things down. The film girls have ordered a pizza. We eat that. Mom needs to relax. Dad, too. We all go back to our house and I get a welcome shower. I'm tired but since I've consumed plenty of water, I am not aching. Sleep comes. I'm thinking about all the things. The antique butter paddles vs. the cheap plastic kitchen aphorisms and the advertising premium calendar with the missing January/February. Mom used the butter paddles to make butter to help finance the family in the 40's and 50's. It's important to remember how hard these guys worked to get us all here when you are shaking your head at the stuff they keep or their confusion and dislocation. Life is both too short and too long. |
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