Sunday, June 22, 2003

Life's Debris05:54 PM CST (Link)
I was hunting for the user manual of my old fax machine today. I couldn't find it on any of my bookshelves, so I decided to look in some boxes that I hadn't unpacked since we moved into our house nearly three years ago.

While I was rooting through those boxes, it occurred to me that I could just go ahead and sort through the stuff as I hunted. So the search for a manual became a trip down memory lane.

I found an odd assortment of bits of my life in those boxes:

* Papers, some important, most not. Old address books with filled with people who used to be my best friends but whom yesterday I couldn't even have told you their names. Photos of Tiamo in her puppyhood and of family in younger days.

* Definitely dead, nonrechargeable batteries. Definitely dead, rechargeable batteries.

* Small toys, such as action figures, a pocket-sized kite, and a foam frog. Accessories that came with those toys that I don't want but never could bring myself to throw away.

* Paperclips. Lots of paperclips, plus some screws, nails, and safety pins. I have a lot of things that need holding or fastening, I guess.

* A 25-pin gender changer. (Extra points if you know what that is.) A microchip. I'm sure it did lots of cool things and that's why I kept it. Read/write heads and one platter from a disassembled hard drive.

* A slingshot. BBs for the slingshot scattered at the bottom of the box.

* Things I kept because they were important at one time but not now, such as a piece that broke off of a long-gone printer.

What do you do with all the flotsam and jetsam of your life? Do you just throw it out and not look back? Do you box it up and go through it every decade or so? I doubt I'll ever need this stuff. But even as I threw out 90% of it today, so many memories came rushing back that I just couldn't bear to let go of all of it. So I boxed some up again (four boxes consolidated into one) and put it back in the closet.

I wonder who is going to go through all that crap when I die? I hope nobody thinks they need to. Maybe I should put a note on those boxes:

"Sentimental crap that you don't need to go through."

However, that would be a red flag to my family that something juicy is in there and they would paw through it anyway. Of course, all they would find is sentimental crap that they didn't need to go through. On the other hand, wouldn't that be the ultimate practical joke?

Oh, that manual? I finally found it at the bottom of the fourth box.

Saturday, June 14, 2003

Saying Goodbye11:40 PM CST (Link)
Last fall, for the first time in my life, I held an animal while it was being put to sleep.

Sure, I've seen insects die. I've cleaned and gutted fish after a trip to the lake. I've been to funerals. I've seen dead bodies on the ground in my former life as a reporter. I even had a parakeet keel over and die of shock and horror shortly after five kittens were born not more than a two feet from its birdcage.

(Her name was Bitch, an apt moniker. Poor Bitch. She wasn't a friendly bird, but she managed to outlive two husbands. A rescue from someone who got her as a pet and didn't want her, she lived a good long time. But five kittens. Well, that was just too much, I guess.)

But up until last year, I'd never held in my arms something that had been a daily part of my life for the last 11 years as a doctor squirted deadly fluid into her veins. My heart broke when Zebbie died in October. I know that it had to be done, but it hurt. Still does.

I realized, later, that Dad had always done it before.

We grew up with animals. Mostly dogs, a few cats, ducks, goats and various other animals sprinkled in. While everyone in the family loved animals and while we all handled various routine vet visits, Dad always got stuck with escorting the animals on their final trip to the vet. I know it hurt him as much as it did us to see them go, but he did it to shield us from the pain. He never complained about his unwritten duty.

When I was in high school, an orange tabby decided to live with us. He walked in the back door one day and just decided to stay. We think it was because Mom was frying chicken that afternoon. He loved chicken -- raw, fried, baked -- any way he could get steal it. He was one of the sweetest cats I've ever known. He never really had a name other than Orange Kitty.

At the time, we lived one street over from a major thoroughfare. Once, Kitty disappeared for an abnormally long period. After a couple of days, Mom noticed a squished orange cat in the middle of the highway. Distraught, Mom sent Dad on the unfortunate errand of scraping the flattened mass of orange cat remnants off the hot pavement. Not a job for the squeamish.

Two days later and much to everyone's relief, Orange Kitty sauntered into the house. We never found out whom the other cat belonged to, but Orange Kitty lived a good, long life after that.

We've had a rash of bad luck with pets recently. Zebbie died in October. My brother's black lab, Jack, died just a couple of weeks ago. My brother has seen plenty of animals die -- he's a hunter and a fisher. But the loss of his best pal hit him hard. My brother faced it alone, because Mom and Dad were more than 180 miles away when it happened.

Just days after Jack died, another beloved family pet had to be put down. A stomach tumor finally took its toll on Mom and Dad's little Maltese, Tiffany. That teeny tiny dog had a heart as big as Texas and the courage to stare down a Great Dane, but she couldn't defeat this tumor.

Once again, Dad got the job no one ever wants. Once again, Dad handled the hardest part of any journey -- saying goodbye.

Thanks, Dad.

Thursday, June 5, 2003

Possum Pussy10:40 PM CST (Link)
Tonight, after getting ready for bed, I let the dog out for her final romp in the back yard. When I opened the door to let her back in, one of our cats slipped out. Without thinking, I ran after him. Suddenly, I realized I was outside in my sleeping attire. I'll spare you a description.

I knew Bub was going to play hard to get. Proving me right, he hopped away quickly to the dark nether regions of the yard. I yelled for Mel to come get "her" cat. Already in bed and watching television, she laughed but didn't budge.

Knowing the cat wasn't going to come in without a fight, I grabbed the squirt bottle of water we use for cat discipline and ran out again. In the meantime, Bub saw some branches rattling in a tree at the edge of the yard and went to investigate. I ran after to investigate what he was investigating.

A possum! Slowly crawling up the tree, trying to be inconspicuous.

Imagine the scene that ensued--a middle-aged fat woman in her skivvies chasing a fat hairy cat around the perimeter of the yard with a squirt bottle, trying with little success to herd him away from a fat treed possum and into the house.

By the time it all ended, we had one scared possum playing possum in the tree, one mad woman and one mad wet pussy dripping all over the living room floor, one safe and dry woman laughing hysterically from the bedroom, and one puzzled dog wondering what all the fuss is about.

That's my life. A sitcom waiting to happen.

Monday, June 2, 2003

Melamine Memoirs11:23 PM CST (Link)
Over the last couple of weeks, I have seen quite a few ads and store displays for a material I haven't thought about in years--melamine (aka Melmac). Up until I was in my teens, our everyday dinnerware was made out of this stuff.

Our regular dishes were white with a wheat sheaf pattern. Unfortunately, the white plastic-like stuff stained easily, especially when we ate tomato-based products, such as ketchup. Which was every night. Bleach would do the trick, but when you’re doing dishes and you’re 11 years old, you don’t really want to dunk your hands in bleach every night. I don’t want to do that now.

Because Dad was Dad, a grown man, the breadwinner, and bigger than we were, Mom always served him bigger portions of food than the rest of us. He even had his own special Dad plate--a monstrous pink melamine serving platter.

I hated that plate. It didn’t stack in the sink with the other dishes. It had to be washed by hand on those rare occasions when we lived somewhere with a dishwasher. Usually, the dishwasher was yours truly.

My preteen years were spent in a tiny town in the northeast corner of South Dakota, 11 miles from the Minnesota border. One of those years, we lived in a fabulous old, very large, two-story, four-bedroom house on South Sixth Street. I’m sure it had a fabulous heating bill, which is why the next year, we moved across the street to a not-so-fabulous, not-so-large, two-story house that had only two real bedrooms. (My baby sister was born while we lived in the not-so-fabulous house.)

In the fabulous house, my parents had a bedroom, my brother and I each had our own bedroom, and the fourth bedroom was the TV room. Though we had a dining room, we (I and my mother) generally would cook dinner and then take everything upstairs to eat in front of the TV. Of course, the kids (again, mostly me) would be responsible for taking everything back downstairs when we were through.

(I baked my first solo batch of cookies while living in this house. They didn’t turn out so hot. I still don’t know what I did wrong, maybe nothing, but they didn’t melt down at all. They were just big cookie lumps. Fortunately, they tasted OK, so it wasn’t a total loss, but I was so disappointed because I followed the recipe exactly.)

Back to the plate… One night, after eating, I was assigned the duty of carrying all the dirty plates and utensils from the TV room down to the kitchen. There must have been something really good on TV that Dad consented to let me watch, such as the Brady Bunch or Partridge Family, because I ran down the stairs to the first flight, reached around the corner, dropped everything on the stove, and ran back to watch television.

Unknown to me, someone had left a burner on low. A little later, we hear a cracking sound and a terrible smell. Ah, the sounds and smells of melting melamine. Pop's pink platter was cooked -- overheated and cracked in several spots. Dad was upset, but silently, I rejoiced. The hated platter was gone. I never had to wash it again. Woohoo!

Unfortunately, he had a yellow melamine platter waiting in the wings. Fortunately, a few years later, Corning came out with the Corelle line of dishes that cleaned easily and did not stain. Fortunately, my mother fell in love with Corelle dishes and got rid of the melamine. Fortunately, we finally moved into a house with an automatic dishwasher. Unfortunately, I broke the dishwasher doing something stupid with liquid dishwashing detergent.

But that’s another story.

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Addendum: As I was trying to find web links to Corelle for this story, I did a Google search on the word pyrex. I came up with a link for Pyrex glass dildos. Umm. No.

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