The preacher quite confidently stated: “You can’t take It with you. You will never see a U-haul following a hearse.” That being stated … now you can understand why when I was driving by a local cemetery last week and I saw a moving van parked in the center of the cemetery, I laughed so hard I almost choked. The irony of that mental picture gives you pause to reconsider: perhaps I can take something “with me”? and if so, what can I take with me?
Someone once told me that you spend the first 50 years of
your life accumulating stuff, and the next however many trying to get rid of
it. I don’t know. I’ve got a perfectly good TV in the guest
bedroom attached to a VHS player and both of them still work. I have had two “bites” online to buy it. Yes, I was actually the person to post them
for sale (I have no husband to blame for such generic offenses). I just can’t bring myself to click the button
that reads: “Yes this item is still available.”
Mentally, it is not yet 100% available.
What happens if my Roku tv craps-out on me? And yet I remember that I lived for 20 or 30
years after college without a television.
Some people looked at me like I was Joan of Arc when I told them
that. Other people were horrified. I had one man look at me and say in a very condescending
tone: “Well, I don’t think that’s right.” I couldn’t figure out who I would have
offended by not participating in the nightly national holy-hour broadcast of
Wheel-of-Fortune and Jeopardy! To this
day, his response puzzles me.
I keep purging clothes out of my closet. That is going to be a never-ending process
for a few reasons. Firstly, because I
keep buying clothes. So I get one, I give one. That’s the mentality. Except the quantity
never really evens out. Secondly, because in my closets and in my Rubbermaid
bins I have other people’s clothes too.
I have clothes from 30 years ago that I still like that haven’t fit me
for, oh, 25 years. We will call those
the property of: Young Adult Me. My acronym name would be Yame. It’s pronounced
like “amy” only with an excitement in front of it that only the letter “Y” can
bring: I was young, I was slimmer, I was
alive. Yay-Me.
Then there is the batch of clothes that belongs to: Suck-Crunch-Zip-Me. That acronym will be Suczi go with the Polish
pronunciation of “soo-chee.” These are
clothes that I have to suck my stomach in, crunch my legs down and zip on the
count of one-two-threeeeee. Suczi. Well it’s better than Sucky. Those are the clothes that I hope to get back
into next year. Those are not the
clothes I am thinking about when I say YES to the ice cream, YES to the
brownie, YES to the mini chocolate bar.
Note to self: You cannot say YES
to the Dress and YES to the Desserts as well.
Then there is a small cache of clothes that belong to
Wistme. Wistme is the Wistful part of
myself that thinks I’d knock-em-dead in that adorable black, lace bottom
dress. Someday. Or that impulse-buy Orange and black bathing
suit I grabbed on the boardwalk about ten years ago. It’d make me look like a Mae West spin off of
Bay Watch. Maybe. At least wistful me thinks so. But I need to adjust a few locations of the
real estate before I can slide into that piece of spandex. Yep.
Not happening this summer.
Although, kudos to the friend that just lost 20 pounds by
cutting carbs. In one month. My gosh, I’d be on a respirator in the ICU if
I went without carbs for a month.
No. I mean it. I look at the fruit we’ve been farming in to
the stores this winter and spring, prior to our local crops coming in and, man
alive, who can eat it?! Sure, the bigger
container of strawberries is only like $3, but half of them are WHITE. I don’t want to buy strawberries that look like
the Polish flag. I want them to be ready
to eat or utilize (jams), not sit on the counter all day to ripen and in the process
gather more fruit flies than true believers at the annual Baptist convention in
the Bible belt.
And speaking of food.
I tried to clean the pantry the other day. My carbs are all sitting there waiting for me,
should I need them. And really I cannot
figure out why I continue to go to grocery shop once or twice a week almost
hypnotically when I could feed an entire troop of Boy Scouts for a weekend with
my pantry. I mean it. I have cookies in there from 2 Christmases
ago. I have a box of chocolates that is
a few years old too. Were they
gifts? Did I pick them up in a moment of
wanton devil-may-care fever the last time I went to Harry & David’s at the
Outlet Mall in Waterloo? Darn. They should call that place Alamo, not
Waterloo. Because I can’t seem to forget
it. (Remember the Alamo?) I like driving out there and wandering about
like a lost soul on Halloween in the misty moors of England. I’m so happy that’s where I found that
special liquid you use to protect your cutting boards. If I actually USED my cutting boards I may
need that liquid. But my favorite wood cutting
board was a gift and it just sits propped against the wall looking majestic in
my kitchen …. Because I like it that way.
And my tchotchke’s.
How I love my tchotchkes. I love
saying the word. It is Yiddish. But intriguingly it has roots in an obsolete Polish
word: czaczko, which means the same
thing: trinkets and collectibles. Now WHY and WHO would declare that kind of a
word obsolete ever? - Probably this 30’something generation that I have an
ongoing locking-of-horns with. My friend’s
daughter came to my house when she was a teenager and when I opened my
microwave to pull out a package of cookies, the kid laughed at me. Hard laughing. Really?!
I had to explain to her that we don’t “waste storage space” in my
house. That generation never lived
through the Depression. Well, to be
fair, I didn’t either, but I am prepared: I’ve got storage. I have two of my grandmother’s cabinets for
safe-keeping my tchotchkes. I mean, who
wouldn’t want a mini Santa in a bathing suit carrying a surfboard with a beach
ball at his feet? Or the ceramic cow
that was given to me, unpainted, and I painted it, but it never got fired up to
high gloss. I can’t part with it. Or my three little exotic birds that are
actually stampers for envelopes. Find
one of those today anywhere: I dare you.
Or the soft bisque praying angel that has a broken leg under her flowing
dress. I will get around to fixing her
someday. No one needs to know that one
leg is broken. Is it not a deep,
spiritual truth that those who pray often have brokenness that is not apparent
to the rest of the world? So why would I
want to throw out or give away a great spiritual lesson like that?
Then there is the Bik’s Memorial Dog & Pet Kennel
collection. I could probably evacuate
the Bronx Zoo with all my animal carriers.
Probably. 2 Large Dog Kennels,
one medium kennel, three or four carry-on’s in case I need to fly somewhere
with my birds-in-tow.
To my credit, I have not moved my residences and worldly
possessions as often in Central New York as I did when I lived in Arizona. In Arizona, I moved six times in four
years. The last time I moved, my friend
the Immortal Tom Walsh, said to me: “Arabik. This is it.
This truck aint moving your crap to another apartment, not one more
time.” I guess he meant it, because the
following year he moved himself to California.
He fit all of his worldly belongings in the back of his steed-white El
Camino. I’m not kidding. If I had to move my earthly possessions to
another state, it would take …. Um …. Probably a herd of El Camino’s or …. A U-Haul
…. Like the one I saw in the cemetery last week. I will leave it at that.
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