Apple Foot

Spring Cleaning

The documentary film Possessed spends a few minutes with each of four hoarders. Each hoards different things, for different reasons, and some desire freedom from their stuff more than others.

To me it seems there's a logical progression through the four. The first is the one I think of as most reasonable, probably because he hoards books, which I highly value, too. He's got 6000 books in a one bedroom flat, and he's carefully cataloged them all in a database, including their physical location in the apartment. A fire inspector would probably have a coronary just walking in the door. I could be this guy--I have 6000 comic books, and probably a thousand books.

Contestant number two has a problem with acquisition. Inside of a year, he buys 300 cell phones and stores them, unused, in his stuffed home. He is deeply in debt, and can't seem to stop buying things. He also can't seem to get rid of them once he has them.

The third hoarder is a woman who literally saves junk, albeit somewhat neatly. There are neat stacks of used cosmetic sponges, her kitchen is full of neatly rinsed jars and plastic bottles. She sleeps on half her bed, the other half being stacked with stuff she can't bear to throw out. It looks to me like the reductio ad absurdum of "It's a perfectly good..."  This is the sort of thing I've heard many people, including one of my roommates, say to justify storing some item they have no need of: "It's a perfectly good [item]." It's unthinkable to throw out a perfectly good item, even if you'll never use it, because it's not trash. "That's a perfectly good mayonnaise jar. Someday I could use it to store something in."

Hoarder number four is the sort you think of when you think hoarder (unless you think of cats--thankfully, none of these people hoards live things). He's a rather sad, lonely, late middle-aged man, living in absolute squalor (his once-white stove is black with cooking grease, everything has a thick layer of dust over it) among his piles and piles of trash. As he sits fiddling with a broken pair of eyeglasses and talking about his grief for his deceased mother, all I can feel is profound pity.

I come from a line of hoarders. Great-grandma had stacks of newspapers in her home, and paths from one room to the next between boxes and piles. She had gobs of useless items bought at garage sales and other items she and her pack rat husband deemed "perfectly good..." When their grandchildren cleaned out their home to sell it, construction-grade flatbed trucks were needed to haul away the junk. My grandmother, having grown up in this home, was not much better. When my grandfather made a bedroom out of a partially finished attic, he shoved some of my grandmother's stuff against the side walls and dry walled over it.

I can talk myself out of a certain amount of "It's a perfectly good..."  I can periodically look in my closet and think, "Yes, those are all perfectly good mittens, and I'm never going to wear some of those again," and then throw the extras out or give them away. I can admit that it's time to liquidate the relics of some abandoned hobby. But there are some things I can't seem to get rid of, the worst being the comic books. I throw away magazines all the time, but it's nearly unthinkable to do the same with comic books (I have recently made one or two exceptions). The storage of my comic books is a constant concern, a weight on my life. The thought of moving is horrifying to me, and I fantasize about just walking away from everything I own and letting someone else deal with the disposal.

My roommates contribute more than their fair share to the clutter in our apartment. I try not to be a hypocrite about their clutter. I often remind myself that my collection of comic books is not intrinsically more valuable than the things my roommates hoard. We just value different things, I tell myself, as I jam my coat into the overstuffed closet or gaze despairingly at the "perfectly good" mattress in our tiny front room, or knock over some of the several dozen bottles of shampoo in the bathroom. I remind myself of George Carlin's joke about "my stuff, your crap." Unfortunately, the convergence of my crap with my roommates' crap into a cumulative clutter of crap has become dispiriting.

Possessed is unsettling, bordering on terrifying. That could easily be me. Maybe it already is me, and I just haven't admitted it yet.

Birthday Cake

Memo to my sisters' kids: when we were little, we didn't have friends over for birthday parties. Birthdays were just family, and we'd get to have some favorite food for dinner, and then Grandma & Grandpa C. would show up with ice cream, and we'd eat cake and ice cream and the grown-ups would drink coffee made in a Corning blue corn flower percolator.

This year and last, my parents have come up from New Jersey to celebrate my birthday, and mom brings cake. Specifically, she brings chocolate mayonnaise cake with a fairly small amount of what I guess is called butter cream frosting.

Funny story about frosting: One day in college my friend E. said something about making fake frosting for a cake. "When you don't have time to make real frosting, you can do this fake thing with butter and confectioner's sugar and vanilla..." I had to inform E. that to most Americans, this is real frosting; fake frosting comes out of a can. E. believes real frosting involves a candy thermometer.

At any rate, every year on my birthday I get myself something sweet to stick a candle in. In recent years, it's been brownies or congo bars or something. I'm usually unsatisfied by my improvised birthday cake (especially if it's actual bakery-bought cake), and I'd thought this was because I was sitting alone in my bedroom singing happy birthday to myself and blowing out a candle from a package I've had in my desk for twenty years. It's not just that, though. Now that I've had mom here with her mayonnaise cake two years in a row, I know what is really lacking on my birthday.

I can't even tell you how happy it makes me to eat birthday cake that tastes like the birthday cake I had as a kid. It would be the perfect birthday if dinner were a couple slices of plain Sicilian from Carmine's, followed by cake and coffee.

Band Director Dead

My mother sent me a news clipping--the obit for my high school band director. He was 59, and when I do the math I realize that when I was in high school, he was about the age that I am now. This is astonishing to me. Of course, adolescents tend to think folks in their thirties are "old", but I think it was the man himself, too. He stuck his chin forward, like a turtle from its shell, he had a sad, orange mustache, he was round-shouldered. Frequently there was a dried spot of spit on one knee of his polyester pants. He looked like what he was--a saxophonist with bad posture--and he had a hangdog personality. Plus, by the time I was his student, he'd already been working at the high school for some years.

Like many public high school music teachers, he had to be jack-of-all-trades. He taught me to play the oboe and the saxophone, my friend to play the drums, my sister to play the bassoon. When the music wasn't quite right, he'd do some arranging. None of this leaves much time for teaching the finer points of music, and now that I'm taking private lessons, I'm astounded by all the musical knowledge I didn't have then, even though I think I played better than I do now (or maybe I was just ignorant and confident enough then that I thought I was better).

Band was the center of my life in high school. All my friends were in the band, a lot of my daily schedule depended on rehearsals and trips and football games. Strangely, though, I don't have any particular memories or feelings about the man holding the baton. Orange hair aside, he seems mostly colorless in my memory.

Great Grandpa's Day

March 17 is, of course, St. Patrick's Day (here in Suffolk Co., Mass., it's also--wink wink, nudge nudge--Evacuation Day). St. Paddy's Day has always been Great-Grandpa Higgins' Day, regardless of whether or not it's really his birthday, as he claimed.

I know I'm the only one of my sisters with any real memories of our great grandfather, who was a true character. When I was seven or eight, my mother pulled up outside the post office, gave me some cash, and told me to go in and get so many first class stamps. "If they give you any trouble," she said, "tell them Patrick Higgins is your great-grandfather."  Apparently, the staff of that particular post office had a reputation for mouthing off to customers, and my great-grandfather gave them back every bit as good as he got.

Grandpa's been dead 25 years or so, and my mother goes out to the gravesite every year on St. Paddy's Day (the day grandpa chose to celebrate his birthday), pours a beer on the grave, and asks grandpa to consider pulling some strings at the lottery.

He had bristly, close trimmed hair that was all silver. Apparently, his hair had gone completely silver by the time he was thirty.

His wife actually died after him, though she'd been institutionalized for several years with senile dementia, so I'd never known her, and her funeral felt like it came after a long delay. She was a tiny little French Canadian woman, every bit as tough as her husband was sentimental. My mother always talks about her drinking enormous bowls of tea with thick slices of deli meat and watching professional wrestling on the TV, which evidently she took seriously. Their home was cluttered--they were packrats of the highest order. When my mother's cousin E. bought grandpa's house from him (for some nominal amount), he and his brother cleaned it out by backing an 18 wheel flatbed up to the house and throwing stuff out the windows. In the shed was a case of the dye used to trace septic systems, warehoused since Grandpa had been a health inspector twenty or more years before.

My own grandfather, when he was beginning to show signs of Alzheimer's and remembered long ago better than he remembered recently, told this story about his in-laws. When my two great-uncles went into the army for the war, the family drove them to the train station. Grandpa Patrick had to stay in the car, in the parking lot, because he was so upset and sobbing. Christine, on the other hand, stood stoically on the platform with her boys, and the only comment she made, as the train pulled away, was "Goddamned Japs."

Shortly after telling this story, my grandfather asked which way we were headed and whether he could get a ride home with us. He was sitting in his own living room at the time.

When my mother was a small child, she gave her grandfather a coin purse with 13 pennies in it. Patrick accepted the gift, but promised he'd return the loan some day, with interest. On her wedding day, her grandfather gave her a sizable check, and the coin purse with the pennies in it, just as he'd promised. I think it special that a man remembered for twenty years that he had this coin purse in trust for his granddaughter. When he died, my mother slipped one of the pennies into the coffin with him. When my sister married (maybe both my sisters did this?), she slipped one of the pennies in her shoe, for luck.

Police Scanners

I think most people have at least one moment during late childhood or early adulthood when they realize that some daily part of their family's life is considered totally bizarre by the average human being. I don't necessarily mean any revelations about your "family" business or the fact that your father's a cross-dresser or anything like that. It's usually something much smaller.

One day in high school I was sitting in my parents' bedroom talking on the phone. My friend interrupted me to say, "What the hell is that noise?" I responded that it was a Plectron test, and tried to proceed with my story. "What the hell is a Plectron test?" said my friend.  Well, you know, that series of test tones you get on the police scanner. "The police scanner?"

I considered the scanner a perfectly common household appliance. Grandpa, who'd been a volunteer fireman for several decades, had one. We had one. My great-aunt had one (I'm not sure what her excuse was). When sirens went off somewhere in the distance, naturally you turned up the volume on the police scanner, maybe isolated a particular channel. You looked in the paper the next day for more details on that accident all the firemen had been talking about. You knew that the cops in Wharton (or maybe it was Mine Hill) were so bored that they eagerly offered their assistance to neighboring municipalities' officers for the most routine traffic stops. In a small town, you learn a lot from a police scanner.

One Saturday a few days after high school graduation, my mother woke me early for my Burger King shift and told me that my friend M's father had died of a heart attack that morning. Mom was already making an enormous batch of muffins for me to take by M's house on my way to work. My friend's mother was startled to see me arrive, bearing food, so soon after her husband's death, but M. knew it must've been the police scanner.

What I Did On My Summer Vacation

I went down to New Jersey for a week to visit my parents. Sister C. and her brood spent a couple days visiting, too; the boys love grandma and grandpa's pool. Mom and I went out to see my sister A's new house in Pennsylvania (lots of room).  I gave Wellesley clothing to all the nephews and niece. Bought a new harness for an old husky. Spent a day at the Sussex Co. Farm & Horse Show, watching pigs race and 4-H'ers get dragged around by cows. Went to see a movie (Pirates 2, which seemed endless to me). Brushed the aforementioned old husky and her cowardly compatriot, with limited success. Watched cable TV (ooo, first run Stargate! American Chopper! CNN!) Activity was fairly low key, since my back was aggravated again.

Photos here.

Dusty Yearbooks

This is neat.  A local history website has posted photos from my grandfather's 1936 senior yearbook.

1936 was a momentous year.  The Green Hornet debuted on the radio.  I wonder if Connie listened to it?  1936 saw the brief reign of England's Edward VIII, Hitler hosting both the Winter and Summer Olympics, the beginning of the Spanish Civil War--was a teen in rural New Jersey paying any attention?  Men's basketball became an Olympic sport--did Connie, who played roundball on an intramural squad, follow the tournament?  I have known my grandfather to make racist remarks, although I'm sure he would've vehemently denied being racist.  Did Jesse Owens' triumph in Berlin touch him?

Connie died more than four years ago, at an advanced age (and a regressed age, too, thanks to Alzheimer's).  I wonder what he was thinking at 18 years old?  What did he think his life would be like? Did he know he'd live his whole life within five miles of his place of birth?  Could he have imagined he'd spend half a century as a volunteer fireman?  As a good neighbor in a small town, Connie knew a lot of people from high school through old age--gave them a lift to dialysis, saw them at the store, trained their children to drive the big firetrucks.  In some ways, what he imagined for himself might have become true--the same friends for his whole life, in the same town.  In so many other ways, like all of us, his life must have been very different from his dreams.  I don't know what those dreams were.

Baked goods

Tonight I'm baking cookies.  It's a modest double batch (approximate yield per the cookbook: 6 dozen) of a recipe I haven't tried before for pumpkin cookies (with raisins and walnuts).  It sounded kinda seasonal to me, and I'm making a bunch of them to give to my music teacher for the holidays, since she gives me a ride to and from the train every week, which seems above-and-beyond-the-call.

Beginning in middle school sometime, I was for several years the family's chief holiday cookie baker.  I'm talking dozens of sugar cookies, pressed spritz cookies with maraschino cherries, god-alone-knows how many hundred chocolate chip cookies.  I'd spend 3 or 4 days baking.  When I was a kid mom used to bake all those cookies, plus pumpkin nut bread and pumpkin pies and fudge, and give out a lot of it as gifts, to teachers and semi-distant relatives and service people (back then you could give the postman some homemade cookies, and he wouldn't necessarily assume they were poisoned).

A couple weeks ago my youngest sister showed me where she works, in a building located on "Hahn Road", which recalls my grandfather's favorite bakery, Hahn's, in Ledgewood.  Now long out of business, Hahn's was where Connie often got apple horseshoe, which I never had anywhere but at grandma and grandpa's, and which I'm sure can't be as good as I remember.  He also bought sandwich rolls there, and big bakery cookies, and coffee cakes.  The cookies were always kinda dry, to tell the truth, but it was a special occasion to take one out of its box with the red-and-white twine.

Connie was a man who loved to eat.  Entenmann's coffee cakes are a sort of sentimental family tradition thanks to Connie.  Every birthday for my sisters, me, my parents, mom would bake a cake, and grandma and grandpa would show up with a half gallon of ice cream.  Connie made "Dagwood"-type sandwiches.  Not that they were towering or anything like that; just that somehow he'd put together some cold cuts and leftovers and come up with something that made him very happy.

Connie also had a liberal hand with lighter fluid when barbecuing: to this day, my sisters and I prefer our hot dogs crisp and blackened.

More details on Walkin' Joe

Little sister remembers a few more details on great-uncle Walkin' Joe.

Walkin' Joe

In high school, some friends told me one of the urban legends of our little town.  "There's this old guy who hobbles down Main Street and back every day at the same time, because his doctor told him it'd be good for him.  He looks like he's about to drop dead every step of the way."  The kids called him "Walkin' Joe".  [sidenote: Main Street in my little town had long since ceased to be The Main Street.  It had no businesses or significant landmarks, just a name left over from 150 years before.]  One day, looking for something to say to my mother in the car as we used Main St to cut between two highways, I saw an old man walking up the road and said, "That must be Walkin' Joe."

"What are you talking about?" she asked a little sharply.

So I told her the story, realizing as I told it that it was really stupid, and it would've been better not to bring it up, and feeling pretty embarrassed.

"That," said my mother, "is Uncle Russell."

Seems Walkin' Joe was my grandfather's eldest brother.

This is the kind of thing that happens when you grow up in a small town where your family's been for a couple hundred years.  All kinds of folks turn out to be long lost relatives, and you and your family tend to refer to places in town by names which the recent emigres from Queens don't recognize.

To name a fairly recent example, my family and I call one particular road "the Sears Road".  This is one of those mysterious, four lane, wide shoulder roads to nowhere you see in rapidly developing towns.  It has a real name-- damned if I remember what that is-- but we call it the Sears Road because when I was a toddler the road was put in for a planned Sears shipping center that was never built.

The town has a number of roads with unimaginative but accurate names like "Flanders-Bartley Rd" and "Flanders-Drakestown Rd".  More recently settled residents complain that these names are confusingly similar.  "Look," I'll say, "it's very simple.  Flanders-Bartley Rd goes from Flanders to Bartley, while Bartley-Chester Rd goes from Bartley to Chester."  Which is all very well and good, except for the fact that no one knows where "Bartley" is-- it's an historical name for what is now considered a section of Flanders (I blame the U.S. Postal Service for only wanting to expend one ZIP code on the place.)

And Bartley is where my grandfather grew up, along with his brothers and sisters, one of whom earned fame among local teens as "Walkin' Joe."