Daddy, Liam, and Nate take a late afternoon trip to the park. This was the sixth of six in as many days, and the only one for which I took the camera. If you’re interested in further details of the chase scenes, table talk, or the goosedown-beshitting of wandering hands, click a pic.
I’d gone in to get the boys something from the refrigerator, and ended up sitting on the far wall with my back to the corner, where Charlie’s bed was, my head in my hands. The boys followed me in, uncertain.
“Da-da trine do?” asked Nate.
“What is da-da tryin’ to do?” repeated Liam.
***
I’m not sure what woke me up. It might have been the thunder, unspooling from a low, distant rumble into a flashing crack-shot that rattled the windows. Or it could have been the sudden and complete absence of sound that immediately followed as the power flicked off, taking the white noise with it. Whichever was responsible, I was suddenly awake. It was the middle of a workday, but I was home in bed. My allergies had linked hands with the giant bubble display tube virus and together, they had clothes-lined me into a sick day.
It was too dark in our bedroom, and it sounded like the wind was trying to get its fingers under the glazing and shake the glass out of the windows. I went across the room, pulled back the shade, and peered out into the side yard. It looked like a special effect from “Twister”, only with fewer cows, and more realism. I have personally weathered Hurricanes Hugo and Andrew, then several typhoons in Japan, and what was playing out in front of our window now was as dramatic as anything I had seen while pulling aside any of those shades then.
Still hopping into my clothes, I met Jill in the darkened hallway. She’d been putting the boys down for their naps, and was coming out of Liam’s room.
“What the Hell?” I asked.
“It came on quick.” she responded. “When I left Nate’s room, it was a little dark outside. By the time I made it down the hallway to Liam’s room, the rain just exploded! Dude, it was like when the dancer pulled the chain in Flashdance.”
“And I just looked out Liam’s window, and saw Charlie in the driveway, running laps around the Sequoia.”
Shit. Charlie doesn’t do rainstorms. Before her hearing began to fail, she would tremble and cower at the first hint of rattling wind or smattering drops. Now, she usually sleeps soundly in her corner, peacefully oblivious. But this time, she was in it, outside - in the middle of what looked to be the worst storm we’d had since moving here. I started down the stairs, taking them two at a time.
As I opened the side door, a branch as big around as my arm fell sideways across the fence by the driveway. The rain was alternating between blowing sideways, and blowing even more sideways. It was hitting the side of the garage so hard that it looked like smoke going around the corner. The porch and driveway were papered with wet and rolling leaves, twigs, and branches. And Charlie wasn’t there.
Marveling that only minutes earlier, I had been sleeping soundly in a warm, dry bed, I opened the door, jumped the steps, and started out into the eye.
***
I’d gone out to the store to get soup, and I’d come back with a puppy.
“Do you really need a dog right now?” my mother had asked over the phone when I told her that I’d gone out to get soup, and had come back with a puppy.
“I do. Besides, she’s a Basset Hound.” I said, holding her on my lap and pulling her loose folds of skin into my hands. We’d had a much-loved Basset while I was growing up, and if you asked anyone I’d ever shared a barracks with, getting a Basset Hound immediately upon shedding the chains that bound me to the Marine Corps was right up on the list with ‘refusing to cut hair until I have to pull it out of the crack of my ass’.
She had good markings, and her face was cleanly brown and white, with starkly-defined borders between. Her ears were long and as smooth as velvet. She had thick, oversized-paws, and was puppy-clumsy and playful - her teeth were needles, and her breath was pure eau-deu-puppy. Puppy breath defies the confines of the written word, but if you’ve ever smelled it, then you’re nodding right now, and I don’t need to elaborate. It’s like ‘new car smell’, but inside a puppy’s mouth, and without the possibly harmful benzene and formaldehyde. When she growled, she sounded like a little dinosaur.
The woman at the pet store told me that they’d been calling her “Jacqueline Basset”. But that didn’t seem to fit her, and was a bad pun anyway. Later that week, I got her AKC papers in the mail, and the woman had jotted a quick note to me: “Good luck with your new puppy!”
I was living in a third-floor apartment. Sometimes at night, she would bark and howl, and I’d stack the couch and chair cushions around her crate like a fort, hoping to muffle her enough to stave off any complaints from my adjacent neighbors. There was another Basset in the complex, and sometimes I’d trade raised hands with the couple who walked it as I took my new puppy up the hill over by the apartment car wash.
At times she’d waddle up to the landing going up to the loft, and turn around and sit, looking down at me - her face sagging forward until I wondered how she could see. I’d join my fingertips to my thumbs and put my hands up over my eyes as though looking at her through binoculars. She’d start to growl, and then bark at this strange behavior. I called this her ‘barking place’, even though she soon began to bark at me immediately when I did it, regardless of where we were.
I was still simply calling her “Puppy” when I went home for Christmas later that month. My sister was pregnant, and I joked that my puppy was actually the first grandchild. Puppy got into both the candy dish and the cat box during that trip, eating things from each that she shouldn’t have. Want a new spin on Christmas cheer? Watch the looks of dawning horror on your family’s faces when a Basset puppy comes galloping into the living room, shakes her head, and sends a litter-riddled cat turd flying through the air - Christmas’ nastiest lump of coal, special delivery!
I received “Travels with Charley: In Search of America”, by John Steinbeck, as a gift that year. I unwrapped it, held it up, and looked at the dog. “You look like a Charley to me.” I told her. She wagged her little puppy tail, and it was set. Although I decided later that she looked even more like a Charlie.
Charlie slept in my lap almost the whole eight hours home.
***
“You boys leave Charlie alone!” Jill yelled across the yard. “She’s an old girl!”
I looked at Jill. “Charlie’s like: ‘What the hell? This is NOT how I envisioned my golden years! I did NOT sign up for this’.”
The boys ran towards the swingset, and Charlie slowly settled back down into the grass, possibly planning escape routes; possibly reflecting on these small, ever-present people; or perhaps simply feeling relief at settling her old bones back down into the cool grass.
***
Senior and I were sitting on the couch in his living room, watching Gordon and Jett, his Black Lab, play with each other. Gordon was going for the cheap shots and snapping at the larger, more solid dog’s front legs.
Sometimes, they would stop to rest, smiling and panting and occasionally pulling their oversized tongues into their mouths to take a swallow before letting them unroll and loll again. Sometimes one or the other would disappear and could be heard messily lapping from the water bowl in the kitchen before running back into the room. They were really stinking up the place, and if you pet one of them, you had to be prepared to wipe your hand off afterward.
Charlie lay on the couch beside, and on me, and eyeballed them, growling them away if they drew too close. She’d grown into her paws now, and each time the dogplay did come near us, I could feel her claws curl down as she tensed and readjusted. Sometimes, she would nudge me with her cold nose, and I’d absently rub my arm, then stroke her head as we sat there.
Gordon had his paws on Jett’s back, and was now using him to walk back and forth across the room, like a bear in the Russian Circus. Senior, still looking at them playing, and years away from getting any grandchildren from me, smiled.
“Son, you’ve got a lot of good years left with those dogs.”
“Yep,” I nodded.
Although I had no way of knowing it, I would reflect upon this moment many times in the coming years.
***
“We normally weigh her on the scale in the back,” I told the technician. She looked at me uncertainly.
“It’s okay,” replied another, who’d been there longer. “That’s Charlie, and Bill is family. Besides, he’s the only one who she’ll let pick her up.”
We went back into the lab area, Charlie padding closely behind me. I bent down and picked her up. She was pitifully easy to lift onto the scale.
29.4 pounds. 4 pounds less than two weeks ago, I noted sadly. And about half as much as she was in her prime. She’d been steadily losing weight over the last year, but especially over the last few months, and it appeared to be hastening. Her once-meaty haunches were now alarmingly sunken, and where there was once shiny fur and a solid back, there was only dry, shedding hair, and too much backbone. Her sharply brown and white face had been replaced with one that was now entirely white.
She’d had a kidney infection a month earlier that we’d successfully treated, but the weight was still coming off. Four days earlier, she’d started throwing up, and was unable to keep anything down, not even water. She was trying, but nothing would stay. So I made a last-minute appointment for Saturday morning to see Karen, Charlie’s main veterinarian for almost 14 years. Karen’s the kind of vet you call by her first name, and she’ll come to your house for Halloween parties. Once, when it had been a long time since I’d been in, she hugged me.
Karen or not, Charlie doesn’t do vets. As we waited in the exam room, she trembled and panted. I stroked her from the top of her pointy Bassety topknotted head down her neck, and onto her back. I spoke calmly and soothingly to her and let her know that things would be alright. She stopped panting and sat quietly at my feet.
Undoubtedly, Karen would come in and prescribe something to her to ease her stomach, and then we could concentrate on getting some weight back on her. Maybe some vegetable oil in her food would even bring her coat back a little.
She greeted us, reviewed the file, and began Charlie’s examination. I told her about the last few weeks with Charlie. I was still talking when Karen gently interrupted me.
“Stop.”
“Stop what?” I asked, blinking. But I knew.
We talked for several minutes. Eventually, Karen left us alone, and for the last time, I made a lap for Charlie. I held her and loved her, and told her that everything would be okay. I stroked her head and her back, and soon, there was a little pile of shed hair on the floor beside us. Everything she had ever been to me, she was in that moment.
She was my Old Charles; she was my funny puppy. She was my Whirl. My brown-faced puppy, barking at the top of the stairs, and my old white-faced girl, lying in my lap, exhausted.
Unashamed, I wept, and the tears I shed were those of a 23-year-old boy, freshly on his own for the first time, holding a puppy in his jacket and bringing her home. They were the tears of a man of 25, moving into his first house, and spending long weekends alone but for his hounds. They were the tears of a 30-year-old, checking to make sure his dogs were okay after being T-boned at an Interstate off-ramp. They were the tears of a man of 38, a husband and daddy now, sitting and looking down at his beloved hound and hoping desperately that he was making the right decision.
A short time later, Karen came back in, and Lori, who had also known Charlie for many years, was with her. With wavering uncertainty, I turned, and lowered my face until it rested on the top of Charlie’s head. I prepared to do the last thing for her that I ever could.
Karen didn’t say anything. The door drifted shut, and closed silently behind her.
***
I could hear a cat meowing.
I was in the driveway two houses away, and there was still no sign of Charlie. The rain was hitting me so hard that it hurt, and I was holding my elbows in front of my face as I yelled into the din. The possibility that I had left my sickbed and run into a tornado only occurred to me later.
And now, just under the deafening wind, I could hear a cat meowing - a thin ribbon twisting and curling, swept through a roaring river of sound. I turned to look towards the house, and saw not a cat, but my neighbor Clarie, standing on her side porch. She was yelling, but I could barely hear her. Her mouth was moving, and she was pointing to the house next door.
I followed her waving hand, and turned, calling Charlie again. Just then, I saw her, lower to the ground than usual, and looking like a boiled otter. She scrambled almost apologetically up to me, and I scooped her up into my arms and sprinted back through the limbs and the bedlam to our house, meeting Jill in the driveway.
Later, from a place of dryness and safety, I thought about what it must have been like for her, lost and alone in a strange place while the world fell down around her. Then, even through her cataracts, bloodshot eyes, and the perfect storm, recognizing me… and possibly against all her instincts to the contrary, coming to me. Knowing that I was there, and that she was found, and that I was her safety.
I watched her, asleep and still drying, lying on her bed in the corner, and I no longer felt sick at all.
I had protected her from the storm, as she trusted I would.
***
“What is Da-da tryin’ to do?” repeated Liam.
“Daddy’s sad. Daddy’s sad because Charlie’s not here.”
“Where’s Charlie?”
“Charlie got sick. She had to go to the vet with Daddy, and then she had to go to sleep,” I said, fighting the rising lump in my throat.
“That’s Charlie.” Liam said. “She’s old dog. And she’s sick out there.”
“That’s right, buddy. She was sick out there.” I brought them both closer to me, and Liam nodded again.
“Charlie’s gone.”
I nodded too, no longer fighting the lump.
“Yes, Charlie’s gone.”
Our backyard wedding, four years ago today. Happy anniversary, Buhbee!
“What if, when I went downstairs to dry Charlie’s bed, I turned around to come back up, and I saw a rackbone-thin little ribby dog standing there, all quiet. Just staring at me, but half his face was gone? And what if he looked so real that I was all like, ‘Heeeeey boy.’”
“Okay.”
“And then, I’d suddenly notice that there was someone standing behind him… this silent man, just standing there. And even though he would be standing in the light, I still wouldn’t be able to see his face. He’d just be this dark, shadowy figure. Then suddenly, they’d both just be… gone.”
“That’s pretty specific for a “what if’.”
“Yeah. But what if that really happened? We’d have to move.”
“Oh, we’d move. Right now the ghosts are probably taking notes and saying, ‘That’s all we have to do to get them to leave? A skinny dog and a shadowy dude? Take the boys with you, but leave that baby.’”
“Buhbee! On TV… It’s a dog! And there’s a dark, shadowy dude behind him!’”
“That’s Russell Simmons, Honey.”
I feel compelled to point out that the pistachio nut is not the only ‘animated’ food Bill has felt the need to save lately. I found him in the kitchen a couple weeks back scrutinizing Cheetos before eating them. Some he popped into his mouth. Others, he smiled at and laid ever-so-gently into a plastic Gladware container.
“Hey, Buhbee! Don’t throw these away or eat them, OK?”
“Um, OK.”
*beaming* “I’m making a Cheeto-Alphabet!! See, this one is a ‘J’…and here’s a ‘Q’…”
I’m questioning Bill’s sincerity in his decluttering effort. A Cheeto-Alphabet?!?! C’MON!!! And, there they sit atop our refrigerator like little stale orange donuts.
The belly button. I have no excuse for that except that I couldn’t see the surface of the shelf that it was on because it was up too high. (Hey, Jill! That probably means you haven’t dusted up there since Sam’s button fell off circa December 2007, huh? You are correct.)
I was out running errands the other day, and I realized that I wasn’t wearing my seatbelt. I thought about it, but decided that was okay. I was just going to Jiffy Lube, and who gets into an accident just going to Jiffy Lube? I’ve never heard of anyone, and I’ve known dozens of people. None of the numerous accidents I was personally the cause of in my teenage years ever occurred while any of the litigants were enroute to Jiffy Lube. I wonder if there’s ever been a study on this phenomenon.
Still, putting on my belt is win-win. I should just do it. But then I’ll have to reach over and find it while driving, and is that really so safe?
A few blocks after this inner debate, in the middle lane, I came up on one of those temporary road signs, the kind that has its own tires and tells you in words made up of yellow lightbulbs when lanes are closed ahead. Today, this one was flashing a message that read simply:
SEATBELTS SAVE LIVES
Huh. It blinked this message several times as I passed it, and I glanced at the back of it in my rearview, reflecting on the weird timing of the thing. If I got into an accident now, that sign would be a pretty colorful detail I could add to the story I’d tell people about the moments leading up to the wrecking of my truck. Unless of course I couldn’t tell the story, because of the injuries I’d sustained due to the fact that I wasn’t wearing a SEATBELT, therefore not allowing mine to SAVE my LIFE. Nobody would even know, just me and the blinking yellow bulbs, who had tried to warn me, and whose warning I’d chosen to ignore. So maybe I’d better belt up, after all.
Because it was also kind of weird that it was in the middle lane, just sitting there, out of place and kind of obstructing traffic, a little. And if you were trying to turn into Kinkos, kind of obstructing traffic, a lot.
Maybe it was a sign… and not just an actual sign, in the literal sense. What if it had been placed there specifically for me? Yeah. From someone in the future who knew that I was on my way to an accident, and this was their attempt to help me out? This flashing roadsign was his one shot to let me know that SEATBELTS SAVE LIVES, and that I should definitely be giving mine its chance to step up and do that. What if, for some murky time-traveling-related reasons, he couldn’t communicate with me directly, or ironically, he was pressed for time, and this rolling bank sign was the only means he had to communicate to me the danger I was heading toward?
What if this well-intentioned… ‘Futureboy’ was sitting in front of a viewscreen hundreds of years from now, watching me ignore his sign. What if he was thumping his balled fists onto some crazy future table that I could never understand, and yelling “C’mon! Idiot! Buckle uuuuuup!”, and maybe even spraying a little spittle onto his screen. And if that was happening, then it was okay, because maybe in the future, there are little spittle-cleaning nanobots that spring to life, push off against the side of the screen like a bloom of rolling pinpoints, and like scores of microscopic figure skaters, clean off the foreign saliva. Tiny single-minded scrubbing bubbles.
But he wouldn’t even notice them, because he’s so used to cool future stuff like that… stuff that would give you or me a heart attack if we saw it. Maybe he wasn’t even looking at a viewscreen at all, but instead, had an old yellowed newspaper spread out in front of him, and he was waiting to see if the headline would change from “Local Man T-Boned and Killed by Meat Delivery Truck” to “Meat Delivery Truck Overturns, T-Bones Everywhere”.
Actually, that’s not too logical. I mean, if Futureboy were truly trying to save my life, and the flashing road sign were his only means of communication, wouldn’t it make more sense to spell out something like:
BUCKLE UP BILL
It’s shorter, more personal, and impossible to ignore. If I’d seen something like that flashing in amber yellow, I can guarantee you there would have been no inner dialogue… no debate. I’d have been fumbling with that belt so fast it would have looked like I was trying to put a fire out on my shoulder. But it didn’t say that. It only said:
SEATBELTS SAVE LIVES
So. Future-Bill-Saving-Boy scenario is probably not a reasonable assumption to make. Maybe it was just a coincidence. Or maaaaaaybe…. maybe it was placed there by, I don’t know, the state highway commission. Or some seatbelt-use advocacy group… something like that. Maybe they were just trying to get the message across that seatbelts save lives. And this was their way to tell people that.
Once, my Basset Hound Gordon ate not a seatbelt, but an entire bag of Pepperidge Farms Cinnamon Swirl Bread. It was New Year’s Eve, 1999 - a year before Jill and I met. While everyone else in the world was preoccupied with the Y2K bug and was nervously eyeballing the sky for falling planes, I was nervously eyeballing my beloved hound attempting to digest plastic. He was lying down, sitting up, and lying down again, unable to get comfortable, and drooling like a broken spigot.
Gordon had followed his sniffing nose into the kitchen and bellied-up to the counter, then gulped down that loaf like a snake swallowing an egg. He’d left no evidence that bag full of tasty bread had ever existed - not a twist-tie; not a raisin - just some slobber next to the sink, pointing toward his escape route like a mutely accusing finger. And it wasn’t just a single bag that went down Gordon, Pepperidge Farms likes to double-wrap their Swirl, with both a bag, and a cellophane inner wrapping.
Over the course of several days, and during several trips to the vet’s office, it became anchored in his stomach and nothing seemed to be able to dislodge it. Not even two tubes of the stuff my vet normally prescribed to grease up the inside of cats that needed to pass particularly hairy balls. One tube of that stuff will last your average cat about eight years, and on the vet’s orders, I wrung two entire tubes of it down Gordon’s throat in a single night.
The shit was rolling out of poor Gordon like oiled smoke, but no bag.
For one perfectly awful moment, I had the irrational and horrifying thought that it would be semi-plausible for me to just reach down into his gullet, with the warm, wet curtains of his throat gripping my forearm like a blood pressure cuff, grab the end of the goddamn bag, and give it a good yank. If I did it fast enough and got out of there, maybe things would be okay. I shuddered and quickly pushed that image from my mind.
He eventually passed it, not through his puffy, laugh-inducingly large dog anus (seriously, it looked like a puckered ditch), but through a 6-inch opening in his abdomen. They had put Gordon under, scoped him, and made the determination that it wasn’t going to come out any other way. They were going to have to cut it out of him, or he was going to die. So, over the howling protests of my checking account, off Gordon went, to be indignantly shaved and cut into, yet again.
They took him about thirty miles away to a place called simply “The Farm”. He made it through the surgery fine, and was in hound recovery for three days. They had visiting hours, so I went down to see the old boy. I took Charlie, my other Basset, with me. We went inside, and found Gordon lying on his side in a large, roomy wall-kennel on several clean, folded blankets. They opened his wire door, and he rose on wobbly feet and came out to us. Whoever had been on dog-shaving duty the evening before had either been a little unsure, or a lot overzealous. The bald patch on G’s stomach was so far-reaching and grand that the sides of it almost touched and overlapped up over his back. His newly-exposed skin was baby-rat pink and he had black patches that didn’t quite follow the patterns of black fur he had when not shaved. But Gordon didn’t follow the rules, not even the rules of nature.
I crouched, and he stopped walking when his nose bumped into me, like a blind cow against a barbed-wire fence. I noticed that pitifully, he was hooked up to an IV, which trailed from one bald leg, across the smooth concrete floor, and back into his kennel. On his stomach was a clean, straight incision, pinched and folded a little at the ends, and bristling with stitches that looked a chorus line of spider legs.
At this point, it all became too much for Charlie, and she began to honk.
If you’ve never heard a honking Basset Hound, then you can’t really appreciate what I was dealing with. She was honking and trembling and honking, and even the normally stoic Gordon perked up his ears and began looking around curiously. Some of the other post-op animals were also starting to find their feet inside their cages, and one of the techs quickly came over. I asked him if he could watch Gordon for a minute while I took Charlie outside.
When we got outdoors, she started to unclench, and the honking ticked back down and settled on kind of a yipping whine.
I put her back into my car, at the time a sweet 1987 powder-blue Chrysler LeBaron. It being early January, I knew there would be no danger in leaving her there while I went back inside to pet Gordon for a few minutes and see him back into his cage.
Characteristically, Gordon was facing in the wrong direction when I went back in, and he had never looked so much like a half-bald, swayback donkey to me as he did in that moment. I grabbed handfuls of his loose, Bassety rolls of extra skin, said my goodbyes for the day, and went back out to the car. When I opened the door, the first thing I noticed was that Charlie was now in the backseat, and staring at me, wide-eyed. The second thing I noticed was that she had shit copiously all over both the driver’s side seat and its unspooled seatbelt.
That was a seatbelt that wasn’t doing anyone any good.
So… Futureboy. If you’re poring over old blog entries from 2008, and you happen to come across this one, how about forgetting about the unsolicited public-service safety announcement? Give me something I can actually use. Like:
PUSH THE BREAD BACK FURTHER ON THE COUNTER, ASS
Sir,
We are now 3 weeks past the date by which you estimated that we should have received our “Bio Force TNT System AS SEEN ON TV“. This morning, I noticed that you are no longer a registered eBay user, and in reply to my earlier email demanding an immediate response, I received an automatically generated one that informed me that you are on an open-ended vacation, with no mention being made of a return date.
At best, this makes you a poor businessman, and at worst, a thief.
As I mentioned in my earlier correspondence, I have contacted my credit card company and initiated a fraud complaint. Your Paypal account has been frozen, and I am to immediately receive my funds back via the fraud protection that my credit card provides. I suspect your account was already frozen, as I am probably not the first to undertake this action if you are in fact absconding with your customers’ money.
If that is the case, then it is my sincere hope that you get caught, and someone with blunt, unkind fingers disembowels you by way of your rectum, then puckers your newly-outed innards with a good salting.
May the last thing you see be the crows pecking at your drying gutpile.
Good day.
Bill: “Do you hear that buzzing noise? I can’t figure out where it’s coming from.”
Jill: “I’ll tell you where it’s coming from. It’s coming from that motherfucking toy phone on Sam’s saucer. The batteries are dying.”
Bill: “That’s annoying. How do you even change them?”
Jill: “I don’t know.”
I was watching television recently, and Peter Walsh, organizational guru of “Clean Sweep” and “Oprah” fame, was on, breaking down a woman’s disorganized life like a shotgun, then holding up the pieces for her to see and explaining all the underlying reasons behind her disorganization. Explaining why her inability to prove the existence of a couch in her living room was really just a symptom of a much larger problem.
To the crying woman, sitting in a kitchen filled with boxes, he said, “you save things for one of two reasons - either a thing has sentimental value, and you keep it, or you think you’re going to need it someday, so you keep it”. He accentuated each point by jabbing the air with a potato masher. Or maybe it was a whisk. The specifics don’t really matter, because I’m paraphrasing anyway.
Preach it, Peter.
I silently appreciated his clear manner of illustrating each problem, and the insightful language he used to bring her to their solutions. He’s one-part closet organizer and two-parts psychologist. And he was peeling this woman like an onion. This silly, disorganized woman, who had so much crap in her house that she…
Suddenly, I had the feeling that I was not alone in the room; I had the feeling that someone was looking at me. This really shouldn’t have been that strange, as Jill was sitting on the couch directly to my left, and she was looking at me. I slowly turned towards her and met her gaze, which was unflinching, slightly accusatory, and firmly fixed upon me. It was one of those looks that could make you say at least three stupid things before she blinked. One of those looks that was saying that Peter was right, and that if he were here, she would totally tell him that I keep a can of egg nog in the basement that I’ve been saving since 1993. A look that said that the woman in the kitchen was actually the man on the couch, sitting next to her, blinking and trying not to say stupid things.
I had no defense, so I simply smiled at her.
There was no denying it, because I do have a can of egg nog in the basement that’s a teenager. In fact, even as correct and true as Peter’s assessment was as to why we save things, the nog doesn’t really fall into either of his two categories. I couldn’t tell you exactly when or where I got that can of egg nog. One day, I just noticed it, and its origins were no more than the faint memory of a dim recollection.
When I was a kid, I remember watching an interview with a guy who’d lost several hundred pounds on an ‘all liquid’ diet. For months, he’d eaten nothing solid, and instead drank only shakes or a thin broth.
“So for seven months, you ate absolutely nothing?” asked the incredulous interviewer.
“Well, there was one time, I realized that I had a salty taste in my mouth, so I think I might have eaten some crackers. But I don’t remember doing it,” the man had answered.
And that’s the nog: a salty taste in my memory that one day left me standing in my kitchen, wondering why I was holding a can of egg nog that was so far past its expiration date. Maybe I’d wanted to save it because it was so old when I first became aware of it. But in any case, it was unassociated with any good times or special memories, so sentimentality is out.
That leaves practicality. Will I ever need it… this antiquated nog? I don’t think so. If I ever did open it, I’m pretty sure it would softly hiss, then slide slowly out like white cranberry jelly, still holding the shape of the inside of the can even as it plopped out wetly onto the countertop.
Each time I find it again, I wonder what I’ll do with it. The last four or five times I’ve come across it, the best reason I can come up with to keep it is that one day, one of my great-grand children could take it onto whatever passes for the 2099 versions of Jay Leno or Regis, and produce it with a flourish to the amazement and delight of a post-apocalyptic audience, sitting attentively around their piles of burning tires. And as far as reasons to keep something go, that one shouldn’t really count.
But I save many, many things, and my reasons for doing so aren’t always valid. At least not to anyone who doesn’t have to wait for their dinner to get pushed into their cell at the end of a broomstick.
A small sampling of the things I’ve saved that defy convention, logic, decorum, and at least three laws regarding the disposal of hazardous biowaste are:
These are all posts for a different day… each of them, and more.
For years, I saved cups beneath my desk at work. My best reason for keeping them was that one day, I was going to make something… like a suit, maybe. A cup suit. I envisioned myself marching into some future Halloween party like the Michelin Man, if the Michelin Man were made of red soda cups. Everyone would turn towards the door, and I’d just be standing there - a giant pile of cups with eyeholes - my hands on my hips, not that you could tell. No one would say a word. Shocked, someone would drop a cup of something, and I’d pluck a new one from myself like some strange tree picking its own fruit, and say, “Need a new cup?”
And everyone would start clapping, and someone would shake my hand and pat me on the back of the cups and say, “It was so worth it, man, saving all those cups!”
But that never happened. Halloweens came, and Halloweens went, and the closest I ever came to using those cups for anything was that one year I went as a garbage bag filled with various things, and cups were among them. Oh, and I taped receipts to my face. And when that party was over, I gingerly removed all the cups, restacked them, and brought them back to my desk for further saving.
Until one day, I decided that I needed to lose even more weight than Liquid Diet himself, and I threw them away. I documented it here, and that made it easier. Suddenly, I realized that I could do away with a great many things in the same manner. I admitted to myself that I would never use these items for any giant, complex reasons or to moderately impress future generations of talk show audiences, even twice removed.
So I’m going to purge our lives of these things, and tell you about it here, whether anyone cares or not.
Documenting these things and posting them here will be my new reason for saving these items. Except that instead of saving them just to save them, I’ll be saving them to get rid of them, the latter of which is what you have to do to get rid of things, by definition. But I’ll still have saved them, after a fashion, as I can always come here to look at them.
And their being here won’t interfere with Jill’s ability to walk across a room, open a closet, or make her all mad and… rational whenever she opens the downstairs fridge.
And maybe the next time Peter Walsh says something insightful, she won’t stare at me. But if she does, it will be with that ‘I-love-my-man’ look, and we can raise our cups in a toast to self-awareness, and a willingness to cut the bonds of sentimentality, unrealized practicality, and foolish pursuits.
And when we do, it will be with regular cups that we may or may not throw away, because we could totally keep them or we could totally throw them away; we aren’t bound to them by some twisted and misplaced sense of nostaglia or purpose, and therefore don’t really need to save them.
Unless Jill wants to.
I don’t remember my mom taping this to the fridge.
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