Hello, Dear Readers. It’s good to see you.
This past week, I’ve been thinking a lot about mementos. No, not Mentos. Those are little mint things. I’m talking about mementos—all those various little souvenirs of experience that pile up over the years. It’s stuff like that t-shirt you got at the last Stones concert or that trophy you won in the local bowling tournament or that glass eye you got after your last bar fight. It’s all the stuff that reminds you of where you’ve been and what you’ve done.
Now, I’m a very sentimental person, so mementos mean a lot to me. In fact, my friends often joke that the best way to get revenge on me is to give me an ugly shirt as a present. I’ll never wear it, but I’ll never have the heart to throw it out. I’ll be stuck with it until the end of time. I’m one for keeping keepsakes, no matter how much I don’t like them.
I’m one of those people who has never thrown away a personal letter or card. I’ve taken a clipboard from every company I’ve ever worked for just for the memories. I’ve even been known to print out CT scans of my kidneys and hang them on my fridge. I’m all about creating evidence of having had a life, and that’s what mementos do. They’re tangible proof of having been there and done that.
In a way, though, some of the biggest successes I’ve had in life have left behind such strange souvenirs that I really have no idea how to deal with them. I mean, a couple of weeks ago, I passed a big, important exam at school, and I walked away with pretty much nothing to show for it. Well, I did get a piece of paper saying that I had convinced four professors that I actually knew what I was talking about, but I had to turn it in at school the next day. So, I’d spent months studying for this test, and as it got closer and closer, I had pushed everything else in my life aside to get ready for it. And in end, the only souvenir I got from that whole experience was an incredibly messy apartment. I got a stack of unopened mail that took up most of the coffee table, a fridge full of mostly rotten food, and a pile of laundry that was actually taller than I am. So, I had to decide if I was going to clean the place up or just cover everything with a coat of polyurethane and enshrine it for all time.
When you really stop to think about it, though, there’s really something sort of fascinating about having to deal with a mess. Probably one of my earliest memories of having to deal with one was when I first started mowing the lawn. Of course, I didn’t start out at lawn mowing daughter status. In my family, all three of us kids started out on clipping duty. We divided up all the edges of the lawn that my dad couldn’t get close enough to with the mower, and then we went around on our hands and knees with hand clippers and clipped the grass.
I hated that job. First of all, it took forever, and it seemed like it was always at least 110 degrees outside every Sunday when my dad wanted to do yard work. And I always seemed to end up with the crappy green pair of clippers that I swear to God had been manufactured sometime around World War I and hadn’t been sharpened since the day they rolled out of the factory.
On top of that, I’m allergic to grass, so I’d never get more than a few minutes into the job before my eyes would tear up, my nose would start running, and I’d break out in an itchy rash. But then again, pretty much everyone in my family had hay fever, and everyone was suffering. So you could swell up like a big, itchy, teary-eyed tick, and you still weren’t going to get out of doing your clipping.
But more than just the allergy stuff, I hated clipping because there were bugs. There weren’t a lot of bugs, of course. I mean, we lived in Colorado, not Georgia. But most of the clipping was around my mom’s gardens, so there were always bees and wasps and caterpillars and spiders, and I secretly believed that there were probably poisonous snakes and plague-ridden rats hiding out in the flowers, too. The worst area was the tomato plants. There was just no telling what you might find over there. As far as I was concerned, that whole garden was like one big pit of primordial ooze capable of spontaneously generating the most heinous insect life any kid could imagine. I’d make almost any deal with little sister to get out of working over there, and she knew it.
My dad was pretty picky about the clipping, too. You had to clip at the same height that the rest of the grass would eventually be cut at, and if you did a shoddy job, he’d make you go back and do it again. It’s not that he was really such a maniac about the lawn, though. After all, this was the suburbs back in the early 1970s, long before everyone just hired a lawn care company to come and deal with the grass. This was back in a time when parents still realized that their children were an invaluable source of free labor, and no kid in my neighborhood under the age of 15 had ever seriously uttered the word “no” to either of their parents. But beyond all that, lawn care was a competition sport with the fathers in my neighborhood. It was what they did before mixed martial arts came along. So, you weren’t just clipping the grass. You were part of a team. You were fighting for your family’s honor and an entire week of bragging rights.
Anyway, once you got to a certain age in my family, you were promoted to lawn mower duty. My older sister got that job first, but I don’t think she liked it that much because it took longer to mow than it did to clip. And she was all about spending the least amount of time possible teasing the Great God of the Heat Stroke. So, one summer when I was about 12, my sister stepped down, and I was magically lifted out of the ranks of the grubby-faced, swollen-eyed clippers and elevated to the status of Assistant Deputy Chief Lawn Mowing Daughter. It was one of the proudest days of my life. And it’s also when I got my first taste of what dealing with a mess is like.
Back in those days, you see, no one had a mulching mower. So, we collected all the grass in three huge burlap sacks. Of course, if my dad just put the grass bags out for the garbage pickup, then they’d throw his bags away, too. And I think he’d had those bags since about 1960, so he wasn’t about to give them up. He was really very attached to those grass bags, and in a way, it was kind of oddly touching. But it also meant that all that grass had to be disposed of some other way.
So, along about five o’clock on Sunday evenings when all the neighborhood parents were having some iced tea on the back patio and all the kids were watching Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom on TV, my dad let me know that we were going to dump the grass. Then he’d give my mom the high sign, grab his car keys, and from there, the race was on. The race against what, I don’t know. But it always seemed like we were racing against something. We’d run out and toss the grass bags into the back of the station wagon and then go speeding out of the neighborhood as fast as we could without attracting any undue attention. The trick was to get out of the our subdivision and over by the railroad tracks as quickly as possible. From there, we’d drive several miles out into an area of overgrown fields, and after glancing nervously around several times to make sure no one saw us, my dad would peel screeching off the road. Then we’d jump out of the car and empty the grass bags as fast as we could.
It was all pretty routine, but the way my dad acted about it, you’d have thought we were dumping toxic waste or disposing of a body. It was like we were on a mission for the CIA, and I was always sort of surprised that he didn’t insist we both wear ski masks. I mean, it was a positively clandestine operation, and to this day, I have no idea why. Nonetheless, as soon as the grass was dumped, we peeled out and put some serious distance between us and that abandoned mess. When we got home, my mom would just say, “Did you get it taken care of?” and my dad would nod silently. After that, no one ever mentioned it…until, of course, the next week when we had to do it all over again.
So, what I know about mess management, I learned from my father. Basically, you dump your mess on somebody else’s property and hope like hell that no one saw you do it. That’s the suburban approach to dealing with chaos. And from the time I’ve spent living in big cities, I think it’s a big part of the urban strategy, too. The only difference is that the suburban style is a “dump and drive” kind of thing while the urban one is more of a “dump and run.” And that makes sense. A lot of people in big cities don’t have cars, and if they do, they’re parked somewhere in a garage six miles away. You have to take a cab to get there. It’s not exactly convenient.
In a big city, you can’t really abandon your mess any father away than you’re willing to carry it, but the interesting thing about the dump and run strategy is that it ends up requiring a level of secrecy that even a cagey guy like my dad would have a hard time with. I mean, if you dump an old couch half a block from where you live, you can’t really get that far away from it. You can’t pretend that you don’t know that couch. But you have to. Otherwise, everyone will know that you dumped it out there, and then it’s only a matter of time until some angry neighborhood improvement people show up at your door demanding that you go get your car from the garage on the other side of town, pick up that couch, and go abandon it somewhere out in the suburbs.
And it’s not like you can avoid the couch, either. If you only got half a block away from where you live before your trusty helper said, “I’m not carryin’ this piece of crap one step farther” and just dropped it, you’re going to have to pass by it at some point. And that’s when things get hard. You can’t just pretend you don’t see the couch because then everyone will know you dumped it there. I mean, it’s just suspicious to act like you don’t see a couch sitting right there. And people in big cities aren’t dumb. They catch on to stuff like that. But then again, you can’t just stop and stare at it. You can’t stand there in a fog of nostalgia over all the great times you had on that couch. That’s a dead giveaway that you’re somehow connected to it. Or it’s a dead giveaway that there’s something really wrong with you. Either way, somebody is going to a call a cop, and you’re going to be sorry.
So, the trick is to be able to walk past the couch and notice it while saying to yourself, “I don’t know that couch, I’ve never seen that couch before,” over and over and over again. Just don’t say it out loud. And don’t linger. Keep moving at a normal pace. And try to appear ever so slightly irritated that someone had the nerve to abandon a couch on your block. That’s the key. In an urban post-dump situation, it’s all about attitude.
Of course, the urban dump and run strategy isn’t much use to me with my current mess. I mean, I live in a nice neighborhood apartment complex. I know most of my neighbors, and at least some of them have been in my apartment. They’ve seen my stuff. So, if I started dumping it on the sidewalk outside, they’d probably think I was being robbed. And worse, they’d think that all I owned was really crappy stuff. And even worst still, they’d bring it all back. They’d carry it up three flights of stairs and then call the cops to report the crime.
So, I’d come home one night to find all my junk piled outside my door and some stone-faced police officer ready to take my statement and get a dragnet going. And then I’d just crack under the pressure. I’d not only admit to having dumped my own stuff, I’d own up to every bad thing I’d ever done in my whole life. Then I’d start confessing to bad stuff I just thought about doing. Eventually, I’d start claiming responsibility for things I didn’t even have anything to do with. By the end of it all, I would’ve copped to the Kennedy assassination. It would be a nightmare.
Anyway, the urban approach to dealing with my apartment was pretty much out of the question. So, I thought maybe I’d look to my sisters for a little advice. But both of my sisters live in rural areas, and mess management in those places is a whole other thing. Well, actually, it’s more of a no-thing than an other thing. People in rural areas don’t notice everything they own; they just pay attention to the stuff they’re using. People in the country don’t deal with messes; they just ignore them.
I mean, I could go to my little sister’s ranch, and there could be 10,000 Barbie doll heads laying in a heap in one of the pastures, and if I pointed it out and asked, “What’s that?” I can almost guarantee that the first words out of my sister’s mouth would be “What’s what?” “That big pile of Barbie doll heads.” “What big pile of Barbie doll heads?” Then she’d stop and look over for a minute and just say, “Oh, those. I don’t know. They were here when we bought the place.” And that’s the rural mess management approach. If you’re not using something, then it just doesn’t exist. It doesn’t matter where it came from. If you can’t use it and your cows aren’t choking on it, then it’s invisible.
The same thing even goes for bigger things like entire buildings. My older sister’s place is in the mountains, and it’s got a lot of little weird old wooden buildings on it. I was out visiting her recently and pointed to one and asked, “What’s that?” and she said, “What’s what?” (I know, typical. I really should’ve seen that coming). “That building over there.” “Oh, it’s a smoke house.” “When was it built?” “I don’t know. It was here when we bought the place.” “What’s in it?” “Nothing.” “Do you use it?” “No.” And that was the end of that. I still don’t know how it happened, but that smokehouse just disappeared right before our very eyes. We weren’t using that. So it didn’t exist. It was like it had phased right out of our space-time continuum. I remember rubbing my eyes several times, but it was too late. I couldn’t see it, either. I’d already gone rural.
By the time I’d taken the long flight back from my sister’s house, though, I’d returned to my normal self. And it’s kind of too bad because when I walked back into my place, all I saw was the messiness. But I also had an amazing realization: for most of my life, I’ve been trying to use the rural mess management approach. And it’s never worked, mostly because I’ve never actually lived in a rural area. After all, if there’s one thing you absolutely have to have to use the rural approach to messiness, it’s a whole lot of “rurality.” As a strategy for a one-bedroom apartment, it just isn’t that good a plan. I mean, I really couldn’t ignore 10,000 Barbie doll heads piled on my bed no matter how hard I tried (and I don’t think I could push the creepiness factor of something like that aside for more than about 10 seconds). And I couldn’t just disregard an old smokehouse in the middle of my living room even if it had been there when I rented the place. It would block my view of the TV too much.
So, I finally came face-to-face with the fact that I couldn’t just dump the mess, and I couldn’t just ignore it. The last resort of mess management was the only option I really had: I was going to have to bite the bullet and clean my apartment up myself. I was going to have to do my laundry and clean out the fridge and deal with all the mail. I’d be erasing my big souvenir of having passed my big test, but then again, I figured I could always just go to school and ask them to make me a copy of the form that says I passed. I mean, I suppose there’s something to be said for that kind of simple problem-solving. And ultimately, too, I think a xerox copy is going to be easier to hang on my fridge than ten pounds of unopened mail, a rotten avocado, and a dirty shirt would be. If nothing else, it’ll smell better.
These days, I try to work on my apartment whenever I can, and it’s slowly coming along little by little. Every time I create a new oasis of clean, I get a little glimmer of hope, and I take a moment to stop and give myself a pat on the back for all the hard work I’ve done. After all, when you rise to the challenge of cleaning up your own mess, it’s an accomplishment. It makes you feel good about yourself. Still, I have to admit that every now and then, I think back to my days as Assistant Deputy Chief Lawn Mowing Daughter, and I get a little teary-eyed, probably for several different reasons. But more than anything else, those memories remind me that no matter where I go or what I do or how big of a mess I make, in my heart-of-hearts and soul-of-souls, I’m always just going to be a kid from the suburbs. There’s always going to be some part of me that wants to abandon that mess in someone else’s apartment. And there’s always going to be an even bigger part of me that just really, really wishes my dad would show up with his station wagon, a few hundred burlap bags…and a couple of ski masks.
Philosophy for a hungry planet.
Enjoy.
© R. Rissler, 2011. All rights reserved.
