Category: Poetry

Random Semicoherent Thoughts – Volume 29

NPR had a blurb today regarding a handwritten note by Albert Einstein that was selling for $1.6 million. Apparently, it was life advice written to a Japanese bellhop when he refused to take a tip from Einstein. As Einstein himself predicted, it ended up being worth a lot of money.

My father remarried fairly soon after my mother died. My stepmother was preparing to move into the house and getting rid of things that weren’t needed. She ran across a box of napkins that had my mother and father’s name printed on them and placed them in the pile to be discarded. She meant no harm, but it felt wrong to me. When she wasn’t looking, I took them and hid them in my dresser drawer where I kept most things of sentimental value. Years later, I finally convinced myself I no longer needed them.

Ms. Boss, the Bosslets, and myself moved over 900 miles to our current location about five years ago. Preparation for the move involved multiple trips to the transfer station where we literally deposited tons of items in the landfill (for the record, this particular exploit is starting to fade, but the figure of two tons sticks out as being the overall amount). Trophies, magazines, blankets, clothes, yard tools, there wasn’t a single category of household item that was omitted from the purge. It was tremendously liberating. We’ve threatened to do it again.

I just contemplated the question of what single item I would save if I had a house fire. I immediately thought wedding ring, but that’s almost too easy – it’s always on my finger, if it’s safe, I’m safe.

The lengths to which Amazon will go to bring stuff to your house is just staggering if you sit there and think about it for a bit.

I first rented an apartment the summer between my sophomore and junior years in college. My grandfather and I moved me on a day I had a 102-degree fever into a place that didn’t have the electric turned on yet. I had a bed, a dresser, a couch, a picnic table with benches that doubled as a coffee table, a few pots and pans, and very little else. I spent the summer by myself working, sleeping, playing solitaire with actual cards, riding my bike all over the place, and eating out of pots and pans. It was simple. Sometimes I miss simple.

The day we moved to our current town, I navigated the Ryder truck that held everything we owned through the mountains on a busy interstate in a hellacious storm. I don’t know that I’ve ever felt so close to disaster in my entire life.

I’m in the middle of a project where we have over $4 million worth of equipment stored in a warehouse. Bales and bales of shredded cardboard sit not more than twenty feet away one day only to replaced by another a day or two later. Sitting right behind both of them are at least fifty vending machines from a bankrupt company that have been stored there at least five years if the papers hanging on them can be believed. In a climate-controlled facility where square-footage is likely the same rate for everyone, it is interesting to contemplate the value of what is being stored and why the owners spend money to do so.