INSANITY
When my old men’s group met this morning I mentioned that I had taken the very first step to unloading the storage locker that I have rented for at least 20 years for $65 a month. It was $65 a month 20 years ago and has stayed the same in spite of inflation. 20 years at $65 a month is $15,600. That is 1/4 of the price I paid for my house when I moved in in 1990. The stuff that is in there is slowly disintegrating and is probably not worth $500.
I have no excuse. Paying so long for this locker is complete insanity. No wonder they didn’t raise the price, it would have reminded me how much I was paying and jolted me enough to get me to clear it out.
In fact, when I went over to check on the locker I couldn’t remember which one was mine so that I couldn’t even try my basket full of keys to see which one would let me open the lock. None of them would it turned out, the key was lost. On the way to the locker Mr. Davidson, who owns the lockers and is a direct descendent of the Davidsons who first settled the Swannanoa Valley about the time of the revolutionary war told me his ancestors story and described the place where a Davidson ancestor had been lured to the top of Jones Mountain, above my house, and scalped. Mr. Davidson still owns the large plot land that one of the original Davidsons, there were three families, owned. It was only later that I began to consider how any of the Davidsons could own plots of land. They certainly didn’t buy them from the Native Americans whose hunting area it had always been. Maybe that is why he got scalped.
Mr. Davidson had an electric rotating saw that cut my lock. But then it turned out that the spring inside the locker door was broken and he couldn’t lift the door. It would have to be repaired. Obviously it has been a long time since I had been in there, paying $65 a month all along.
So that is the first step in clearing the locker. I know that in the back of my locker are milk boxes filled with books, 6 milk boxes high, 8 milk boxes wide, 5 milk boxes deep, 240 boxes in all, are filled with books, books I haven’t been able to read for 20 years but couldn’t part with.
There are also a huge number of other miscellaneous things in the locker, a good number of them objects that I found at the Dreamland Drive In flea market in the ten years or so I was addicted to scouring the flea market three times a week, Friday, Saturday, Sunday at 6 in the monring.
Finally the Dreamland Drive In property became a giant Lowes that I refused to set foot in for years because I resented Lowes so much for depriving me of the flea market. But luckily, very luckily, about that time I discovered digital photography and from then on if I see something that touches me anywhere I take a photo of it. And that ended my lust for owning beautiful things. A photograph was enough. I shifted from one addiction to another.
But I still had a carport and locker full of flea market finds which I have slowly been ridding myself over the years. And now my children, afraid I will drop dead and leave them with a house and locker overflowing with stuff to get rid of are pushing me to clear the locker and the carport. I feel that I have the burden of Sisyphus ahead of me, Sisyphus who had the task of cleaning a dung filled Augean stable, if I remember rightly.
And of course I am not the only one. All five of us old guys sitting around the table at McDonalds drinking coffee have the same problem, a household of stuff to clear out. One, Sheldon Neuringer, has just moved to Highland Farms Retirement Community after a year of clearing his own Augean stable, the home he and Rochelle lived in for years. He and everyone had advice for me. But I don’t want advice. What I need is the will to finally start parting with the lifetime of accumulation. And cutting the lock on the locker was the first small step.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 