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The Reality of Free Stuff

Michael Gigandet

    5:00 A.M. The Day After
    They say the best cup of coffee you will ever have is the first one in the dark of early morning when everyone’s asleep, and I believe them. Sitting here at my kitchen table I can drag that cup of coffee out for an hour easy. To do that though, I have to sit and think a lot between sips. Since Em died two years ago and the kids left home, I have lots to think about. Right now, the subject is shampoos and soaps.
    After I got rid of Em’s things and let the kids pick over the furniture, I thought my house would look empty, but when you’ve lived in a place with four other people for 35 years, raised your family there, the place will always be full, a bustling downtown city sidewalk of memories. I don’t believe in ghosts, but I sure believe in the power of memory, that conflagration of dead occasions, conversations and impressions roaring up in your brain when you aren’t expecting them. They surprise you around a corner or when you open a door or when you are just sitting at your kitchen table wondering if today is trash day. You learn to move with the memories when the traffic allows, stopping until the memory passes by, ignoring that one, honking the horn in your head at the ones you want to go away, your brain shouting: Stop! Stop It!
    I’m not kicking about it; I’d sell the farm and move if it bothered me. I am just recognizing the fact.
    This morning, it’s shampoo and soap, and I’m not ready to honk the horn yet.
    Before I retired, back when I was travelling around the southeast trying lawsuits, I stayed in a lot of hotels. I carried my own toiletries so I gathered the complimentary, miniature bottles of lotion and mouthwash, soaps and shampoos from my hotel rooms and brought them home to my daughter. I told her they were “your very own cosmetics.”
    She took them to her bedroom to be examined and inventoried. Sometimes I saw the bottles lined up on a dressing table, maybe by size or color, green body wash, creamy pink lotion, blue shampoo. They never appeared in her bathroom, so I don’t think she used them. They were too nice for that. Em had a different reaction. “More bottles?”, but it really wasn’t a question.
    One day, those bottles disappeared. Maybe Em threw them out. In time they were forgotten. I remembered them today, the day after nothing mattered anymore.
    6:15 A.M. The Birds Arrive
    The second best cup of coffee happens as the sun is coming up and you stare out the bay window, watching the birds arrive to empty feeders. By that time, I’ve let my body collapse like it melted, settled down and lost its creases and corners, my edges going one at a time.
    When you are retired and the only one left to live in a two story, farm house one half mile from your nearest neighbor you can do pretty much whatever you want—sit, think about things that don’t matter to anyone but yourself, neglect the birds and watch them worry over an empty feeder. Someday I am going to remember which birds show up first.
    Why haven’t those birds figure it out yet? Is this their way to reprove me for my neglect? I am clearly visible to them there through the bay window.
    Some time ago, a smart person with nothing else to do, theorized that the world may have just sprung into being moments before, and the Past was not real at all, just memories created in your brain to give perspective to the present.
    If they were right, then what happened did not really happen so you don’t need to feel bad about it all. Maybe the people you remember aren’t even real.
    But then there’s those birdfeeders...there’s the wrinkle isn’t it? The birds know that feed has been there. Now it’s not there, but it was. So is the past real or are the birds not real too?
    Were the bottles of soap real? I could see them clearly on my daughter’s dressing table. They still had to be in the house. She would not have taken them with her when she left home for college and the job up North. And, that daughter was like me, she would not have thrown them out either.
    Here’s a fact: No matter how long you sit, or how tired you are, or how determined you are to do nothing and sit at your kitchen table, your forearms sticking to the surface, you are going to stand up eventually and you are going to remove yourself from where you are to someplace else. I removed myself to my daughter’s room or towards it anyway.
    7:00 a.m. Standing At The Stairs
    This is a big house, plenty of room for me to wander—four bedrooms, dining and living rooms, a den the size of Denmark. I even have a two-story library and home office.
    My daughter’s room is on the second floor. At the foot of the stairs I decided to take another activity break. It wasn’t the act of climbing the stairs. (Although I am in good physical condition for my age, this is the time in life when climbing stairs gets your attention.) I just felt like standing there with my hand on the newel. Like I said, when you live alone you can do whatever you want.
    Sometimes I stopped there when I was trying to decide where I was going to take an afternoon nap. Like Goldilocks, I had my choice of beds. I made my decision based on which kid I was thinking about at that moment.
    After our kids left home, Em decorated every single bed with a pile of frilly, decorative pillows, not just the guest bedroom or our bed. When I wanted to take a nap I had to dig down through them to find the bed. Afterwards, I had to put them back, but my brain insisted that they be placed in the same position as I found them; it was a chore. I also noticed that there was not a chair in the house without a couple of pillows in it.
    One day, after Em was gone, I got rid of them, drove my pick-up truck near the back door and tossed every pillow in the house out the door and into the truck like fat Frisbees until it was filled. I did not even tie them down; I just drove slowly to Goodwill.
    “You must like pillows,” Jerry, the man with the withered arm who collects your things at the drop-off doors, said.
    “I love them,” I said. “That’s why I want to share them with you.” I wasn’t being sarcastic; I was being a smart ass. There’s a difference.
    7:10 a.m. Ground Zero
    I stopped in traffic again at my daughter’s bedroom door and leaned into the frame.
    My children never really left home I guess; they just did not come back. They left their rooms just like they did when they went off to college. Movie and sports posters on the walls, the memorabilia of their high school social lives scattered along the shelves, collectible dolls and stuffed animals on the girls’ beds, a flat basketball in the corner.
    Maybe they wanted the assurance that wherever they went they had a permanent home. Em and I never planned on moving from the farm.
    I suppose that was reassuring to me too. When my daughter went off to college and I missed her, I would stand at her door like this until my balance returned. When she came to visit she always slept there. Maybe the posters of Rhett Butler and Scarlett O’Hara and the carnival and concert souvenirs on the pin board, the trinkets of remembrance, maybe they were rejuvenating to her, restorative.
    Em’s death had been hard on her, and she flew in from up north and spent several days with me, mostly in her bedroom with the door closed. At night I heard her crying, and when I knocked on her door, she stopped and I went away.
    My daughter had a lot of junk. She was like me that way.
    It was a constant source of irritation to Em.
    “What you going to do with all of that stuff when you die?” Em would ask me, and since this was more of an accusation than a question, I let it slide, said nothing. If you think about it, “nothing” is the answer because I’d be dead, inert.
    Em often complained it would take her years to clean out my things when I died. “I’ll be one of those old women who show up at Goodwill with a trunk full of her dead husband’s folded clothes.”
    I do have this thing about keeping any possession which might turn out to be useful someday. I not only keep them, I acquire them.
    Em never had to concern herself with my accumulations. Her cancer saw to that.
    It did not take me long to give away her things, and she had a lot too. I gave her clothes and shoes to her sister. I donated her car to a charity, and I told the kids to come and take anything else they wanted from our house as remembrances of her. Living out of state, they could not take much on the few visits they made after the funeral. Everything else went to Goodwill.
    “You’re not selling the farm are you daddy?” my daughter asked on the telephone from a long way away. Had her brother asked her to call me?
    No, I enjoyed my privacy too much to do that. Besides, with development from Nashville surrounding and bypassing the place its value continued to skyrocket. Best to wait.
    For a few weeks, Em disappeared in phases.
    I can’t say why the children disappeared.
    At least Biff in “Death of a Salesman” could point to his father’s adultery as an excuse for his loss of interest in life. I don’t think any of the kids could point to a particular family crisis and say “That’s why I left home and rarely returned.”
    7:25 A.M. Touching Things Makes Them Real
    My daughter’s bookshelves, like mine, were lined and stacked with books. No real book lover ever gets rid of any book he acquires. My daughter still had her children’s books, Marvelous Millie, a children’s version of Little Women and Mary Poppins, some pop-up books. I made a quick mental inventory, running my fingers over the spines of the books.
    That’s something else she got from me. Thankfully, my home office stretched over half of the second floor of our farm house, and I lined it with bookshelves. When I was practicing law, I’d prepared for my trials there in the cigar smoke and among my books which I’d started acquiring in 12^th grade. My first acquisition was a set of out-of-date encyclopedias from the 1950s which I bought for $5 from a thrift store. I still have them.
    Early on, I collected books autographed by the author, and then I began buying any book the do-gooders and the perpetually offended threatened to ban or censor. (When I got older, I began buying those targeted books when I was giving someone a gift.) I now had a couple of thousand books tucked into shelves along every wall. You know you have a lot of books when you begin inserting them flat on top of the other books on your shelves.
    I’d read most of them. I pull out and lay down on their spine those books I am planning to read in the next six months. Sticking them out like that motivates me to read them so I can turn them upright again.
    In time my books will end up in the used book section at Goodwill or drying out in the corners of musty antique stores until some teenage version of me finds them and takes them home. I pasted a name plate inside the front cover of every book, so somebody 50 years from now will see it and say: “This is the guy who owned this book. Whatever happened to him?” They may not think about it long, but they are going to know that I lived. (That nameplate is not a creation of memory; somebody stuck it there.)
    8:10 A.M. Real Words From The Past
    In a box under my daughter’s bed I found the weekly letters I’d written her over the years. I ran my thumb over them, fluttering them like they were playing cards. They made no noise, so I did it again but harder.
    They weren’t letters at all; they were holiday and event cards I’d gotten from charitable organizations as gifts when they solicited for donations. I must have been on the mailing list of every charity in the U.S. because Em and I had boxes of them—cards for every occasion, birthdays, Christmas, sick people, congratulations. I would pull out those Christmas cards which avoided using the word “Christmas”, opting instead for the phrase “Happy Holidays” or “Seasons Greetings.” I used those Christmas-less cards as stationery for my weekly letters to my children in their own college and professional travels. My children were probably the only people in the country getting mail in April with Santas, snowmen in top hats and candy canes on them. In this small way, I refused to cooperate with the politically correct, a healthy practice for any free thinking citizen who distrusts authority and despises the self appointed bullies of our moral well being.
    Years of letters, forgotten words recording forgotten things—I spent more time than was good for me reading and remembering. All this was real. Here’s the proof.
    9:05 A.M. Progress
    “You are turning into a hoarder,” Em told me once.
    “I’m just thinking of the kids,” I said. “Think of the fun they will have in that hot, dusty attic. It will be like Christmas morning.”
    You are not really a hoarder if you give away the stuff you are supposedly hoarding. Hoarders are people who keep things in a clutter, even trash. They stack newspapers and magazines along the walls from floor to ceiling, at least in the beginning of their hoarding careers. Then they fill in the remaining space with plastic bags of trash and...clutter. They travel through it like they are walking through a snow drift without snow shoes.
    Hoarders are the people who die in that clutter somewhere and have to be located by the authorities because no one knows they are in there. They often get on the news or are featured in some cable television show which probably paid their relatives to film the place, a kind of vengeful karmic event for their survivors to offset the expense of having to clean up that mess after the hoarder dies.
    I’m not that way at all. My house is tidy, everything in its place. Before I go to bed at night I perform a walk-through and inspect to make sure everything is in its place. This is easy to do now that I am retired and Em is gone. I did not get sloppier in widowhood; my house got tidier with only me in it.
    My daughter’s closet was neat and full of clothes.
    I heard a preacher say once that you should donate to charity the clothes you have not worn in a year. Not me, I donate mine if I have not worn them in 10 years.
    “I might decide to start wearing these again,” I’d say to Em while holding up a pair of 34-inch waist jeans from younger days.
    I ran my fingertips over my daughter’s dresses like I was counting them—blue, black, red, dresses with patterns, frilly shoulders, padded shoulders, all on hangers tucked in place. Since she lived up north why would these dresses be here? Shouldn’t she have them with her? Maybe these were from her old life and not appropriate in her new life as a lawyer up north. Did she expect them to come back in style?
    With a closed casket you don’t have to worry about finding a suitable set of clothes. They don’t even ask you. I’m not sure what they do, but whatever they do, they do it and don’t bother you with it. You just have to show up when you’re supposed to.
    I reached up and took down the boxes in the top of the closet, some books and a movie star scrapbook, a couple of photograph albums, some sweaters.
    I put everything back just the way I found it. When the time was right, I’d take her clothes to Goodwill. Just stuff them into the trunk of my car and let Jerry drag them inside like an animal dragging something dead into its cave.
    9:40 A.M. I’m Done For The Day
    There were more clothes in her chest of drawers. I found what I was looking for there in a bottom drawer—a hatbox full of miniature bottles of lotions and soaps, green, blue and pink, like a chest of precious jewels.
    I ran my fingertips through them to hear them clatter. I held the box up to my face and breathed in the soapy scents.
    And it was all real.
    I lay down on her bed with the hatbox beside me. I didn’t even take my shoes off. That’s the nice thing about living alone; you can do whatever you want.

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