Cool, Calm & Contentious - Merrill Markoe [65]
Unbeknownst to me, I had now joined the ranks of the “planning to stand on the roof with a hose” faction of my neighborhood. Our plan, if you could possibly call it that, was to postpone an evacuation while we kept the fire at bay by dampening our wood-intensive structures. But because that meant there was a chance that we would have to evacuate if the hosing plan proved futile, we still had to perform that most unnerving of all fire-in-the-neighborhood rituals: deciding which cherished possessions were coming with us if we did have to leave.
The dogs, the deed to the house, the insurance policies, the checkbooks, the computers, and the hard drives: these were no-brainers. Paranoia had caused me to have most of my important paperwork still in a container I had never unpacked from a fire threat the previous year.
“I’ll be out in the studio,” Andy said, as he headed out to the converted garage to sort through the densest stockpile of his own personal belongings, some of which were enormous electronic keyboards.
I stood alone in my office, looking at all my stuff, confronting once again the eccentric collection of souvenirs from a million particular moments during my twenty-five years of living here. Obviously, furniture was a moot point. But in every room of the house a showdown was brewing among hundreds of inanimate objects, all crying out, “You’re not seriously thinking of leaving me behind, are you?” Which of these things could I fit into the remaining car space after my four large dogs had already boarded? Only a handful of the millions of God-knows-whats were going to make the trip.
One of my flaws (which I prefer to think of as one of my endearing traits) is my inability to stop saving worthless things that I find funny. Take, for example (though I doubt you will actually want to), an old Xeroxed sign I tore off a telephone pole because it said, “Turn your canker sores into cash.” So hilarious was it to me at the time that I now have it preserved in a frame. And it does not want for like-minded company. Every level as well as every vertical surface of my home is littered with something I’ve saved: ceramic figurines that caught my eye because of their peculiar subject matter, weird foreign food packaging I felt I had to buy because of amusing misspellings. Thus two little overall-clad Amish children holding eggs that are larger than their heads coexist happily alongside my many prized Remnants of Failed Advertising Campaigns. I may have the last two packages of Kraft macaroni and cheese featuring “Andy from Minnesota,” a sallow pie-faced teenage boy sporting a Moe Howard haircut who is posed with a big forkful of mac and cheese, his eager mouth agape as he calls out to other teens to “Become a Blue Box Kid!” A week after I bought the packages, they were pulled from the shelves, giving me the responsibility of preserving this piece of poorly conceived macaroni history. Or my mint-condition box of Urkel-Os cereal, which I was prescient enough to buy when it first appeared for sale. Or my spray bottle of Chuck Norris’s “KICK brand shoe and boot deodorizer,” originally purchased from a coupon in the back of a magazine simply because I was stunned to learn that Chuck Norris was now a player in the world of foot deodorant. Then there were those packages of off-brand freeze-dried squid from a Korean market that are called “Happy Family.” Or my cans of “spotted dick,” a still-for-sale pudding from England.
But I’m not insane. I knew I couldn’t fill up valuable space in my car with spotted dick. So I heaved a remorseful sigh and made a beeline for the twenty-three bulging photo albums in my closet. Damn! If only I had scanned those dinosaurs onto CDs. Okay, … which of these photos did I need to see again? The ones from art school and childhood? Yes, of course. Those photos were the only evidence that these things had actually happened. But the trip to Bermuda with an old boyfriend to whom