Coffee heat rising

Idle essays

Most coveted junk

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So, what do you want for Christmas? The New York Times “Home” section, one of my favorite catalogs for the aspiring nouveaux, has any number of inspirations for valuable junk you can give to friends and relatives, or, better yet, ask them to get for you. I love looking at this stuff. It’s so hilarious! Consider, for example, the stone platters edged in gold leaf, at $375 apiece an item you surely will treasure for the rest of your life and hand down to grateful children. Speaking of leaf, we have these fine leafy spoons, designed to scrape the hide off your palate, at $195 to $275. And who wouldn’t appreciate a framed collage of dried weevils, your loved one’s for a mere $700!

Surely we must all be guilty of coveting some useless object that costs more money than anyone has good sense.

Moi, I want a set of Christofle sterling silver flatware in the Cluny pattern. The going rate for this stuff is $990 a place setting, or $7,920 for eight place settings; but one place online will let you cobble together eight place settings for a mere $4,640 (shipping free!).

What makes this wee craving especially ridiculous is that I already have a perfectly fine set of Cluny in silverplate.

Yes. But…I want it in sterling.

Having received precious few of the pieces of the Royal Danish we registered for our wedding, after my ex-husband made full partner in the tony law firm where he worked, he and I set off to San Francisco one year in search of a set of sterling that would meet our tastes, which had evolved somewhat since the day we were joined in holy matrimony. As a young thing I had selected Royal Danish because it vaguely resembled the pattern I really wanted, which was George Jensen’s Acorn. Why did I think I had to have that? Because one of the other budding partners’ wives selected it.

She and her groom, however, could afford it. We could not, and amazingly enough we had enough sense to realize that we never would: today eight place settings will  lighten your load by $11,625. IMHO, it’s not that much better than Royal Danish: they’re both kinda ugly.

By the time XH and I went in search of sterling, I had decided that I wanted something astringently, Spartanly plain. No frou frou. None. No curlicues, no roses, no leaves, no “acorns,” no acanthi that look vaguely like “acorns” that look like acanthi. What I wanted was something that would resemble the few 19th-century coin-silver pieces handed down from my great-great grandparents through my mother.

Do you know how hard it is to find sterling flatware that is free of gew-gaws?

It’s hard, that’s what it is.

We had just about given up when we stumbled into Neiman’s—it was the last place we were going to look. If we couldn’t find what we (i.e., “I”) wanted, we would resign ourselves to living with our perfectly fine, breathtakingly expensive Danish stainless. We explained what we hoped to find to the sales lady (at Neiman’s, we don’t drool over the silver in its glass cases: we ask to be shown the silver). Forthwith she led us to the sliding wooden cases where the Christofle resided, and by golly, there was a perfect rendition of what I had in mind.

However, in those days Cluny was not produced in sterling. You could only get it in plate. At that time and in that place, the silverplate cost as much as an American set of sterling. XH was prepared to buy sterling, and I expect he would have bought it in sterling were it available. I’m sure, however, that he was privately relieved when I announced I loved the pattern so much that I had to have it, plate or no plate.

Polished and ready for Thanksgiving. Note how similar the Cluny is to the antique pieces in the lower right quadrant of this photo, some of which are dated 1864.
Polished and ready for Thanksgiving. Note how similar the Cluny is to the antique pieces in the lower right quadrant of this photo, some of which are dated 1864.

I’ve treasured this stuff since we got it. After I exited, I left the fancy Danish stainless with XH and decided that I would use the Christofle every single day, the theory being that when you save things for special occasions, you never do use them. And I have. Not only that, but I wash it in the dishwasher. It has held up well: the plate is so thick that after 18 years of daily use, it shows no sign of wearing through.

But, it being plate, it goes clunk when a couple of pieces bump together. I want my Christofle to go ping!

I ask you: is that unreasonable?

Almost ready for Thanksgiving. We actually had more people, and wine glasses were lined up on the kitchen counter for immediate use by arriving guests. I should've put the plates on, since all the food was brought to the table.
Almost ready for Thanksgiving. We actually had more people, and wine glasses were lined up on the kitchen counter for immediate use by arriving guests. I should've put the plates on, since all the food was brought to the table.

Let us count our blessings

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How lucky we are. How incredibly lucky we are to have been born when we were born and where we were born.

Every now and again, I cruise the Web looking for my grandparents and great-grandparents, whom I never saw and about whom I know only some tantalizing hand-me-down legends. Because the pool of public records online grows deeper with each passing day, occasionally I come across something new.

Last night, what should I find but the 1900 census records listing my father’s parents, living way to hell and gone out in some godforsaken patch of east-central Texas. My father was not yet a proverbial twinkle, but both of his brothers had come into being in the early 1890s.

His mother was born in Arkansas. Her father came from Ohio, her mother from Indiana. His father said he was born in Illinois and that his father came from Tennessee.

With a banjo on his knee, no doubt.

By the time my father came on the scene, they were living near or in Fort Worth. He lied about his age as soon as he could get away with it and ran off to join the Navy. He used to say the best thing about being from Texas was being from Texas: as far from it as you could get. I found Google satellite and street-level photos of the wide spot in the road where his parents and brothers must have lived in 1900. Gives technicolor meaning to my father’s words.

Ever have the privilege of visiting east-central Texas in a blue norther? God help us, it’s as cold as you’ll ever get, this side of Antarctica. That’s when you’re inside a house. The icy wind seeps in through every microscopic crack it can find. Imagine living through a Plains winter in a tent, a dugout, a mud hut, or a log cabin! Imagine working through a Texas or an Arkansas summer without air conditioning. Imagine what Illinois and Ohio would have been like before there were cities, before towns, before even a lean-to on the grassland.

Sometimes I think about those folks and I wonder: what on earth were they coming from that this looked good? It’s hard to conceive of the desperation, the poverty that would spur a man or a woman to take off across the Great Plains on a horse or a wagon. Think of that. It’s the equivalent of climbing on a camel and riding into the Sahara Desert. Imagine how hard they must have worked, how hungry they must have been, how tired they must have been, how sick they must have gotten. Imagine giving birth—facing down death to do it—in the middle of nowhere. Really, literally, nowhere.

What drove those people?

We are so lucky to have a roof over our heads and four walls (sometimes more!) around us. Miraculously lucky to be able to turn on a heater when the cold wind wails in from the north, to flick a switch to pump in cool air when the sun starts to bake, to make our livings as wage slaves rather than having to dig our lives out of the rocky soil or chase cattle across the desertifying plains. Lord, what lives they led.

And what lives we lead!

Where my great-grandfather hunted buffalo
Where my great-grandfather hunted buffalo

Image: The Llano Estacado, Texas. Twenty-First Annual Report of the United States Geological Survey. Wikipedia, Llano Estacado.

Paper

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Like dust, paper sifts into my house and settles on the countertops and furniture. If I don’t get to it, before long it stacks up in great dunes of paperwork, forms to be filled out, bills to be paid, statements to be entered in Quicken or Excel, junk to be filed away. Whether its ultimate destination is a return envelope, a file folder, or the trash can, every single piece of it has to handled, examined, thought about, and acted upon.

I’ve known for a while that I would have to get to the stacks on the dining-room table and on my desk. It couldn’t be put off another day, nevermind the stack of student papers and the remaining work to do in the index of medieval & Renaissance history, forget the housework that hasn’t been done in three or four weeks, the empty gas tank, the long shopping list hanging on the fridge. Somewhere deep in the pile was a Visa bill and a car insurance bill, both of which needed to be paid. Soon. Maybe yesterday, for all I knew.

So, having overslept Saturday morning, along about 8:30 I dove into the dreaded task. And…

It took a good four hours to dig out from under all that crap!!! Filling out the forms and copying all the receipts and supporting information for the Avesis claim was probably the most infuriating. Why is it necessary to ask the customer for policy numbers, group numbers, and individual numbers that do not appear on the insurance card, were never sent in the mail, and have to be retrieved by calling the company? What is the point of demanding repetition of facts that are already in the company’s records?

And how, pray tell, do my gender and birthdate bear on my purchase of one, count it, one pair of cheap glasses? What is the point of wasting paper, ink, postage, and my time on this redundant and irrelevant trivia? By the time I finished, I’d filled out a two-page form and photocopied nine more pieces of paper to stuff into the envelope with it. Postage consumed two of the USPS’s pricey little stamps.

Then there’s the form required to ask for the $10,000 of tax-free funds residing in a Northwestern Mutual whole life policy. Is there a reason a form has to be incomprehensible? What, for example, do you suppose is meant by “cash value of,” “face value of,” and “to cost basis”? These terms have exactly zero meaning to me, and I can’t even imagine where to go to look them up and try to figure out how they apply to my particular request, which is a simple “please give me back my money.” No one’s home at Northwestern Mutual, of course: on a Saturday, only the customers have to work.

The Hartford sent not only the current policy and two copies of the piece of paper the State of Arizona requires one to purchase each year and carry around in one’s car, but also three more envelopes full of paper. Lots of dense copy there, too, much of it mind-numbing. The vast amount this company charges to insure my aged car, OF course, requires me to get online and transfer funds from the money market to a checking account, another time-consuming bit of ditz that has to be entered in Quicken, after the credit union’s receipt is printed out and filed. More paper, more ink: more of mine.

By the time I was finished, along about half-past noon, the house was still filthy and the larder still bare. Half the day was absorbed by dealing with paperwork, much of it pointless and way too much of it invasive demands for information that is strictly none of anyone’s business.

A nation of sheep is what we are. If, as a people, we were not passive and indolent, we would rise up in full rebellion at corporate demands for private information that go way beyond anything needed to get a given job done, at the deluge of unnecessary and wasteful paperwork, and (most infuriatingly!), at the newest trend that requires consumers to download and print out online forms, thereby wasting their own ink and paper for no very good reason.

Allons, enfants de la patrie!
To the barricades!

Where does the junk come from?

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Does junk reproduce inside closets, the same way wire coat-hangers spawn in the dark? How does so much JUNK accumulate, after you think you’ve shoveled out every drawer, closet, and cabinet in the house? Where does this stuff come from?

Well, some of it just blew in from the Great Desert University: a week or ten days ago I hauled the last of the junk out of my office and deposited it in the storeroom, where it filled countertops and shelves, waiting for me to find a place to put it away. About half of it, I should’ve thrown out without ever letting it escape the campus. However, I figured if I get the Glendale job, I’ll need the yard-sale lamps, the battery-run clocks, the odd little Mexican mirror, the useless books, the sweet little fan that fits on a bookshelf, oh god what to do with all this junk?

That’s easy: dispose of the unused junk that’s already in the closets and cabinets to make room for the transplanted unused junk.

This inspiration led to half an afternoon’s worth of winnowing out junk, cleaning out drawers to accommodate shifted valuables, wistfully going through beautiful old linens made by or belonging to my mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother, folding them back up, finding a new place for them… Oh, well.

Tomorrow St. Vincent de Paul will get…

• a DVD player
• an AM-FM radio & CD player that runs on batteries or electricity
• a set of electric curlers
• an old smoke alarm
• two decorative ceramic dustcatchers jars
• a Braun electric coffeemaker
• 4 books
• a Bissell hand-held carpet spot cleaner gadget

And as I was about to sit down to tap out this post on the keyboard, I could hear the muted mating calls of the creatures still hidden in the closets:

• an old VCR player
• a keyboard so old it connected to a now-defunct computer with a pair of plugs, one purple, one yellow
• an ancient Toshiba laptop incapable of running any current software of any kind
• a straw basketful of old electronic hoodahs and doodahs
• a plastic basketful of old PC and Mac software
• the Evan Mecham television
• an old Mac keyboard
• an ancient flatbed scanner
• busted JBL speakers still sitting nonfunctionally on my desk
• two empty straw basketweave things for holding magazines

Where did this stuff come from? How did it get here? What is it trying to do?

Coming down to the finish line…

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No time to write this morning: overslept and so have only 45 minutes before the morning constitutional with La Maya. Then must get back to indexing medieval and Renaissance history.

And in the “only” department: only about 130 pages left to go on that: then the task of typing it all up. This will be the last major project I need to do for the Great Desert University.

Once it’s done, I’m outta there. The State of Arizona owes me almost 352 hours of unused vacation time. The most the state will pay for is 176 hours (although I noticed on my latest paycheck that they’re getting set to try to short me. Hallelujah! Another fight with HR comin’ up!). So what one does, I’m given to understand, is to take all the use-it-or-lose-it time at the end one one’s tenure, by way of moving the exit day forward.

If my math is right, that will put me out the door on November 30. The Thanksgiving holiday will add another two workdays to that, meaning I turn in my keys on November 25.

Folks. That is eight workdays from now. I’ve hauled all my junk home, and turning in the keys is literally all that remains to be done, other than finishing the index.

Now, that may  not happen in eight days. It takes a good week of 12-hour days to compile a decent index of this book-length annual, and that’s without working around two freshman comp classes. I haven’t even looked at the student papers that came in on Friday, and another raft is due from the Monday class today. At the time I agreed to take on the community college classes, I knew it meant an avalanche of work would crash down on me at the end of the semester. What we’re hearing is the rumble of rock beginning to slide downhill.

It’ll be worth it, though. GDU drives Indians mad, and they’ve done a fair job of it with me. Will tell you all about it once I’m safely out of the white man’s camp.

Wish I’d written that…

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Among the dusty books and junk I brought home from the office is an anthology of essays that some publisher donated to me, in hopes that I would adopt it for one of the many classes I used to teach at the Great Desert University. In an idle moment yesterday, I happened to pick it up. It fell open to one of my favorite writers, Annie Dillard, and this incredible passage from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.

When I was six or seven years old, growing up in Pittsburgh, I used to take a precious penny of my own and hide it for someone else to find It was a curious compulsion; sadly, I’ve never been seized by it since. For some reason I always “hid” the penny along the same stretch of sidewalk up the street. I would cradle it at the roots of a sycamore, say, or in a hole left by a chipped-off piece of sidewalk. Then I would take a piece of chalk, and, starting at either end of the block, draw some hue arrows leading up to the penny from both directions. After I learned to write I labeled the arrows: SURPRISE AHEAD or MONEY THIS WAY. I was greatly excited, during all this arrow-drawing, at the thought of the first lucky passer-by who would receive in this way, regardless of merit, a free gift from the universe. But I never lurked about. I would go straight home and not give the matter another thought, until, some months later, I would be gripped again by the impulse to hide another penny.

It is still the first week in January, and I’ve got greater plans. I’ve been thinking about seeing. There are lots of things to see, unwrapped gifts and free surprises. The world is fairly studded and strewn with pennies cast broadside from a generous hand. But—and this is the point—who gets excited by a mere penny? If you follow one arrow, if you crouch motionless by the sight of a muskrat kit paddling from its den, will you count that sight a chip of copper only, and go your rueful way? It is dire poverty indeed when a man is so malnourished and fatigued that he won’t stoop to pick up a penny. But if you cultivate a healthy poverty and simplicity, so that finding a penny will literally make your day, then, since the world is in fact planted in pennies, you have with your poverty bought a lifetime of days.

Annie Dillard, “Seeing.” Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. New York: HarperCollins, 1974.