Or DID she think?
My great-aunt Gertrude — a kind of amateur intellectual — lived with her mother (my great-grandmother) in a pretty little Frank Lloyd Wright-influenced bungalow in California’s Berkeley foothills. It was such a lovely little house! All wood floors and handsome windows and…on and on.
In back stood a similarly designed garage.
Neither woman had ever learned to drive.
(Can you imagine living in a time when you didn’t have to drive to get around a city?)
So that garage — big enough to hold two cars — served as a gigantic storage bin.
And what did they store in it?
Piles and piles atop pile on pile of old magazines.
Yes. Gertrude subscribed to National Geographic, and she NEVER threw out a back issue. That garage was chuckablock full of antique issues of National Geographic.
Without doubt, there were other titles, too. But Nat’l Geographic is the one that sticks in my mind. They must have had twenty or thirty years’ worth of issues stashed in that lean-to.
Well. The place would’ve been a fire hazard under the best of conditions. But stacked from floor to ceiling with inky paper? HOLEE mackerel!
Back in the day, when I was a kid, it never occurred to me to ask them WHY they felt they should keep all those old issues, when any public library would have had them. Today, though, I look back on it and wonder were they crazy…or WHAT???
And looking back on it, it surprises me that my father let me and my mother stay at their house for a week or three at a time, while he was off at sea. Though my mother might not have noticed what a hazard that pile of paper presented, he was the kind of guy who would have looked at their proud collection and thought hoooleee sheee-ut!
Only thing I can figure is that maybe he was never invited back there and so maybe he never saw it. Damned if I’d have let my kid stay for weeks at a time when one spark would set off a conflagration that would burn the house down.
People are strange, aren’t they?