a glimpse into the future...

A few weekends back, I answered my mother's emailed call for help. She'd heard about a possible crackdown by the owners of the building where she lives.  One of the neighbors had been forced to give up one of the building's storage lockers that she was renting.  Mom, as the keyholder to three of the damned things, was worried that the boom was about to get lowered on her and decided to go proactive.  Her building is under new ownership and, along with the gaudy (even gauche) new furniture in the lobbies, new tenants are actually filling up some of the formerly vacant units.  Before this infusion of fresh cash customers, my mom probably could have rented a whole apartment for a song to store her extra jun...er...treasures.   That's a scary thought because she'd've done her damnedest to fill the thing up to the same bursting point that her three storage lockers are at.  But that was then and this is now.  The new tenants will require storage lockers of their own; she's been forced into a different sort of crisis management mode.  I spent six hours with her going through carton after carton of old books from just one of her three storage lockers.  We didn't clear that one out completely but we did the worst of the heavy lifting that will be inevitable after the sheriff's deputy arrives with an eviction notice.

I know that my opinion was a matter of public record, that most of those books should never have made the move from 254 Macalester to 1910 Graham 10 years or so ago.  They'd been sitting, mostly untouched, ever since the day in about '66 that they'd been poured onto the shelves at the back end of 254's dining room.  I have no idea where Doug had been keeping them in a succession of houses and apartments before we moved into 254.  But there they were. Old Macalester College textbooks (and not from when I went there), Literary Guild selections of the month, the occasional recent (relatively speaking) acquisitions like three volumes of Robert Caro's LBJ biography that I'd given Doug over the span of 20 years, my mother's collection of 19th century childrens' readers (if it's old, it's gotta be valuable, right?), not-so-current events titles from the '60s.

I'd been pulling plums from those shelves for years.  I got my starts on John LeCarre and Bruce Catton and Ernie Pyle in books that I borrowed and never returned.  I know that I still have some of those books.

That wasn't all.  Books had materialized from all over the house to get packed for transport to the storage lockers at their new home.  Cookbooks of every size, shape and diet craze.  Gardening books by the dozens.  Books on sewing and knitting and miscellaneous needlecraft and decorative arts and antique furniture and home improvements and Native Americans and Scots and Minnesotans and travel.  Macalester and Kaehler School of Nursing and Windom High School yearbooks.  Dear God, I now know why I stumbled into a career (of sorts) in the book business.  It had to have been some sort of a contact high from formative years of rubbing elbows with all those old, slowly disintegrating books.

I got to Mom's apartment a little after 10:30.  After she introduced me around the place a little (the mail carrier and a couple of the residents) and a few muttered curses about goddamned rosaries as we walked past the crowd gathering in the chapel for Mass, we hit the books.  Yes we did.

I had to clear a path in the locker (actually a plywood cube about 4' x 8') and then wriggle around a structural column that rises inconveniently from smack dab in the middle of the floor plan to get at the books.  Out they came, one or two boxes at a time.  Marj plunked herself down in a lawn chair and pawed thru the contents as I shoved the boxes up to her feet.  We made pretty good progress for the first half a dozen or so; she set a few from each box aside for distribution to friends and family or for keeping or for further consideration.  But the sight of the growing stack of cartons on my faithful Hamline Bookstore two-wheeler, prepped for transport to the back of the Tahoe and, after that, to God only knew where must have had a sobering effect on her.  She seemed to reconsider, to imagine the horror of not knowing what the future held for her stuff, to dig in her heels and to start making careful decisions about who in her inner circle should have these books, her books.  We slowed to a crawl.

Mom catching up on a little of her reading.

Granddaughter Anna had never had home-ec in high school so she should have a huge-ass stack of sewing and knitting books.  The tall, skinny cookbook dedicated to beans got rerouted to granddaughter Keely because she "lives on beans; she eats very frugally".  Anna's two kids were awarded a couple of titles, one of them a Sacajewa biography, which will irretrievably turn them away from any other literary pursuits for years.  My sister Susan got the lion's share of the gardening books except for the one on shade gardening.  That went to Keely because her new house has so many trees in the back yard.  Grandson Brendan's bride Natalie got a couple of outdoorsy items, right up her alley as a nature educator.  Marj struggled long and hard over the little book about Isle Royal until she came up with the inspiration of consigning it to Natalie and Brendan because "they might go there some day".

On and on it went.  Marj and I both did pretty well when you consider that our relationship has tended to contentious over the last few years.  Maybe decades.  I only rolled my eyes maybe 18 or 20 times and I don't think that she caught me at it.  She accused me of being the one who would pull the plug on her life-support.  To which responded that I sure as hell wasn't because I was going to make her come back from any imminent demise to help me clean out the rest of her crap from the storage lockers.  Well, it's not like it was Mother's Day or anything like that.

I made three trips to the Tahoe with the two-wheeler piled high like back in its glory days.  I knew all along there'd eventually be a reason that I'd let it clutter up our garage for the last seven years.  Among the booty (no pun intended; you'll see) were three plastic milk cartons full of meticulously arranged-by-date Playboy magazines, most of them still in their USPS Manual required opaque plastic mailing sleeves.  The Post Office goes to great lengths to protect the morals of its personnel if, at the same time, sacrificing something of their morale.  How and why Doug got started on those, I will never know.  I'm pretty sure, though, that Old Saint Peter met him as he was trying to get thru the Pearly Gates and vouched for him with a a roll of his own saintly eyes.

I drove the truck up the alley behind our house and laid out a couple of  2x4's to keep the books off the floor of the garage.  And then stacked the boxes (and don't forget about the plastic milk crates) back in the corner by the barber's chair.  I think that there are about 10 boxes out there; I'd dropped one off at Nan and Dan's house and one at Anna Morley's and one got hauled into our house and I poked thru the contents of a few of the others.  Mom has since told me to go out to the garage and find some books for the Morley boys, sports and American literature and such.  Good luck with that.  I found a few possibilities but their value will be in Doug's bookplates inside the books rather than any content.

These books had, at some earlier point, been my inheritance.  The mishmash of furniture which Mom had collected over the years was to get split between my sisters.  That stuff had held it's value and some of it has maybe even appreciated.  The collection of books was slated for me.  I don't think that a single one of those books has increased a penny in value since long before Mom and I were poking through them.  In a world of 1¢ books for sale on Amazon, they've turned out to be not much of an investment.

I've still got a pile of work ahead of me, sifting thru those things to decide what's not too musty to donate to the Goodwill or a library.  Most of 'em literally aren't worth the paper they're printed on.  Culture and knowledge have become so disposable lately.

Apart from this story's entertainment value, I recognize that it'll be me sitting in that lawn chair after just a few clicks of the fast forward button.  The jun...er...treasures I've piled up still hold a world of potential for me.  Books, CDs, records, collectibles of all sorts are witness to the strange trajectory of my life.  I suppose that everyone's stuff bears similar witness to their owners' lives.  And I can foresee not only me clinging to my belongings a few years up the road but Liz and Kate cracking the whip and pushing me to pass 'em on.

Anybody interested in a 10-year run of '80's and 90's Playboys?

the joys of home ownership in a time of global climate change

Here's a quick update on the water hazard that had been our backyard earlier in the week.  Some of you may have seen Miz Susan's Facebook posts about it but here's another visual for those who watch the Weather Channel just to see middle-Americans' lives turned upside-down.

Hmmmmm.  Who can I blame this one on?  Fine.  Whom.

Even with the low-tech camera on my borrowed cell phone (Miz Susan keeps me hanging around with promises that we'll go out and shop for new phones "next weekend") you can see the effects of the downpour Wednesday night thru Thursday's AM hours.  When I left for work at 7:30 on Thursday, the backyard was nowhere near as bad as this.  But when I got home at 12:30 after Susan's desperation call for help, this was pretty much the scene.

We had trickles of water coming into the basement from all sides and corners of the foundation but that's business as usual after heavy rainfalls or spring snow melts.  But the basement's biggest issue was the well in the northeast corner, dug once upon a time, perhaps for a sump-pump.  We're used to seeing that 18" deep pit fill halfway up with water once in awhile.  But on Thursday morning, the water level was threatening to come up past floor-level and threaten all of the junk we've got haphazardly strewn around in cardboard boxes.

Susan had been playing human sump pump and had emptied dozens of buckets' worth of water into the laundry tubs.  She was exhausted and near at a breaking point with the downside of the dream of owning her own home.  I think her line went something like, "Forget this!!!".  Or maybe something more colorful.

I took over the bucket brigade duties and started making a little progress.  She'd been working with a two- gallon pail and barely keeping ahead of the flood.  I put the 5-gallon bucket (known affectionately around the basement as Big Green) into play and even with me staggering up the steps, out the side door and out to the street to dump the water, I was able to start to get ahead of the threat.  Not for long, though, as the saturated front lawn kept forcing more water into the hole.  I think we were finally able to catch our breath on that job at about eight that night.

All that lower level progress didn't encourage the lake in the backyard to go away though.  What you can see in the picture was still just sitting there come early evening, an occasional soft breeze stirring up a slight ripple across it's otherwise smooth, mirror-like surface.  Picturesque and even romantic when seen from the end of the dock up at the cabin.  In our backyard, nothing like that.

At that point, I headed out to try to find a utility pump to start moving some of what was covering our backyard back to its proper place in the water cycle.  That's what these things are called apparently, utility pumps.  This is a tool which had never really been on my radar before.  Not so surprising as I am about the unhandiest of all handymen.  I mean, I can conceptualize what one of them is supposed to do but what it's called or where to find one in the big boxes or the local hardware stores...not a clue.  Up until now.

I now know what they're called and where you should be able to find one in a store (except at Walmart where all I got were uncomprehending blank looks though pleasant enough) and what the price ranges are and even a little bit about their maximum pumping volumes in gallons per hour.  Note that I said "where you should be able to find one in a store".  The nice people at Menard's and three local mom and pops told me that they'd sold out of their stock by 1 that afternoon. Maybe they'd have more in within a week.  By which time our house might have either floated away down Laurel Avenue toward the river or collapsed into the basement when the foundation gave way.

So, I ended up doing what I should have done in the first place.  I went groveling to the neighbors.  Larry (who had been kind enough to lend me the above-mentioned cell phone while I waited for Miz Susan to motivate to shop for new ones) lent me his utility pump.  He was using Michael's utility pump because Michael had convinced Larry that his (Michael's) pump was far superior to Larry's.  Larry told me that the two pumps were probably equally effective but he and I both know that it's tough to say no to Michael when he's trying to lend you something.  Between the two of them, Michael and Larry own at least one of every hand tool invented since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.  But if they both own one, Michael's is probably better.  That's just the way it goes in the world of hand tools on this stretch of Laurel Avenue.

I got the damn thing across the street and waded across the back yard where I hooked the pump up to 50' (or more) of garden hose and plugged it into an outlet in the garage (I had to disconnect the garage door opener; we're short on outlets in the garage).  I'd run the hose out to the alley and as soon as I plugged that bad boy in and plunked it down in about six inches of water, the far end of the hose began to spew out water in a rush.  It was coming out at about the same rate that our garden hose produces when we've got it tapped into the spigot on the side of the house.  This utility pump was going about its business in earnest.

We let it run all night.  Kelly next door was trying to drain her decorative pond into the alley at the same time so we had quite the torrent headed westward down the alley.  I woke up at 4AM and checked the sump pump well in the basement and the utility pump in the back yard,  It was making progress; the shoreline of the lake in the back yard had definitely receded but there was still plenty of water left to go.  The pump was still doing it's work when I left for mine at 7:30.  Susan told me that she finally shut it off at about 10 that morning when it started to suck air.  When I got home in the afternoon, I plugged it back in to dry up some low spots in the yard.

The major casualty in this flood seems to have been our clothes dryer.  It's been three and a half days now and Susan's dad's advice of blowing a fan on the back of the dryer hasn't panned out.  We'll probably be calling a repair service tomorrow.  There's undoubtedly some sort of karmic justice in our clothes dryer taking a fatal hit even though most everything else is on it's way to drying out.  But I'm damned if I can see it.

Miz Susan and I have a trip planned to Menard's, probably Wednesday this week.  We'll be looking for another dehumidifier for our basement (we'd needed that before the latest natural disaster), a large pot into which to re-pot her gi-normous jasmine plant which had outgrown its current pot a couple of summers ago and at least one new handle and lock set for the sliding door from the kitchen out onto the deck.  Maybe two sets if Miz Susan's esthetic sense is offended by mismatched handles on the two doors.  But you can bet that we'll be looking to pick up a utility pump, as well.  There is no way that I'm going forward into a world full of  changing and uncertain weather patterns without at least one utility pump of our own.  Please God, let Menard's get those things back into stock.