Notes from Maine - 2023/05/21

My father’s house is under contract. We’ll see how that goes—we have to sweat out the appraisal, I guess. We got a bunch of offers in the first couple of days, so hopefully if this offer falls through there will be someone still interested. Last week, we had some furniture (and junk) in the garage that nobody was interested in during our many yard sales last year. It’s not that surprising. Dad didn’t have expensive taste in furnishings and wardrobe. Many of his decorations (and all of his shirts) came from the dump. He wasn’t pawing through landfills or anything—his dump has a “free store” where people donate items that they don’t want but still have life in them. It’s like a Goodwill without the quality control. Not surprisingly, a lot of Dad’s dump picks needed to be returned to the dump.

We took a lot of furniture up to Restore in Waterville. They were wonderful. Everyone was welcoming and happy to take all the leftover furniture and tools. We only took them decent stuff, of course. The rest, Mom and I disposed of in a dumpster that my brother arranged for.

Throwing stuff away gets easier with each passing second.

When my brother returned, he started to ask, “You didn’t get rid of the…”

“Gone.”

“And the…”

“Dumpster,” I said, pointing.

He climbed the side to look down in.

“All this wood was…”

“Garbage,” I finished. It really was. Everything was knotty and cracked. I didn’t have to sort through good/bad—it was all bad. Before he left, my brother was clear about the few things that he wanted to keep. I guess there were some other items that he had his eye on, but he never expressed a strong desire to keep them so I threw them away. 

So now that’s done. Top to bottom, the garage and the attic above it are empty. Mom even swept it clean. 

I had a dream the other night. 

My father said, “You guys are going to have a helluva time putting my house back together.”

You see, it was all a mistake. He managed to pull through and wanted to go home, but first we had to scour Maine and return everything to where he had it when he left. The weight of that—re-weaving that tangle of detritus into Dad’s precise configuration—landed on my shoulders in the dream. It would be impossible to recreate that space the way he had it. It would be just as impossible as reassembling the atoms that once made up his body and reanimating them. I woke up and tried to shake off the feeling. It should be a relief to finally be done with the house. Instead, I felt like I had a responsibility to picture where everything went so I could rebuild the precise memory. 

That feeling evaporated eventually.

It’s important to focus on what’s going on now, I suppose.

Mom is staying with me for one more week. Any day we’ll be entering the, “I have to finish everything I want to do before I leave,” stage of her trip. This stage can be frustrating because it usually accompanies the beginning of several new projects. It’s difficult to finish everything when you’re constantly starting new stuff. No complaints—this is what’s fun about Mom. Her energy, enthusiasm, and drive are infectious. You know, like a disease (or mental illness). 

We had fun yesterday. We returned something to Lowes for my brother. He didn’t have a receipt and was beyond his “return without receipt” limit. After that, we walked around a strip mall and looked at plants. I was parked in front of Jersey Mike’s. 

She asked, “Have you been in there?”

I have. In fact, I’ve been struggling to contextualize my visit to Jersey Mike’s. Trying to explain it to Mom, I think I came up with a decent analogy.

I said, “Imagine you go back to the 1960s, and step into a briefing room at NASA in Houston. Surrounded by astronauts and scientists, you try to order a sandwich. Your request would be greeted with confusion and contempt. These people have no tools, inclination, or ingredients to fill your order.”

“Okay?” she asked.

“That’s what ordering a sandwich in Jersey Mike’s was like. The person who took my order sliced bread in half, looked me in the eye, and asked, ‘What’s on it?’ I was stunned. Why have a menu if every order merely evokes a query of, ‘What’s on it?’ The menu should just say, SANDWICH.”

“Did you talk to the manager?” Mom asked.

“Yes,” I said. “The manager was the one trying to make the sandwich.”