One hundred years

In the morning the black water had drained, but the kitchen sinks still didn’t work. Mom went ahead and  told Grandpa, and he said, “I know, it’s done that before.” But when he ran the tap, and black water bubbled up again, he said, “It hasn’t done that before.” Mom confessed to the macaroni down the garbage disposal, and he said, “That must be it, you just can’t put any food down there.” But it seemed to me that the trouble was older and deeper….  

We did the garbage disposal trick again, with the ice, me under the sink, Mom at the switch…. But it didn’t work. Grandpa had me search the garage for drain cleaner, but it wasn’t where he thought it should be, or anywhere else, as far as I could find. Mom said, “I’m going to the store to get some.”  Grandpa said he was going too, which wasn’t what she’d had in mind but she didn’t say so.

They went to Wal-Mart and bought the cheapest sort available, something that cost less than half as much as Liquid Plumber. I had my doubts, but it worked, or at least the sink drained for the rest of the day….

Grandpa hadn’t slept again. He spent most of the night back in his office sorting papers again. In the small office there’s a desk with a computer, a chair, a bookshelf, and several dozen open cardboard boxes spread around the floor and taking up nearly all the space in the room. Each box is hand-labeled, and the papers are divided with brown torn-of flaps from other boxes which indicate the contents behind. Grandpa has another office space in the basement, decorated in a similar manner. If he wants to take the time to search, he can put his hands on, say, a monthly bank statement from the 1970s, or a 1994 coupon from a carpet cleaning service, or any one of hundreds of issues of Idaho’s small Catholic newspaper….

Here is where he has decided to concentrate his initial attack on the contents of his home, to begin a campaign to strip away the deep deposits of householdery, silted up over decades….

Overnight he had filled two laundry baskets, one with papers that could go right into the recycling, one he wanted me to look through to see if anything needed to be shredded. Supposedly he had culled such materials himself, and at first I thought my task unnecessary. But I did indeed find a fair number of tax forms and other documents with his social security number, and I pulled them out. I’d never used a shredder before, and the sound and results were pleasing.

Later, Mom asked Grandpa if it felt good to be getting rid of stuff. He shook his head in lament, as if regret still trumped satisfaction. “I would’ve gone on the same for a hundred years,” he said, “if it wasn’t for this … wreck”—he swept his hand over his lower body in a gesture of irritation—“this wreck ....”

In the morning he had said to me, “I figure if I can just get rid of one thing every day …. That’s three hundred and sixty-five things a year.” I nodded encouragingly, but I thought, what counts as a “thing”? Whatever the definition, at that rate it’s going to take a lot of years to get done what he wants to do…. Or maybe wants to do. He also told me he had probably $5000 worth of tools in the garage. Easily, I’d guess (it would be hard, though, to put a dollar amount on the hundreds of mayonnaise jars full of screws and nails and bolts and every sort of small hardware fitting known to civilization). But he’s not culling out in the garage, and has expressed no interest in doing so…. I suppose I should be supportive, but I’m not convinced by a day of discarding piles of tax instruction booklets. That’s the easy stuff…. What about all the stuff that he’s more attached to, or, more to the point, that he thinks he needs? I don’t know, maybe he’ll be able to re-think what “need” means….  

Mom made hamburgers and corn on the cob for dinner, and heated up leftover peas and macaroni and cheese. Mike ate with us, and afterwards he and I watched some of the Olympics. I was impressed by the women running the one hundred meters. They were amazingly fit and strong and cut, and almost all of them had interesting hair. A runner from Nigeria had the first name Blessing; she was tall and powerful and a big swathe of pale hair swept across her forehead and was tucked behind an ear.

Late in the evening I biked to the nearby Sonic for vanilla milkshakes. At one of the outside tables a man with a shaved head sat with three skinny blonde girls, about eight, nine, and ten. They all had wet hair and they were in their pajamas. Out for a treat, just before bedtime. I envied the man, until their order came, and the girls began arguing bitterly over the division of the mozzarella sticks.