My 96-year old great-aunt is a packrat. ANY piece of paper that enters her home must be dated and then painstakingly read with her magnifier. Since this is a tedious process, the papers back up.
The stack I went through last week went back to 1998 - I kid you not, and MANY of these papers were advertisements for things she cannot possibly ever use. She is loathe to let ANYTHING go without having personally inspected it so I will try to be her eyes and speed the process up a bit.
"Fifth grade girls science camp, Aunt Trudy?" I ask ask I pass the ad to the recycle pile. "I guess not," she replies, somehow disappointed. "How about vinyl siding - Sears had a sale in 2004," I say with a perfectly straight face.
"I just got the house painted. Why would I want siding," she snaps.
"So - I can toss it?" (I toss it.)
"I don't know. You never know if you are going to need siding."
She has boxes and boxes and bags and bags of papers - receipts, old bills, flyers, company mailings, prospectuses, statements - you name it. One bag has cancelled checks from the 1950s written on a bank no longer in existence. But she won't HEAR of throwing them away because she may NEED them one day.
She has a shredder. Many, many papers are stacked on a tray in front of the shredder. But they don't get shredded until she's had the chance to "go over them" one more time - with the magnifier - just in case something was put there in error.
All over the house are these stacks. With each stack there are boxes - small, medium, and large - filled with rubber bands, paper clips, stubby pencils, markers, grease pencils, odds and ends, measuring tapes, staple removers, antique staplers, index cards, string, pictures, business cards, letter openers, envelopes - and other detritus of the disorganized. The boxes are ALL old shoeboxes or vintage boxes that she could never part with and they all hold mysterious treasure. One has postage stamps going back to the Nixon era, along with penny and 2cent stamps to use when you have to make up the difference because postage is no longer 21 cents.
One day I arrived and she was indignant. She has fired, ONCE AGAIN, a companion sent over from an agency that charges well for its services. This woman's crime? She went through the cupboards and freezer - tossing out cans that my aunt had diligently labeled - with dates going back to the late 1980s. 12 "perfectly good" cans of cranberry jelly from the early 1990s were tossed, along with packages of meat that only the bravest of souls would have defrosted for further inspection. These meat packages had been laid ON THE FLOOR and my aunt was carefully reconfiguring them in the freezer.
"Perfectly good meat! On the FLOOR. Right there!" She was incensed. The wastefulness of some people is just something she cannot fathom.
And speaking of freezers..... on top of the erstwhile stack of paper nearest her magnifier was a letter from SoCal Edison offering rebates to anyone buying an energy-saving refrigerator or other appliance. Clipped to it were several refrigerator ads from the local paper that she had collected over the course of several days.
"Is there something wrong with your refrigerator?" I asked her, leafing through pictures of stainless steel side-by-sides and the latest Sears Kenmore over and under model - complete with icemaker, water dispenser, and a little compartment for those items you need in a hurry.
"No, of course not. It's only 28 years old," she snapped.
"Well...then why all these ads?" I ask carefully.
"There's a rebate. $50.00!" She huffed at me like I was some sort of buffoon.
"So.. you are going to buy a new one?" I venture, steeling myself for the verbal attack that was sure to come.
"Of course not! Why would I?" She answered.
"So... why do you want to keep these ads .... and this letter from Edison about the rebate?"
"Just IN CASE!" She snorted. "JUST IN CASE! It might be a good deal."
"All right. Shall I create FILE for you? A 'Just in Case' Refrigerator file?"
"No. I don't need a new refrigerator. This one's only 28 years old."
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment