"Running Commentary"

To Be More Accurate

    I never sleep well Thursday nights.
    Right now, it’s precisely 3:26 a.m. – Friday morning, to be more accurate. And it’s happened again – I’m wide awake. The odd thing is, normally I’m such a sound sleeper. I close my eyes, and boom! Zzzzzzzzzzz. So what gives with Thursday nights?
    My weekly copy is due – overdue, to be more accurate. I usually submit my columns on Thursday, but when the words don’t flow and I have to literally grind out my 900 words, I drop back and punt – submit it Friday morning. The drop-dead deadline is 11:00 a.m.  Ish.
    Around 9:00 (ish) Friday morning, I can expect an anxious email from Dixie, who sets my copy neatly into Page 2 … “ARE YOU DEAD? WHAT’S UP, POOPIE?”
Dixie sends me notes in all-caps. It’s just her thing, and always makes me laugh. Dixie calls me Poopie because I always say things like, “That’s the poop … the whole poop, and nothing but the poop.”
Anyway, now you know why I’m awake. If I go to bed Thursday night without having finished, the brain lobe controlling unconscious thought goes into hyper overdrive. The looming deadline weighs on me. I wake up in the middle of night and can’t go back to sleep.
To be more accurate, it’s really morning.
Might as well make coffee and see what I can grind out at this ridiculous hour. If I can hack out a rough draft by 5:00 a.m., I might be able to catch a few Z’s before Boulder McGraw wakes up.
    I’m also tired for another reason. I worked really hard yesterday – demanding, physical labor, to be more accurate. Physical labor has never been my thing.
     I’m retired – not used to any form of labor. The old joke was that I went to law school so I didn’t have to work for a living. Actually, to be more accurate, there was some truth to that. Several decades later, I became president/CEO of a large chamber of commerce, and it’s arguable whether I worked even LESS at the chamber.
    So, what’s the poop?
Yesterday – finally! – I finished cleaning out Mother’s house. Hallelujah!
The auction people had already taken the furniture and personal items neither my brother nor I wanted. But there remained a lot of Mother’s personal effects to go through, especially in the storage room.
In the basement dungeon, to be more accurate.
Think I’m joking? There are jars of preserved peaches in a dusty, dungeon cabinet that date to the late 1980’s – 10 years before Mother bought the house. They came with it and I doubt Mother knew about them.
I’m not going to touch the peaches – it’s hazardous waste. You can barely make out what’s inside the jars – the peaches have blackened with age.
Very, very ripe, to be more accurate.
The dungeon section of the basement is a small room you wouldn’t even enter unless you were looking for a dead body.
Meanwhile, sorting through things I began uttering a common phrase – “Mother, Mother, Mother. Why in God’s name did you keep so many things?”
Box after box of old photographs. Albums … photos in frames … family photographs. Old black and white photos of people I don’t even recognize. I’ll say it again – old family photos matter most to the people who took them; they have less and less significance to each succeeding generation.
    In the era before digital photos, people recorded special events: birthdays; weddings; anniversaries, and vacations. They put the photos in boxes or albums and then forgot about them. When that person dies, it falls on us to decide what to do with them.
    Yesterday, I threw out a lot of things, but didn’t have the heart to dump those old photos. I kept the boxes and put them in my garage – fully expecting and hoping that someday I’ll go through them and get things organized.
Which is about as likely as an August blizzard.
    After I’m gone, my children will likely have the same problem. They’ll see these photos of dead relatives and mutter to themselves, “Dad, Dad, Dad. Why in God’s name did you keep all these photographs? Who the heck ARE these people?”
    This unending pattern is the Circle of Life.
Or to be more accurate, the Cycle of Dead People.
Anyone who cleans out a loved one’s personal effects is reminded of another truth about life and living – we all have too much STUFF. We collect stuff. We buy things we don’t need and try to find room in the house for our stuff. Then we go on vacation and buy – MORE stuff. Pretty soon we have so much stuff we need to rent a storage unit to store all our stuff. Which makes more room in the house, so we can buy … yep. NEW stuff. MORE stuff.
    Well, today I got rid of it all. Kept the photos – threw out all the stuff. I’m done, and it’s a huge relief. But now, my friends, it’s almost 5:00 a.m., and I’ve managed to hack out 900 words without really saying one thing worthwhile or significant. Except maybe those black peaches – you’ll remember them, won’t you?
Please forgive me, but I’m (yawn) really tired.
    Dead tired, to be more accurate.

Epilogue: If any readers out there love fruit, I have a few jars of very ripe peaches to sell. No reasonable offer refused. Contact seller at: Rmykl@yahoo.com