My parents have 4 kids. 3 of us have pretty much moved out, though you can't tell by walking around the place. Every room seems as though it couldn't hold anything more than it does. It's not to the point of my Grandmother's house, but it still seems excessive.
It's the typical caretaker/collector scenario. Collect so much stuff that you could never possibly utilize all of it. Or even half of it. There's a Beta VCR here along with a collection of Beta tapes. My dad is the consummate collector. Books, bugs (dead ones), animals (live ones, mostly reptiles), fossils, and plants. On the second floor of my dad's house, there are 5 bedrooms. Out of the 5 bedrooms, there are exactly 0 that don't have at least 1 bookcase in them, and most have 2. The one room has 8. There are quite a few books here. I'll give my dad some credit on these, he's read a lot of them. But I don't know that he's read half of them.
The bugs, well, there are quite a few of those, too. He has 3 five foot cabinets filled with bugs. Not to mention the stack of bug cases that sit on top of the bug cabinets. This is a collection that has grown out of control over the past few years. Aaron, my youngest brother, is helping to feed that addiction. Every year, they spend around $500 at Christmas on bugs. You can imagine that $500 buys a lot of bugs. They usually put together one or two more of those orders throughout the rest of the year, too.
I could write quite a bit about the reptiles. I grew up in a pet store, that was my parents' business for a long time. And once you're into reptiles, you can't leave. My dad had a friend, George, who was in the pet business, and particularly reptiles. George has this cycle that probably continues to this day. He gets out of having reptiles. And then he starts to acquire them again. And then he gets rid of them again. Etc. Getting bit by a cobra didn't stop him. Getting bit by a rattlesnake didn't stop him. My dad's a lot smarter, or at least a lot less stupid than George. He's never gotten bit by anything, but that's not to say there haven't been some close calls.
This morning wasn't a close call, but it's amusing nonetheless. This story is representative of my dad's reptile life. I go down to the basement today (where the reptiles are kept), and my dad's saying, "What the fuck!? What the fuck happened here!? Where the fuck's the lock!?" The cage that he was looking at was reasonably small, which is usually a bad sign. In this case, it wasn't so bad. I asked him what was in there. "A gila monster." For those of you out there who don't know, there are two venomous lizards in the world. The gila monster, and the beaded lizard. Both look similar (gilas have coloring that is pink/orange, beaded lizards have yellow coloring and get much larger than the gilas). Gilas are usually only about a foot long. And neither the gilas or beaded lizards are aggressive. They're like American children: extremely sedentary, only moving when it's time to eat. So anyway, somehow this one had gotten out. That's typical experience for everyone, right? Venemous lizards on the loose in your house?
It turned out to be no big deal in this case, my dad had found him in 30 minutes, he had crawled into the compressor area of the freezer. But this is typical. Neighbors find lizards or snakes that have no natural reason for being found in Eastern Pennsylvania.
My mom's collections are a lot less intrusive into the lives of the neighbors. She collects three things, primarily. Patterns for making clothes, fabric to make said clothes, and paper. Nevermind the fact that it has been probably 10 years or more since she's made an article of clothing. And believe me, you don't want to wear it anyway. But that doesn't stop her from keeping that stuff. It wouldn't be so bad, except that she just has a fucking mountain of it. But her true collection is scraps of paper. She cuts out articles from magazine and newspapers to give to people. Every time I come home, I have something to read that she saved from Fortune or Newsweek from 2 months ago. But though she actually gets rid of the shit she gives me, you can't tell by looking at her room. It's an unbelievable mess. If you've seen my grandmother's place, you'll get the idea of what her bedroom looks like. That degree of mess hasn't spread to the rest of the house, but it's probably inevitable. My mom and her siblings took 4 8'x'6'x20' dumpsters' worth of junk out of my grandmother's; at least I know what's coming.
When the 3 older kids were growing up, we each had our own room. We had to fit whatever we had into that one room. Since now 3 of us have departed, Aaron has taken it upon himself to make my parents feel that there are still 4 kids in the house. He does this by having junk in every room of the house. There are times when he takes over 3 rooms of the house with his junk. I guess it's the only child syndrome, though I sure wouldn't know.
In other news, one of my major accomplishments of yesterday was learning how to do those Magic Eye things. For years, I've tried to do them; my mom loves them, has a ton of those stupid books laying around. Last night, while waiting for a phone call, I noticed the book on the shelf of one of the bookcases in the room that I'm staying in. Disney Magic Eye, that's where I lost my Magic Eye virginity. It turned out to be much simpler than I thought. Rather than listening to what people have told me about how to do them, I did something novel: I read the instructions. Who would have thought that they'd actually have instructions in those books; I should have done that a long time ago, apparently. :-)
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