73 : Throw it All Away
I set my alarm for seven o’clock that morning, just in case. But it was hardly necessary. By 6:30, Yali was already bouncing on Oxbear’s head, buried under the pillows. Wake-up time.
7:30, and Mom pulled in the driveway to scoop up the boys for a day of fun out at the Big House. Because Oxbear and I had work to do. We were throwing everything away, everything within reason, to prepare for a hopeful summer move.
Oxbear left early and returned with a sack of breakfast and a large roll of 55-gallon trash bags. And so we buried ourselves in the basement for the morning.
Four and a half hours later, I extracted myself from the ruins of what had once been three decades of memories, and felt pretty satisfied with the results – about eight giant trash bags waiting for the dump. Of course it helped that every time I asked Oxbear…
“I don’t know. What do you think about this one?”…
…he easily replied every time, “Toss it.”
I looked at what remained on the shelves at the end of our endeavors. “It’s basically just Christmas and my old journals left.”
“We could get rid of Christmas,” Oxbear suggested.
“We could… But then we wouldn’t have Christmas…”
Oxbear agreed to leave Christmas alone. It was sort of his holiday after all. But he did decide to donate the old Nintendo and a handful of zombie movies. When we dropped them off with heaps of other stuff at Goodwill before lunch, one of the youngsters managing deliveries had a big “Thanks, man!” waiting for him.
When we finally got around to picking up the boys at four o’clock, Mom assured me that they had behaved themselves, and had a great day to boot. Things like eating popcorn in the yard under a tree, readings in 1950s “The Happy Hollisters”, bike rides, etc. All that Grandma’s House stuff. Puck proudly displayed his skills at riding his Aunt Irish’s bike up the street, to prove that he was now tall enough for an adult bike.
“I’m really good at riding this bike,” he declared several times, as if to seal the deal on dropping by a bike shop on the way home for an upgrade.
Several plates of tortellini, ravioli, and Texas toast later, Oxbear and Puck hit up the movies for “Angry Birds” while Yali hit the feathers and I watched some of my old go-to classic, “Midsomer Murders”.