GETTING READY TO GET READY, THEN WHAT

Are baby boomers getting ready?

They’ve been getting ready all their life.

The boomer baby is continually shown as a rebel, a kid who grew up with a pledge to ‘not be like our parents.’

It was fine until one day we became parents.

It was fine until we got all the left-overs.

From too many tea cups from so many tea parties, like the one last month, to enough creamers for five parties at the same time:

 

 

The pledge to not be like Mom and Dad took a turn.

More than once I opened the door to one of my big city dive apartments and remembered what it was like opening the door to the North Bend houses.

We were the first to live in both houses.

One was the last house on the block next to the woods, with more woods and sand dunes across the street.

That was the small house. The big house was different..

It sat on a corner with sand dunes across the street. (Hey Paul)

The woods grew next to the dunes.

The apartments were all a mystery. Someone could have been murdered in there and I’d never know.

I do know that no one was murdered in my childhood homes.

 

A Living, Breathing, Warehouse

We become more like our parents when their clutter becomes our clutter, except when it’s not clutter and instead it’s a bond with the past.

Nothing says bond like a cow shaped butter cover.

Or a special egg cup. Who wouldn’t want to tap one of those.

Or share a dance with one of the ballerinas?

They’re getting ready, but for what I don’t know.

Maybe a box?

 

Tiny Dancer In A Box

When a blogger starts writing about clutter, you know they’re on to something.

Look around and say everything you see is in its proper place.

It is?

Oh, sure, I’m the only one with cups and creamers and delicate statues with missing fingers?

But I’m not. If it’s not one thing, it’s another.

It’s either enough dishes to serve a small kingdom, or enough tools to open a hardware store.

Who has both? Me.

I’ve got furniture from my Mom, comic books from my Dad, a huge tool chest from my father in-law, and tons of stuff from my globe trotting mother in-law, along with the books and photo albums for reference.

I’ll admit looking through the stuff has an educational value.

I’ve been interested in the lives of others.

You tune into the lives of others after a couple of decades of looking at their stuff working in a history museum.

But it all becomes oppressive, eventually.

 

Getting Ready To Get Ready

Toward the end of his life, my Dad talked about the years stacking up and getting heavier and heavier.

To be helpful, I said, “Why not take a load off and put them somewhere else?”

Now that I’ve got a few years on him, I get it.

If you don’t have a plan, a strategy to deal with your shit, it keeps stacking up.

What’s the plan if you get tired of looking at the same old, same old?

Move:

In New York, one of the older guys at work decided to move his wife and kids to California.

He was maybe forty.

The idea of moving to California stirred up the lifers on the floor who would never move ten minutes away from their beloved city that never sleeps.

They talked about California like it was Italy.

“Things are different out there.”

“They do things differently out there.”

I agreed with my work pals without pointing out that California was still in America.

It wasn’t their fault they didn’t know where the states were.

At first they thought Oregon was next to Wyoming. It’s a common mistake?

When writers start writing about getting ready, it means one thing:

Start submitting work.

That could mean moving off from boomerpdx?

Well wait one minute on that idea.