The World According To Anne Arky

As I mentioned, I spent weeks agonizing over what I was going to do with all this furniture and stuff explosion that was coming my way, and Melanie and I worked diligently to arrange and rearrange things to make it happen. Fortunately I had measured everything that I knew was coming to my house before I left Virginia, so we didn’t have to estimate, we could actually make specific plans, although at times Melanie swore my measurements were bound to be off and this was never going to work. It did – everything fit just where I planned for it to be. There were two items that I hadn’t figured out what I would do with, and as we speak, they are in my garage waiting for placement. Neither of them is anything I care to part with, as one is a child’s homework desk that was given to me by a neighbor when I was about six years old, and I’m as sentimental as a homemade Valentine. If someone gives me something, I’m apt to still have it some thirty to fifty years later, just based on the fact that so-and-so gave it to me. (This, of course, all depends on just exactly who gave it to me – I’ve cheerfully tossed almost every piece of anything Mike ever gave me unless I was attached to it in spite of him – but never because of him – and likewise a few other people’s stuff goes the same way, but you get the idea.) The other item awaiting placement is a bookcase my father and mother built, which sure as heck isn’t going anywhere outside of my possession.

Among the things that arrived at my house in this exercise was the rest of my dish collection. I have four sets of antique dishes that I actively collect, and one of them is the same set that Mother bought in the 1960s. My collection started out as my buying replacement items for her, and ultimately she told me to stop buying her any more, but not before I had stumbled across a couple of huge piles of it, so I just started collecting it myself. Mind you, I have a china cabinet that I bought soon after buying my house, but it’s filled to the brim and beyond with the main set that I collect, so a couple of years ago I bought a barrister’s bookcase for some other dishes, which sits beside the china cabinet. I figured when the rest of my dishes arrived, I needed to have a place to put them, so lo and behold, I found not one, but two barrister bookcases for sale on Craig’s List for the same price I had paid for my original one, so I arranged to buy both of them, figuring that while I really only need one right now, having a “spare” would not be a bad idea because sure as shit, in a year or so I’ll need another one and wish I had gotten it. So I did. The beauty of using barrister bookcases is that just like a glass-fronted china cabinet, the stuff you put in them doesn’t have to be dusted, and believe me, I have a lot of stuff that I want not to have to dust.

During this move, when we needed padding for furniture, I managed to accumulate – and was then forced to wash – enough sheets to outfit a KKK rally, so long as it was sponsored by Martha Stewart, because they were all sheets with prints and not solid white. Unfortunately, except for the ones I took off my own bed to wash with the rest of them, I really didn’t have any that I cared to put on the new bed downstairs, so this meant that I had to go buy some new sheets for the “new” (but quite an antique, actually) bed at my house.

Last weekend, I was going out with Tami to visit our friends for dinner, and I was telling her that these friends were taking me the next day to get the barrister bookcases (they often get drafted for my wild furniture chases, owing to their having a truck and a great disposition about it). I also mentioned that even though I’m oversheeted to within an inch of my life, I planned to go this week to get a set for the new bed. Later, her car radio jolted to life to remind her that she had merely turned it down and not off, and when I asked her if she’d heard that faint noise, she said, “What noise?” I blinked and said, “You know – the voices I’m hearing that say, ‘Buy more furniture! Buy more sheets!’”

P.S. Got the sheets, got the bookcases. What next?

My sister, the executrix of Mother and Daddy’s estate, was pretty well determined to divide up Mother’s stuff during the weekend of the funeral and get the house emptied out as soon as possible so we could sell it. I didn’t have the money to get a truck and make my part of that process happen right then, and I figured we were all going to be one big walking nerve ending and not likely to have much interest in being diplomatic or considerate of each other’s feelings. (Even on a good day, we usually aren’t that, and I didn’t reckon on that weekend being filled with good days.) She was hell-bent to do it, though, so I steeled myself to be ready to walk out of the house empty-handed, without looking back. I still remember vividly the 1974 estate brawl between my parents and Uncle Asshole and his wife (I was the only one of the three of us kids that witnessed it, and I was on the front lines), and it almost came down to a blood letting. Since then, I had been dreading the property split we would someday have, knowing that despite the fact that she has more money than the rest of the whole family combined and could go out and buy anything she wants, my sister had a way of getting anything and everything she wanted and wanting everything I wanted just because I wanted it, and my brother wasn’t much better (minus the money factor). Thirty-three years is a long time to have something hanging over your head, you know? I had a lot of things in the house that I’d put in storage years ago, and I was pretty well ready to walk off and leave it and everything, because I just wasn’t ready to get into any knock-down drag-out fights over things. Also, some of the things I really wanted were heirloom-type things, like a cabinet my dad’s dad had commissioned to be built in the 1930s, which he left to my mother, because while he was the designer and owner, it was her uncle who had built it, so it was a double family heirloom, with history from both sides of the family. (Sort of like the furniture equivalent of double first cousins.) There was a time when I would have gone to the mat for things like that, but a few years ago I realized that having family heirlooms in my possession wasn’t nearly as important as it could have been, since I don’t have anybody to pass it on to – kids of my own, anyway. Somewhere along the way, the whole thing just ceased to be of much importance at all. If it came to it, I was just going to get in the car and leave and never look back, because frankly, it’s just stuff, and they could just stuff it. If there’s one thing I do NOT have a shortage of, it’s stuff.

But you know what? Amazingly, it went very well, and everybody seemed exceedingly polite about what they wanted, making sure that nobody else minded or wanted a particular item before laying claim to it. I had envisioned that it would be a “gimme-I-want fest” and quickly be reduced to the bloodshed level, but as far as I know, everyone got everything they wanted, and I only gave up one of the four things that I absolutely wanted. I didn’t feel like I had to give that one up, but it was number four on my list, and it turned out that I was getting a lot of other things I had not counted on (some of which I longed for years ago but figured I’d never get after I found out that my sister wanted them as well), so I could afford to be generous. Besides, with all the other stuff I was going to be getting, I wouldn’t have had room for it anyway, so it was easy. Like I said, everyone prefaced every desire with, “If you don’t mind…” or “If nobody wants this, I’d like it.” I kept wondering who these people were and what aliens had possessed my family, all the while wondering if they would keep them, because I liked these people! Very strange! My brother, of course, did have to show his ass at least once while we were there. He did so while we were in Florida, also, and probably did irreparable damage to his relationship with his daughter. I’ll spare you the details, but I will tell you that when she was deciding what to take from Mother’s house, she elected to leave behind the toy box my brother had bought her for Christmas in 1977, probably the only thing he ever bought her. This was not an accident, as it was quite visible in the mix, and her husband told my sister that they were leaving it and that it was a hard decision for her. To me, that she left it spoke volumes for the future of their relationship.

The funniest part about the property split was that the only argument anyone ever had over anything was after everything in the house had been divided up and most of us were already gone, at which point my sister and brother almost came to blows after everyone else left – over my Squeegy that I’d inadvertently left in the driveway! The only reason I even heard about it was that I knew my sister was having someone come over and haul off the junk from Mother’s carport and such, and I just wanted to alert her to the fact that there was a perfectly good Squeegy that I’d left there, and someone should take and keep it rather than letting it go to the dump. She told me they had already discovered it and fought over it, with each of them yelling, “But I wanted that!” and she ended up with it. How weird! Even funnier is that she brought it back to me when I saw her last month (more on that later). I didn’t want it back – I just didn’t want it to get tossed as trash.

I spent the next month and a half trying to figure out what I was going to do with all this furniture that was coming my way (not to mention the boxes and boxes of things both mine and Mother’s). I sold the white wicker bedroom set I’d bought soon after I bought my house, and I gave away a couch and chair. Then Melanie and I spent the next few weeks moving mountains – mountains of furniture, mountains of boxes, etc. Presidents’ Day weekend, I drove up to Virginia and my sister met me there; we spent Saturday and Sunday getting things ready to be moved (she had already spent a couple of weekends before helping my niece and her husband get the rest of the things they couldn’t get in early January – my brother got all his the weekend of Mother’s funeral), and Monday we drove back to Georgia, with her driving the truck and me driving my car. The next day, she flew back to DC. I had wanted her and her husband to stop by my house en route to Mother’s when they left Florida, but she said he was (in essence) acting like an ass and would likely not make it a pleasant overnight stay, so she would come to Georgia with me when I got my stuff from Mother’s later. It worked out very well, and we had a nice visit. The trip was supposed to consist of both of us getting our stuff, with her son and his fiancé riding down with her, renting a truck and one of them driving back the truck and one driving back the car to DC with her stuff and the things her son is taking, but the fiancé’s grandfather is ill, so they didn’t make the trip, so she drove down in Mother’s car, which she left at Mother’s to be retrieved later.

After my sister and her husband finally got back to Mother’s house (remember they were stuck in Florida for days after Mother died), they found Mother’s walker, BOTH her canes and her nebulizer. I’m not exactly sure what a nebulizer is, but it’s some kind of lung treatment that is like an inhaler to the tenth power or something – something she used when she was REALLY out of breath – and it was a machine with medicine that had to be loaded into it and something she could only use at home. Because they were short on room in the car and because they were in such an all-fired hurry, they left all that behind. Like I said, they took her down to Florida and killed her.

Please know that I didn’t begrudge my mother a trip to Florida. On the contrary, I wanted her to go, and I pretty much wanted and expected her to spend the winter down there. She was so excited about the trip, and according to people in her town I spoke to at her funeral, it was all she talked about for weeks prior. But I wanted her to use some common sense about it and see to her health in the process. Common sense was something else that probably wouldn’t have fit in the car, so I guess they left that back at her house.

My sister has it in her head that Mother’s death was a deliberate thing on her (Mother’s) behalf because she had been in quite a lot of pain with her shoulder (she had fallen into the corner of her stove last summer and hurt it) and she had galloping osteoporosis that was causing lots of little breaks in her backbone causing her more pain. Also, even though she was bound and determined not to follow the example of my aunt and my grandmother when their respective spouses died and just sit down and wait to die to be with them, and she was determined to build as much of a life as was possible without Daddy, plainly and simply, she just missed him. A hell of a lot. After 57 years, how could she not? So my sister thinks that Mother had a plan to just thumb her nose at the world and the fates and go to Florida to die. I personally think that’s so much bullshit and that Mother never would have done that to us, but whatever it takes to get you through the night, I guess…. I’m still quite convinced that they just took her down to Florida and killed her. (Third verse, same as the first.)

Sometimes, just when you think you are at your wits’ end and you really can’t take anything else piled on top of whatever it is you feel trapped under, some dimwit comes along and dumps a little more, just for good measure.

The day was Sunday, and the date was 23 December, two days before Christmas; at 0800 that day, Mother had died. I was a total zombie, and about as grubby as I could be, but I had about 141 things to do that day, including get in the shower and then get dressed and ready to go out – I had a dinner date, and while I was quite sure I wasn’t going to be the life of the party, I still felt I needed to get out and do something. Around 1230 that day, someone rang my doorbell. My first thought was that it must be one of my friends I’d notified about Mother, throwing courtesy to the wind and coming because they thought I needed them. I didn’t want to answer the door because I was seven shades of grubby and grungy, hadn’t even brushed my hair or teeth and was still in my pajamas. Not exactly ready to play "Welcome Wagon" and greet company at the door.

To my utter and everlasting shock and dismay, this moron who said his name was Robert Something-or-other showed up on my doorstep wanting to know some information about my “bad blood” with “the woman who used to be your neighbor”, a/k/a Krazy Kristy. It seems they (it was never clear to me who “they” were) had her on medication and it hadn’t worked, so they were trying to have her put away and they needed some information, but every time I started to tell him anything, he kept talking over me and saying “I know this and I know that”, and finally, after trying twice to get his attention to beg off, I yelled, “Shut the hell up and LISTEN to me! My mother died five hours ago, and I don’t need this! Goodbye!” I slammed the door on him and haven’t heard from him since. My sister suggested later that he might actually have been sent by Kristy just to see what I’d say about her, and I probably should have called the cops. Considering my state of dishabille, and not wanting to entertain the local gendarmerie either in my grubby pajamas and general state or after I had cleaned up and get a lecture on why I should have called them sooner, I didn’t, but I wish I had. If I ever hear from him again, I will. Anyway, whatever this bozo might have expected me to say, I bet that wasn’t it.

Later that evening, my friend and I went out to dinner and then stopped by Walgreens for something (I forget what). I was still quite the walking zombie, and when I encountered a teen-aged girl who kept zigging and zagging and making it nigh onto impossible for me to get around her, her mother said, “Get out of that woman’s way!” The girl did, and then her mother said to her, “Not everybody has the Christmas spirit!” and glared at me. I came to within a hair of yelling at her, “Well, not everybody’s mother died this morning, so go fuck yourself and your Christmas spirit!” Just a friendly reminder that we never know what someone we don’t know (or even someone we do know) is going through when their actions seem thoughtless, inconsiderate or inconsiderate. I tend to be very impatient at times, so I’m making it a point to remember that incident as a reminder of that thought, painful though it may be.

Labels: Nutty Neighbors