July 8, 2023 – (Cont.) Feeling confident, I asked Gaga, “So, what do you think about my tackling all the junk in the driveway along the side of the house?”
“Go right ahead!” she said. “For years I’ve been waiting for someone to get rid of it all, but no one listens to me.”
In the driveway separating UB’s gardens from his row of dilapidated sheds and garages housing badly jumbled horticultural implements and supplies, lay a conglomeration of pallets, scrap metal, steel beams, girders, stainless steel laboratory sinks and counters. Who knows how and why this junk heap had landed there, but as I had already witnessed during my days on the payroll, UB and Grandpa were hoarders and scavengers of the first order. Grandpa’s penchant in this regard, however, was of a biblical order of magnitude.
Between UB’s row of Dickensian gardening garages and the real (perpendicular to the ground), fortress-like, vehicular garage abutting the warehouse complex were two gigantic rectangular panels of structured metal. One day I asked Grandpa how those industrial-gauge something-or-others had wound up on the property.
“H-h-h,” he said. “One dy I ws drvng bck frm a Lion’ Club lnch ovr in Lyndhoist [his Jersey way of pronouncing “Lyndhurst”] nd I hppnd upn th scne of n accdnt nd a trcktr-trlr lyng on its sde.[1] Whn I dscvrd they plnnd to jnk it, I had m hl it hr. Thoes pnls cld b usd as a rf fr an xtr grg we mght wnt to bld smeday.”
Except, more than 12 years had passed since those semi-trailer panels and the surrounding industrial-gauge heaps had grown into a sculptural mountain covering the driveway. Decades earlier Grandpa had had the asphalt laid over what had been a fine tennis court—an amenity that Great Grandpa Holman had built in 1910—next to his dream house.
Whenever I’d visited before 1980, the junk heap had offended my personal code of aesthetics. Now that I was on the payroll, however, I saw that large-scale scrap as a monument to a genetic propensity for saving, accumulating . . . hoarding . . . stuff. If Grandpa lacked an immediate plan for all that junk, he just knew that someday, it would come in handy, it would be useful, it would serve an exact need, it would all fit perfectly into place.
Years later, I would confront UB’s extreme hoarding, and I would recognize the same trait in Mother: for example, her habit of taking the red tape that was wrapped around bananas and sticking one end to the top of the inside of a cabinet door in the pantry, until the door was mostly red. I can’t remember that the tape was ever re-used—or tossed.
Most frightening, I realized the hoarding gene was raging in my own life, as I treated containers as if they were some sort of valuable currency. To this day, I have trouble throwing away “perfectly good” boxes, jars, or cartons: what better thing to save than containers in which smaller things can be stored![2]
In sharp contrast to the rest of her immediate family, Gaga was a tidy, non-hoarder, and she often lamented how powerless she was to assail the mountain of junk outside the house. With her approval and encouragement, I pulled out the Yellow Pages and called a number of scrap metal dealers in the area, found the best deal and arranged for the dealer to come and haul away the monument to Grandpa’s obsessive-compulsive disorder.
As with the magazine-newspaper disposal project, I had first checked Grandpa’s schedule to ensure that he would be away at a meeting of the Lion’s Club or the board of directors of the Boiling Springs Savings & Loan. And as with that recycling operation, Grandpa re-appeared without warning and stated his strong disapproval of my cleanup mission.
Ironically, I was so overcome with surprise at the sight of his gold-colored Cadillac pulling into the driveway, I dropped a large section of “salvaged” heating duct on my right foot. The result was a hematoma under my big toenail. It hurt like hell for a day and a half until a local podiatrist applied some medieval method to relieve the pressure. As for Grandpa, he soon got over the loss of his junk and never said another word about it. (Cont.)
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© 2023 by Eric Nilsson
[1] This wasn’t Grandpa’s first rodeo. The photo accompanying this post was taken by him at the scene of another truck accident decades earlier.
[2] Time out. I inherited a good dose of the hoarding instinct. I remember hoarding acorns, for crying out loud, when I was a little kid. I liked the look of the fruit of the old burr oaks in our yard. I set about collecting the better specimens, until I had several sandbox pails full of acorns. But why? Was I emulating nature or mimicking influential people in my young life, who were products of the Great Depression? Or was it genetic? In any event, I finally reached a point where my pails had to be emptied into a sizable cardboard box that Mother contributed to the enterprise. Finally, after admiring the huge quantity that I’d collected—hoarded—it occurred to me exactly what to do with them. My hands weren’t very big, but I sank them both deep into the box of acorns and grabbed as many as I could. I then stepped to the edge of our yard and threw the little bomblets with all my might. It felt so good, I repeated this action, casting another batch of acorns into the street. With reckless abandon, I continued until my hoard was gone. Yet I knew there were many more acorns to be harvested. What pure joy it gave me to be so rich in acorns I could throw them to the winds, as many as I wished and have plenty more to collect. But it was a rare deviation for a hoarder like me—something Grandpa never experienced, I’m sure.
