AUGUST 21, 2023 – That afternoon, while UB putzed around amidst the collection of jumbled junk and trash that filled his headquarters area, I sat down at the desk in Headquarters Central to read and respond to my office email.
As I waited for my laptop to fire up, I turned to the metal shelves next to me and noticed among the food stores, an antique can of Kemper Nuts. The can itself was a collector’s item, and there was a fair to middling chance, I thought, that it still contained nuts, which, doubtless, would not be a collector’s item, despite their age. I picked up the can and carefully removed the lid. Inside, arranged in perfect order, were about 25 philatelist envelopes, each of which contained a block of four stamps issued between the late 19-teens to the mid-1940s. Having once collected stamps (See 7/27 post – “Arthur”) I recognized many of them—Columbian Exposition, Leif Ericsson commemoratives, for example. Values ranged from moderate to considerable. How had they wound up next to the can of Shop-Rite Cling Peaches? And given the Holman’s tradition of hoarding and longevity, what was the likelihood that the stamps would still be in the Kemper Nuts can when a number of them would be over 100 years old? I replaced the lid and put the can back on the shelf, wondering if any of us, in the distant future, would ever find the can again[1].
After checking my office voice mail and dispensing with a few of my inane office email, I returned to my senses and realized that now was the opportune time to dig through the trash and heaps of paper that filled UB’s offices. Since he and I planned to drive to Connecticut the next day to rendezvous with Nina, who was coming down from Boston, and Jenny, who was taking a train up from New York, I was particularly curious about documents pertaining to Hamburg[2]. Years before, Mother had shown me a copy of Gaga’s will, and it provided that UB would inherit Hamburg in recognition of his care for Gaga and Grandpa in their old age. Everything else was to be divided equally between UB and Mother. Grandpa had died a decade before the fire, and Gaga had been dead for nearly four years, yet when I questioned UB about the status of their trusts and estates, he was very evasive, and would only reveal that “a couple of papers still needed to be filed.” Two days earlier, in UB’s presence, of course, I had found an ancient appraisal of the warehouses, but what other information could be found regarding UB and Mother’s inheritance, and ultimately, that of my sisters and me and our children?
I began my search under the cover of “Say, Uncle Bruce, what do you say we try to organize some of your stuff?” He acquiesced, but I could tell he was less than enthusiastic about it. However, all I wanted was license to search. He gave me that absent-mindedly, and for the most part, left me to my own devices. For his own part, he poked around a box or two, found something to distract himself, and then shuffled through other containers until one crashed from its precarious perch atop a leaning stack of other cartons, spilling the contents irretrievably behind a dust-laden file cabinet.
In the end, my search was futile, and for the first time during that particular sojourn in Rutherford, I felt genuinely and almost physically disturbed by the chaos factor. As I combed through box upon crate upon Hefty bag of papers, hardware, obsolete household objects, and gadgets still in their K-Mart packaging, it became abundantly clear to me that to the end of time, the fire would be the excuse for the chaos that resided as much in UB’s mind as it did among all of his possessions. He had no intention of organizing—let alone throwing out—the mess that the fire had created, or, more precisely, had revealed and caused to be transported from 42 Lincoln to Headquarters—never mind the piles of crap, stuff, garbage and yes, valuables, that had already been crammed into the warehouses since time immemorial.
Mostly horrified by the chaos, I managed to find humor in the process of seeking what I could never find. I treated each container like a jack-in-the box. What mess of papers would I find in this box? I’d ask myself, as I pulled the top flaps. What collection of discarded Comet cleanser containers, K-Mart clocks and thermometers (still in their packaging) would spring out of this carton?
Atop one stack of unorganized papers was the 1936 corporate tax return of “Junior Trucking Corporation,” a company that Grandpa had established in the early thirties to haul gravel for roadwork in Rutherford.
In one of the rooms of my expedition, I found several large, plastic bins of videotapes. I estimated the total number by counting the tapes in each layer and the number of layers in each bin, times the number of bins—84 tapes per bin; over 300 in all. Each bore a label in UB’s hand-writing. Most were TV documentaries, but many were TV movies. I wondered how many of the tapes had ever been viewed.
A while later, as I rifled through a line of boxes stuffed with broken, rusted, bent, used-up kitchenware, I posed a radical thought. “Uncle Bruce,” I called out, as he rummaged through junk in an adjoining office. “A lot of this stuff could really be thrown away, don’t you think?”
This touched a sore spot, and he snapped at me. “You don’t realize how much time it would take to go out and replace all these things.” Just as he said this, I opened a box with four or five ancient, boxy, broken radio-alarm clocks. Suddenly, I experienced a flash-back to that occasion 30 years before, almost to the day, when from my dorm window at Sterling School in Vermont, I had watched my eccentric uncle pull a burgundy, shoe-box size container from the trunk of his Mustang, as a black cord dropped from the box—the clock radio that he had brought to me on Parents’ Weekend, the clock radio that would re-introduce classical music into my life. I pondered the consequences of randomness: what if UB had grabbed one of these clock radios, instead of having chosen the burgundy clock-radio, which, because its regular alarm hadn’t worked, I had switched to the radio alarm, which, because of my remote location in Vermont had worked with only one station—the CBC from Montreal—which, in turn is what got me hooked on classical music?
“I’d have to take all kinds of time to try to replace all these things,” he repeated aloud to himself.
Knowing this was utter bullshit, I wanted to shout the obvious: 99% of this doesn’t need to be replaced, but not wanting to experience even a verbal fireworks display inside an old warehouse filled with combustibles, I bit my tongue. “Well then,” I said. “Why don’t you hire a service to do it for you?”
“You might as well put me in a rocker,” he answered. Cliff would later remark, after hearing my description of this exchange, that this was a lose-lose conversation. It was a classic case of UB logic. It was “the world according to Bruce.” (Cont.)
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© 2023 by Eric Nilsson
[1] They never would see the light of day—at least in a room occupied by Cliff or me.
[2] “Hamburg” is the unincorporated hamlet on the south and east shore of “Upper Hamburg Cove,” where our family’s property is located. My sisters and I grew accustomed to Mother, UB and Grandpa referring to the property as “Hamburg” (pronounced “Hamboig” by Grandpa) or simply, “the country” by Gaga. For decades, a wooden sign bearing the name, “Escape Hatch” hung from a front, lower eave, but I rarely heard anyone call it that. When my nieces, Hillary and Erica (the latter a stand-up comedian and actress)—both Nina’s daughters—lived together in New York and spent considerable time at the house, they renamed it “Lyme Light,” a play (so to speak) on Erica’s stage career and “Lyme,” which is the name of the township (founded in 1667) where Hamburg Cove is located.
