JULY 6, 2023 -(Cont.) By this time (autumn, 1980) in the course of my evolving inheritance, Mother had been making regular trips back East. The stated reason was to “give [UB] some relief in caring for Gaga and Grandpa,” but in truth she was on a major guilt trip for having left her family and moved all the way to alien Minnesota.
At least that’s how I looked at it, especially after the reality about Mother struck approximately 15 years later. She really didn’t provide that much “relief” that I could see, and I noticed that her mission seemed to drift from “caring for Gaga and Grandpa” to “helping” UB and Grandpa with “paperwork.” She noticed, of course, the long hours that Grandpa maintained day in and day out, and when she remarked to him about it, he would respond with a long monologue with repetitive themes: 1. Taxes; 2. Paperwork; and 3. The impossibility of finding reliable, competent “help.” With absolutely no clue about what was really going on, Mother propagated these explanations for Grandpa’s long, grinding work hours. “Poor Grandpa,” she’d say to the rest of us. “He has to work so hard. There’s so much paperwork created by taxes, and it’s impossible these days to find competent people you can rely on.”
After only a couple of days on the Holman, Inc. payroll and observing what really went on, I realized that what kept Grandpa at work from 6:00 a.m. to 10:00 p.m. each day was not “paperwork,” “taxes,” or the dearth of able, reliable “help,” but a serious obsessive-compulsive disorder, exacerbated, no doubt, by old age. Since UB and Mother, I would later realize, suffered from the same disorder, it was no surprise that they would not detect it in Grandpa. And frankly, in as a callow 25-year-old who hadn’t taken a single college psychology class, I didn’t then understand Grandpa’s behavior as “obsessive-compulsive.” I simply knew that he clung to things—things literally, and perceptions and routines—habitually, irrationally.
The “paperwork” turned out to be accounting paper bearing all sorts of repetitive entries regarding the modest number of storage lots that still came into the warehouse and rent checks that were received from the handful of small, commercial tenants who occupied haphazard office and retail space within the complex of old, dilapidated buildings owned by Holman Holding Company, the affiliate of Holman, Inc. Grandpa would start one ledger, misplace it, start another, transpose a few figures, start afresh yet again. I knew this from my sleuthing operations while he was away at a meeting at the Masonic Lodge or the savings and loan. “Taxes,” as in sales and payroll taxes, were simply an extension of the on-again-off again approach to “paperwork.”
“Unreliable, incompetent help,” meant the local high school non-honor roll student who had been hired part-time and who didn’t know instinctively that when you pushed a floor broom, you didn’t (for God’s sake!) lift the broom after a forward stroke, because if you did, for crying out loud, it would allow the dust to rise in a cloud off the floor and settle all over another section of the garage floor, which, of course, was so perpetually filthy from decades of grease and grime, it could never be very clean, no matter how competently you pushed a broom.
“Unreliable, incompetent help” also meant the plumber hired out of the local Yellow Pages (because the “reliable, competent one” had retired 20 years ago) who showed up at 3:00 p.m. instead of “around noon” and who insisted on replacing (instead of patching) a section of rusted-out pipe that had been installed back in 1902.
Once I realized that all the “paperwork,” taxes” and lack of “competent, reliable help” were pretty much one big fiction, I was able to see that the mountain ranges of junk and clutter in Grandpa’s domain was just that—junk and clutter. It had been accumulating for decades, of course. Much of it was understandable—the family had been in the moving and warehouse business for three generations, and if I didn’t watch out, I’d be making it four generations. (Cont.)
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© 2023 by Eric Nilsson
