A hundred pictures of Jesus; Grampa's secrets III

Grampa McMahon does OK at the funeral of his wife of 60 years.

Goes home and shuts down.

By "shuts down" I mean he went back to the home he had shared with his Heintzman girl for sixty years. Stopped eating. Stopped drinking. Stopped looking after himself.

Stopped living.

They found him on the floor in a coma a week later. All but dead. Had a leg amputated just to keep him alive.

Put him in a home.

The dreamer and the Weston's VP had different ideas on how to handle Bernie.

But they finally agreed that he belonged in a "home".

Bernie goes to a home, and the rest of us set about clearing out the house.

I was the only family member with a truck, so I was front and centre for the clean-up.

For many years no visitors to the McMahon household had been permitted beyond the front room. The front room had plastic on the couch cushions and a picture of Jesus on the wall.

Finally we were able to get past the front room.

Pictures of Jesus everywhere.

Egg cartons and newspapers and magazines everywhere, once you got past the front room.

They were big-time hoarders.

You got down to the basement, and besides the newspapers and magazines piled so high you could barely navigate your way through, there were hundreds if not thousands of empty gin bottles.

And pill bottles.

Apparently these pillars of the catholic community had spent the last fifty years ginned up, pilled up, and generally fucked up as they dictated morality to the rest of the community, as devout Catholics are wont to do.

I made five or six trips to the Cambridge landfill with the box of my pick-up truck filled with old magazines. I took hundreds and thousands of Life, Look, Time, and Newsweek magazines from the 30's to the 70's to the landfill, as well as thousands of empty pill and liquor bottles.

Not two weeks later I was walking through the Stone Road Mall, and a bunch of nostalgia merchants had set up their kiosks in the place. They were selling magazines from the 30's on up, from five bucks on up.

It suddenly occurred to me that in the past month I'd taken a couple of million dollars worth of nostalgia to the landfill...

...more soon.

It's not hoarding; I just have a lot of stuff

The Farm Manager has been on my case to organize the garage. By "organize" she means clean up or clear out.

That's a tall order. Damn near overwhelming. In fact, I dare say I am overwhelmed.

What's driving this is the need to put the Mustang Fifty away for the winter. I had thought the barn, but that doesn't make sense when there's a garage right by the house. Trouble is, the garage is full.

I've been out here planning the clean up all afternoon. Eventually I had to bring the laptop out here, partly out of curiosity whether the Wi-Fi reaches this far, and partly because to plan this job properly I'm going to have to generate a couple of spreadsheets and maybe a power-point presentation.

That's my story anyway.

The garage collection has in actuality spilled out from the garage. Just for an example, the snow-blower, which will be called upon in the first blizzard of the year, has spend months sitting in the weather in front of the garage, while at least two non-operable lawnmowers take up space inside.

That simply makes no sense whatsoever.

Not that those lawnmowers need to be inoperable. Just need a little tinkering. But there are only so many hours in a day.

Then there's a very substantial NordicTrack treadmill. This is a veritable Cadillac of treadmills. This puppy will do everything short of cooking your breakfast. You can even hook it up to your computer. I have no clue why anyone would want to do that, but it's got the connection ports just in case.

It fell out of use even long before one of the hounds chewed the cord off it. I put on a new cord about a year ago. Not that anyone has used it since, but it's nice to know it works.

There's a drum kit. My 200 watt bass amp. Another hand-built amp I use with the harp. A couple of guitars... three or four if you count the acoustics. The DeWalt generator I bought to replace the one the dog ate. A big bin of assorted Hotwheel tracks and accessories. Another bin of Lego paraphernalia.

All of this might come in handy for the day we have to entertain grandchildren.

There are many boxes of books and notes that are the residue of a long ago sociology degree.

An air hockey table that glows in the dark, in case you want to play air hockey in the dark.

Three bicycles. My daughter's little starter bike with a basket on the front. Grandchild material again. My Raleigh road bike that is so old it was actually built in England. Junior's mountain bike that he has long since outgrown.

That Raleigh still has the mounting hardware on it from the child seat that used to be mounted over the back tire. We must have done hundreds of miles of bike rides. We used it till Junior was maybe getting a little too heavy for it, because one day we set out and the first corner I took, the seat toppled off the back of the bike and Junior did a face plant on the street. The mounting hardware pulled right through the plastic seat.

That wasn't a very good day.

There's a vintage Toshiba television from back when they were experimenting with Carver stereo sound systems on their TVs. Nobody in there right mind would ever throw that out. It's actually great for music videos.

Maybe someday there will be a grandchild who is into music videos.

There's a kayak hanging from the ceiling that hasn't come down since we put it up there.

And tools... tools like you wouldn't believe. I've taken a couple of stabs at getting the tools organized, but to no avail. The job just overwhelms me. I start out well. One tool box for screwdrivers. One tool box for wrenches. One tool box for sockets. One tool box for miscellaneous, and so on.

Eventually I just end up with eight or nine toolboxes of miscellaneous, and it's inevitably easier to stop in at TSC and buy a number two Robertson screwdriver or a 5/16 socket than it is to root through all those toolboxes.

The last tool I bought was an inch and 3/8 socket to fit the hydraulic tank on the backhoe. It was too small, so I took it back an exchanged it for a inch and 7/16. That was too small as well, but I got the hydraulic tank open with a pipe wrench, which I could have done in the first place. In the meantime, that inch and 7/16 socket has disappeared into one of those tool boxes, so I can't even take it back for a refund, unless I spend an afternoon looking for it.

Then I'd have to look for the receipt... Better to just leave well enough alone and take comfort in knowing that if I ever need an inch and 7/16 socket I've got one.

Somewhere.

There's a few boxes of stuff we inherited from Uncle Murray.

There's a store-quality clothes rack behung with fur coats. The real stuff; mink, chinchilla, fox. Back in the day the Farm Manager's father was a furrier, one of the traditional Jewish trades. Thanks to Brigette Bardot and PETA she can't wear that stuff anywhere, but out of respect for her father we'll never throw it out.

And there's more, lot's more, but you can see what I'm up against.

But at least the Wi-Fi works in the garage.