The basement is FULL of old stuff... just stuff. It's mostly crap (certainly not literally) for which not only do they have no use, but no one else would want unless they were a scrap and recycling facility. Being young and having only so many earthly possessions of any value (mostly my furniture) I finally pushed them to work with me to clean some of this stuff out of the basement, so that I could store my stuff in there when I move.
"We can try, but I don't know what we are going to be able to get rid of," was all the succession i could get from them. My reply was "How about the toaster that hasn't worked in 40 years?" "Well, that's true, but it doesn't make enough room for your couch!"
So, one Saturday we ventured down the stairs, and started to sift through old stuff. I cannot BELIEVE the worthless garbage they had. Old newspapers with no historical significance; carpet scraps from when they re-carpeted the bedrooms; toys that have been broken for 30 years; literally a bag of recycling that was never taken out.
Thankfully, these two geriatrics have pretty good senses of humor so I was free to crack lots of jokes.
At one point, i reached under the ping pong table (a piece of furniture i had literally heard of all my life, and never laid eyes on because it was piled halfway to the ceiling with junk) and pulled out to two old televisions. I just held them up, and looked at my grandfather. What follows is our exchange:
Grandpa: "The one on the right has picture but no sound, and the one on the left has sound, but no picture... so we figured if our other three sets went bad, we could put these together, and get the sound from one, and the picture from the other, and it would be a one good television."
Me: "I'm throwing these away."
Grandpa: "Yeah, that sounds like a good idea."
2 comments:
You brought back memories for me; except my Grandpa actually had two TV's in his living room, one stacked on top of the other, to get the combined effect your Grandpa thought he might someday need to resort to! My mom grew up as a Missionary Kid, and out in the African bush you throw NOTHING away ... and I've happily assimilated these hoarding tendencies myself. It just might be useful some day ... and when that day comes, I don't want to have to pay for something that I could have had if I'd not thrown it out!
My grandparents are also rocking the two TV setup in their living room. The first is an old cabinet style TV - nice wood finish, etc. When the working parts of it died they bough a new tv with boring black plastic design. Rather than buying a TV stand or entertainment center to put it on/in they simply draped a runner over the old tv, covering the picture tube but allowing the nice wood to be seen and put the new TV on top of the old one.
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