An Endless Mound of Treasures.........

This month my Mother and stepfather made three trips over to our house in a suburban full of boxes and bags and other containers holding junk from my childhood and college years, only to dump them in a gigantic mound in our garage. When I say gigantic, I mean GIGANTIC! This topographic anomaly is easily 12 feet long, 4 feet deep and 4 feet high. The garage that Jon once loved now holds only one car and about 2,000lbs. of crap from my parent's basement. It's a wonder that I'm still married.

My Mother has been on my case for a while now to come over and get my old stuff out of her house and to take it to my already "No Vacancy Available" basement. In the end though, when she brought my things to me, they also included an array of her useless knicknacks and Lord knows whats, like snowmen dolls,lunch boxes and a mini ironing board. Although a kind gesture on her part, the boxes of my Mother's donations easily added 500lbs. to my pile.

The truth is, I think that she brought everything over not just to get my junk out of her basement, but to get her junk out of it too!
It's a wonder we're both still married! Well, at least one of us will have a nice basement.

Here are some highlights of the treasures that abound:

This is a bank that my Mother painted for me when I was six years old. Never good with saving money, it quickly turned into and injured insect sanctuary. If you look closely you can still see grass, sticks and opps! injured insects from 1984 in it! At least I tried....



Yet another relic from 84', my "Murry High Flight". Between the groovy rainbow, butterflies and questionable name, it's a wonder that one of the high school stoners never pushed me off the sweet bannana seat and stole this bike.



At the age of 9, it was really odd the lengths I would go through to save the lives of inatimate objects. Ever since I watched our old MG be driven away by a new owner at 5, I feared that THINGS, not just people had feelings. How could my parents abandon their car? Wouldn't she miss us? That's why as I watched the garbage truck coming down our street crushing and destroying every trash bag in sight, I knew I had to do something to help. What I was helping was the small, plastic Cookie Monster chair that our across the street neighbors were so coldly throwing out. How could they throw out this innocent chair! It has feelings too! What a horrible end to be squashed to death in the jaws of that monster, that stinky sanitation truck of death! As quickly as I could, so as not to be seen in the midst of my robinhood justified crime. I ran across the street and stole Cookie right out of their trash. My Mother came home to find her 9 year old daughter sitting in a preschoolers chair in the garage. Needless to say, so far I have given that chair another 21 years of life. Go me!



I just decided to sprinkle in a little vignette of treasure in here, typical of one of my Mother's "bonus boxes"!
1.) An Ewok doll.
2.) An Enstein Bagels lunch box.
3.) Snowmen dolls.



Ok, so I'm only posting this picture because it is SO utterly dorky. I'm really putting my reputation on the line but come on, we were all dorks at 14.

Here are two gorgeous, painted works of art. My masterpieces. The one on the right is title solely "Jerry". Yes, that is Mr. Garcia, who at 14 was my God. It's amazing how cool one can feel in 9th grade with a pair of birkinstocks and socks, an alpaca sweater and a bottle of patchouli. I now get ill when I smell patchouli. Nasty.

The painting on the left is entitled: "Isolation". This was from my serious "Edvard Munch, painter of 'The Scream' phase". As you can see it is an exestensial representation of the isolation and demoralization that teens go through. Note the artist's signature in the lower right hand corner, "Stu". Yes, yet another 14 year old's delusion. I was convinced that I was Beatle's pal Stuart Suttcliffe reincarnated to come back and show the world good art.



Ok now that I've shared, not another word of this dorkiness to anyone!

* Well, I just got off the phone with my Mom and she reminded me of some very true things. Ok, so she HAS been asking me to clean my things out of her basement for 5 years and she's gone through two moves with it. She's been EXTREMELY patient with me. I give her that. It was nice of my Mom not to just throw all of my belongings out after such a long time. I guess the other thing is that at the possibility of sounding too nerdy,I didn't want to admit that I actually really like all of the "extras" she sent me. As my Mom reminded me this morning, it was I who stated "I want to start a snowman collection" last winter. Once again my dorkiness confirmed.