Custodians of the Totally Useless

We (husband, son, and self) have collectively collected enough useless stuff to last our three lifetimes. When I think about it, we’ve probably collected enough for you too. Take that ice cube with a spider suspended inside of it. Something my son made at a Cub scout camp out years back, made of resin and whatever critter the boy happened to locate while foraging in the forest that weekend. I think the goal was to let the resin harden then drop it into someone’s drink when they weren’t looking and wait for them to squirm. But that’s never happened and so the spider sits forever on the sill of my kitchen window where I can visit it on regular basis.

Buried somewhere under our collection of remotes (only three that we actually use), and sitting at the very bottom of the decorative bowl we keep our remote collection in, is my husband’s fart machine. There are two parts to it, the noisy part, that which emits the actual fart, and the remote that prompts its flatulence. I remember how my husband had to have it after seeing the neighbor kid playing with his. The neighbor kid is now in his mid twenties, graduated from college and on to bigger and more interesting gadgets. But we still have our fart machine. My husband and his brothers toyed with the idea of slipping it into their mom’s casket when she passed away years ago. But none of us wives would let them.

Up there in the attic, buried under a thick layer of insulation, cobwebs, cockroach carcasses and dust, hides my son’s baby furniture. There’s a crib, a playpen, a highchair, a basinet and I’ve forgotten what else. Oh and all of my “good” maternity clothes, trussed up tight in a big plastic bag. Now this might not seem such a bad idea to save this kind of stuff - hand me downs and all. But I am in my mid-fifties and not likely to need maternity clothes again unless I really let myself go. And my son is about to turn sixteen, somewhere between the age of needing his crib to sleep in and using it for his own infant child.

Under the desk in the office is every piece of software we’ve ever used on every computer we’ve ever owned. Some of this software was available only on floppy disk. Floppy disk! All of which we still possess. There seems no use for such relics other than to add them to our similar collections, things like the cassettes and eight track tapes that lurk somewhere in the hall closet. Or maybe the four foot stack of albums in the bottom of the china hutch. Note that there is no device in our possession that will play any of these types of media.

One closet in our office is dedicated solely to pictures and paintings we will never hang. They are preserved quite perfectly in sealed boxes and big round tubes, stacked against the back wall of the closet where they’ve begun their own collection of dust.

Following family tradition, I have dutifully saved all my old, chipped (but still usable) Corelware on the slim chance that my daughter might set up housekeeping some day; my daughter, who is twenty six and has been living on her own now for several years. I have to wonder what she’s been eating off of all this time.

In the garage, packed away for that “just in case” moment you’ll find my husband’s leather working kit from high school. Once, about three years back, he actually pulled it down, dusted it off and made a leather money clip. Then he packed it all back up and it’s been there ever since.

I have my ski boots from twenty seven years ago although I’ve only skied once in that much time. They cower in the highest part of my walk-in closet next to my moon boots, ski gloves and mask. Keeping them company are my racket gloves and racket because once, when I was young and lithe, I was quite good at the sport and now I like to wax nostalgic on how it felt to be that way. I have every tee shirt I ever earned running the many 5 and 10 K’s I used to run. This in spite of the fact that I never (ever) wear tee shirts. I have jeans that fit me when I had a body like Twiggie, I have leg warmers. Leg warmers!

But I have to admit that sometimes this rat-packedness comes in handy. We got a new puppy a few months back. She came to us pretty small, weighing in at 4 lbs something. And utterly naked. So I rummaged through the collection of collars we’d saved from seventeen years of previous pets, collars that had outlived their owners, collars that had been outgrown. Imagine how happy I was to find a perfect fit in the later part of the collection! By keeping all those collars, I’d managed to save a whopping three bucks. It was a shining moment, indeed! One that validated the possession of all this other stuff. Because after all, you never know. You just never know.