 Moving is a cathartic experience.
One of the useful things about it is that you are forced to get rid of all the useless
odds and ends you've accumulated over the years that make your garage an undesirable
place to park the car. When we had to decide what to keep and what to toss, we
were somewhat surprised by the number of boxes and bags of Stuff we threw out that
had somehow taken up a mundane existence of their own in out-of-the-way corners of
the attic, garage, and various closets. The following article, which originally
appeared in a recent mailing of the apa SAPS, describes such a situation taken
to the extreme. We've known the author in print for several years, but only recently
were able to take advantage of our new proximity to him to meet him in person. Such
are the hidden benefits of moving.
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The House on Summit Avenue
by Harry Warner, Jr. Every so often, you see in newspapers
pictures and stories about the incredible clutter found in the house or apartment of
a recluse who has died or has been carted off to the funny farm. I used to get an
uneasy feeling when I saw such items and thought about the way the clutter of books
and magazines has been growing in the three upstairs rooms I use for storage
purposes and in the attic. But now I feel better. Unbeknownst to me, I'd been
living for many years next door to just such a genuine case of terminal clutter
without realizing it, and the situation in my neighbors' home makes my accumulation
seem trivial.The elderly couple who lived on the
second floor of the building next to mine were a bit on the wild side. She had
been, of all things, a professional boxer in her youth. Apparently there was a
profession for female boxers around the middle of this century and she was part of
it. She must have been pretty good, if I may judge by the left jab I saw her land
on a young man who she thought had parked too close to her car one afternoon. Her
husband came up to me one day and told me in confidence that he had heard me
shooting the previous night. I hadn't even been home that night and I don't own a
gun, and I haven't pulled a trigger since I patronized a booth at the Hagerstown
Fair in my teens, but he smiled knowingly at me. Their minister told me that they
were in the habit of interposing mailing comments during his sermons in loud
voices.About five years ago, the telephone
company laid a new cable up Summit Avenue, mostly under sidewalks, resulting in the
laying of new sidewalks for most of us and new curbs for some of us. A
concrete-splattered workman told me one day almost with tears in his eyes about the
hard time my neighbors had been giving the crew; they insisted on a flattened
section of curb in front of their building to make it easier to get a wheel-chair
onto the sidewalk, even though neither the husband nor wife needed a wheelchair nor
had ever used one; they just thought such a feature of the curb might come in handy
some time in the future. The woman carried a cane most of the time but laid it
aside when she was in a hurry, and I've seen her climb the steps to her door with
two heavy bags of groceries in both arms without walking difficulties. They
apparently used the local ambulance service the way people used to ask doctors to
make house calls. The ambulance would roll up with siren screaming at least once a
month, stay double-parked for ten minutes or so, and then roll away without either
of the couple as occupants.A local attorney and his wife once
visited my home asking me to begin a career in espionage; this couple and my
neighbors had both patronized a public auction, both couples had successfully bid
on sets of dishes. Then in the attorney's version, my neighbors had walked off
with the more expensive dishes which the attorney had paid for. I was supposed to
pay them a visit and verify this fact by seeing the dishes in their home. I knew
the two went regularly to public auctions, and once in a while I saw them at yard
sales. But I didn't often see them taking acquisitions into the house, which left
me unprepared for what happened early this year. The two had become less and less
visible as the years passed, sometimes not moving their car for weeks at a time, so
I didn't think anything of it when someone asked me where the man was. Nobody had
seen him for a long while, despite catching occasional glimpses of her. We
speculated that he might be in a rest home. Last yuletide, I noticed that the
Christmas card from her was signed in a strange hand, and a few days later her
obituary notice appeared in the local newspapers. There was no mention in it of
her husband, and one of the neighbors somehow learned he had died two years
earlier. It is unheard of that a Hagerstown resident should die without an obituary
in the local newspapers, but it had somehow happened.
A few weeks later, people unknown to
me began removing things from the apartment they had occupied. It began in a modest,
unassuming way, with some battered pieces of furniture hauled away in a small pickup
truck and a half-dozen or so garbage bags of unidentified contents placed at the
curb for the trash collector. Then it escalated a bit. Instead of the pickup
truck, there was a larger truck with greater capacity drawing up in front of the
building and becoming laden with large boxes and mysterious shapes which I could not
identify as anything known to civilization. Moreover, plump garbage bags also began
to be hauled away by truck.Perhaps a week later there was a
tremendous commotion outside the house. What to my wondering eyes should appear but
a dumpster, one of those huge ones, wider than a big truck, half as long as a boxcar
and with sides and rear wall extending perhaps five feet up. Its arrival signaled a
new phase of the emptying of the apartment. Now, instead of things being carried
down the steps and out the door of the building, they began to descend with
resounding thumps from upstairs windows and the upstairs balcony, tossed at random
to the walkway and lawn below for transfer into the dumpster. I wouldn't have
believed that apartment could contain enough stuff to fill a dumpster, but it did.
They piled that dumpster so high that they had great difficulty getting a canvas
cover over the mountain. All the neighbors were marveling and some of them were
looking at me as if there were a secret tunnel through which I was transferring a
lot of my stuff to the neighboring apartment.After the huge green dumpster had
been hauled up atop a sanitary disposal truck and hauled away, the neighborhood
wondered for about 24 hours what that apartment could do for an encore. Then we saw
it -- the dumpster was back. And again the dumpster was filled to overflowing and
again it was hauled away and behold, the dumpster returned and acquired a third load
at least as high and tottering as the first two. After it left for the third time,
Goodwill Industries stopped by with a large truck to pick up a good bit of stuff.
A few days later, for the first time there emerged from that apartment things that
appeared to be in excellent condition: a living room suite, refrigerator, stove,
and so on.
I've looked at that building and I've
tried to cipher out in my head the probabilities that so much stuff could have been
occupying its second floor without resorting to fourth dimensional packing methods
and I haven't had much luck. It occurred to me once that some of the stuff could be
coming from the first floor apartment, but then I realized they wouldn't have hauled
first floor stuff upstairs to throw it off the balcony or out the window. I've
never been through that building so I can't be sure about its attic but from the
outside, it doesn't look as if there could be a very large attic, so not too much of
the stuff evacuated could have come from there.Of course, I have no idea what may
have been in the garbage bags but the workmen wore masks over their mouths on the
job so I fear the worst. Visible were unbelievable quantities of empty pasteboard
cartons, ranging from pizza type to large ones. There was a great deal of
nondescript lumber. Vast quantities of what may have been old clothing but looked
more like rags pure and simple came out.Remember, I didn't make this
spectacle my full time occupation during those weeks. I'm sure there must have
been many occasions when a truck rolled up, loaded, and drove away without my
knowledge because I wasn't home or wasn't looking out the window. And there seems
to be a sort of nervous tension to this day in the neighborhood over that apartment.
People look fearfully at it from time to time, as if they expected their credulity
to be stretched to the snapping point by the sudden resumption of evacuation
operations. I'm not sure if I could bear it if I suddenly saw more stuff beginning
to flop out of the window or balcony because it would outrage all the laws of
probability and reasonableness.Since then, exterminators have been
active in that building, and I've seen other men enter and leave with
mysterious-looking instruments in their hands whose purpose I can't deduce. I can't
help wishing that the apartment has been rendered uninhabitable for the next half
century or so because I'm fearful of new tenants who possess a substantial quantity
of small children moving in and creating territorial rights problems for my back
yard. And I can't imagine how that man and woman managed to live in that apartment
or how they explained the environment to those ambulance crews.Eventually, everything will come out
of 423 Summit Avenue. It will be imposing in its quantity but almost all of it will
be books, records, magazines, music, and usable furniture, and the neighbors won't
think it worthwhile to gossip about what a hoarder I was, because my clutter will
seem quite unimportant in comparison with the things they saw emerge from next door.
And I never did spy out that set of dishes for the attorney, and it's too late
now. All illustrations by Steve Stiles |
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