I’m not as young as I used to be.
Technically, all of humanity can accurately make this statement. When I look at it that way, it doesn’t seem so bad. Rationalizations rock.
Recently, though, time snuck up on me and smacked me in the face. I didn’t discover a new gray hair, replace an arthritic joint, or lie prone in a cardiac catheterization lab. A far more insidious insult to my age occurred. I saw a device that I remembered from my youth, now displayed behind glass, memorialized like a museum attraction or a bygone social artifact.
I stood inside the University of California San Diego Geisel Library. In the middle of a display showcasing African American music and art from the sixties, seventies, and eighties lay a yellow Sony Walkman Sports AM/FM Radio/Cassette player. An identical Sony Walkman sits inside my nightstand. I actually thought it was mine for a second. It felt surreal, like Charlton Heston’s character, George Taylor, seeing his fellow astronaut, stuffed alongside primitive humans in a Planet of the Apes curation.
But there it sat.
A Sony Walkman, untouchable behind glass like an Australopithecus jawbone or a woolly mammoth tusk. Do people look at this and ponder, “Geez, what’s that thing? It’s so yellow.” C’mon peeps! It was the best way to listen to your mix tapes while at the gym, jogging down the road, or sweating to the oldies with Richard Simmons. Richard who? You know, “one day I may be meeting you and hearing how you’ve changed your life by saying farewell to fat.” No? Deep sigh.
I suppose undergraduates breeze by it and comment that they’ve seen one before crammed inside a weathered cardboard box in their parent’s basement, attic, or garage. Maybe an aging family member will bequeath it to them. Nobody ever bequeathed anything to me. Perhaps proceeds from the sale of a family house, but that’s not really bequeathing. Regardless, without an official reading of the will inside a stuffy lawyer’s office, sibling infighting could erupt over who gets the neon banana colored antique music machine.
When I was a kid, my mother’s house was chalk block filled with antiques. Furniture, tools, trunks, radios, clothes, and even Confederate money. What’s a Georgia woman to do? Outside of Jefferson Davis’s cash, I considered this old paraphernalia as junk. Partly because my mother wasn’t much of a home keeper and we lived in a constant state of clutter stacked upon mounds and mounds of previous clutter, antique or otherwise. She threw nothing away. I don’t think the ashtrays got dumped unless I did it. How this responsibility fell on a non-smoking twelve year-old, I have no idea.
When I say she threw nothing away, I literally mean she kept everything.
I think she refused to clean the kitchen skillets for fear of parting with bacon grease and dried egg yolks. Her flavor town express skidded off the road straight into a botulism ditch. Old mail, newspapers, and random magazines constituted approximately 17 national forests worth of paper inside our home. Every time I tried to toss them out, I heard the same response. “Oh, no honey, I need to keep that. There’s a recipe in there.”
A fine response, but I don’t have too many memories of my mother cooking. Not that she could actually fire up the kitchen due to the logistical constraints caused by the clutter. The stove top was stacked with dirty pots and pans and the oven was more akin to a storage cabinet. Honestly, if we cleaned all of that stuff, along with the overflowing sink of dirty dishes, no space existed to shelve it. Remember, nothing was thrown away. We added items, but we never removed anything.
My mother loved hitting all of the neighborhood yard sales. I think our next door neighbor, Betty Embry, took my mother on these mini adventures just to get my mom moving and outside of the house. And my mother certainly enjoyed Betty’s company and their bargain hunting expeditions around the surrounding communities. Where else would she buy used popcorn machines? I wouldn’t say my mom necessarily liked popcorn machines. A deep seated, irrational infatuation best described it.
Mind you, we had microwave popcorn by this point in history.
Nobody popped corn kernels on the stove top, heated up their jiffy-pop, or, you guessed it, fired up a popcorn machine. These contraptions were not movie theater sized monstrosities. However, her yard sale popcorn machines sized up bigger than a breadbox and sucked up a significant amount of counter space, which we already sorely lacked. But that’s not the kicker.
It was our glut of this commodity that really initiated some serious head scratching. We probably owned about seven popcorn machines at one point in time. They all sat on the dining room table, the dining room buffet, or on the dining room floor. No, we did not eat that much popcorn. I didn’t even particularly care for popcorn. I still don’t. I wonder why? No head scratching on that one.
When another popcorn machine entered our home and found its final resting place in the dining room, I’d ask my mom the same question. “Why did you get another popcorn machine?” Her reply was always roughly in the same ballpark. “I got it for a quarter!” Great. How much will it cost to get rid of it? Apparently our surplus did not factor into the final purchasing decision for an identical product. Supply and demand? Never heard of it.
Seven machines sat idly with an estimated expenditure of $1.75.
We couldn’t afford not to buy them. Technically it cost her just shy of two dollars to gallivant around with Betty, which ultimately made her happy. And two bones is small price to pay for years of personal entertainment and camaraderie. The popcorn machines just added to the existing decorum – late 20th century American rustic hoarding. Hey kid, put that damn ashtray down! Those butts and ashes are family heirlooms!
I really thought I’d have seen one of those antique popcorn machines behind glass at the Geisel Library before I saw an exact replica of my Sony Walkman. However, that would not have melded within the creative context of how Grace Jones, George Clinton, and Parliament or Funkadelic shaped American culture. Even if James Brown insisted on its inclusion, outside of the glass it would stay. Not even the ambassador of soul could receive diplomatic immunity on that one.
Maybe I’ll craft a mahogany shadow box at home and hang my iPod Nano inside of it. And it’s wired earbuds. We can’t forget those. Kids, once there was a time when Bluetooth didn’t exist outside of dental journals chronicling aberrant molar decay. And to think I sold all of my vinyl records. It’s so damn hard to find Monkees’ CD’s. Oh, yeah. A CD was a media device that we…