LETTING GO

My nephew and niece get here a week tomorrow and I’m panicking trying to get my apartment into some sort of shape. I’ve lived here for seven months and there are still a couple of boxes I haven’t unpacked. The tile floors need to be mopped, the windows need be cleaned and Green Couch needs to be Febreezed.
The hardest part of cleaning up is letting go. It’s like an exorcism of all the bad purchases you’ve ever made, the projects you never started but never got around to finishing. I’m saying goodbye to the floor lamp from Ikea that has worked sporadically since I bought it and finally gave up on when I moved here. The lamp cost fifteen bucks or so, I paid more the lampshades I bought for it, but I’ve convinced myself that I was going to take it back and exchange it for one that works. It’s done nothing but collect dust and get in the way. It’s going to the Wildlife Thrift store in the morning.
I’ve also given up on about eight months worth of “The New Yorker.” My subscription ends in November; I’ve been keeping the back issues with the intention of going back and reading all the short stories I never got around to reading. I also think it’s kind of cool to have the around, giving my apartment that cosmopolitan feel. There’s a second-hand bookstore down the street on Granville, ABC books, that actually takes old magazines. It’s around the corner from the thrift store.
The hardest decision was the one to give up my collection of professional wrestling action figures. I bought almost all of them in eBay, paying way too much for them. I call them my boyfriends. There’s about twenty of them. I love looking at them, they bring back a piece of my childhood when I see them. But there’s too many of them. I picked the one I like the most – Hacksaw Duggan – and put the rest in a box with the vintage wrestling ring I had them displayed in. They’re going back on eBay where they came from, but not until I pay the outstanding six dollars on my account. That could be a while.
Then there are the odds and bobs. “Star Wars,” spaceships, Happy Meal toys, and the Palm Pilot I bought for twenty bucks. I bought the Palm second hand from someone I used to work with just to see if I would use it. The thing never worked quite the way I hoped it would. It would take forever to synch with my computer; the memory would be erased every time the batteries died, and I lost the driver for the keyboard I bought to go with it. This evening, while I was looking for the software for the palm to throw in with the other thrift store donations, I found the keyboard driver. I wrestled with myself for fifteen minutes trying to decide if I should finally just give up on the thing. I could re-install the software, if I tinkered with it enough I could get it working again, take it to a café and write instead of lugging my laptop with me. Then I remembered the problems synching it with my computer. Besides, there aren’t enough hours in the day to do the things I want to do as it is without wasting time on something I’ll never use. Into the box it went.
Once the game of “Sophie’s Choice” was over, I turned my attention back to Green Couch. “This couch smells like Ollie’s place,” Upchuck says whenever he comes over. The couch had been sitting in Ollie’s living room for the last year. He and Blaze chain smoke and rarely open their windows. I didn’t notice the smell at first; I just assumed it was my own cigarette smoke Upchuck was talking about. “It’s me you’re smelling,” I told Upchuck. “You’re just trying to be nice and pin on Ollie.”
“No, that is definitely Ollie’s smell. His place has a very distinctive smell. Your musky; he’s smoky.”
Indeed. With the sliding door open and a fresh breeze, all you can smell is a couch. It smells like the smoking room of some airport. It takes a week for Febreeze to work and I haven’t even started the treatment yet. I hope I can get rid of it before my niece and nephew get here. Blaze says the couch is from the fifties. It’s in great shape aside from the smell and worn springs. I wonder how long someone had it in their apartment before they were finally ready to let it go.


GarpinBC