Related posts

• No related posts.

Jill woke me at dawn this morning. She said, “We’ve got a house full of mice!” Our cats had already gotten two of them. As I stepped groggily from the bed, Simon chased another down the hall. Sofi had yet another cornered in the living room. Fortunately our two cats are good at catching mice. Unfortunately, mice are smart about getting caught. Instinctively, mice know that if they play dead, the cat will get bored and walk away. Our cats did exactly that. “Let’s focus!” I scolded them. Jill wasn’t exaggerating, there seemed to be a lot of mice in the house. Early morning happens to be the cats’ breakfast time and we couldn’t put off feeding them, which, needless to say, was a great distraction from mousing.

The mice got in because I had opened holes in the walls on two floors to run some new electricity. (If you’ve got an old house, you’ve got mice in your walls.) I had left the walls open for nearly a week because it’s too hot to work. We’ve stopped doing all of the chores we normally do around the house in the summer. Our window-unit air-conditioners aren’t especiallly good. They sort of keep us cool, the house temps hovering about 80-84 degrees. Outside offers no relief, even at night. Last night I was watering the front yard at 1:00 A.M. and one of my neighbors trudged by walking her four greyhounds. “It’s the only time we’re comfortable,” she said, “and even this is hardly good enough.”

Jill and I have cabin fever, I’ve decided. Sure, cabin fever is usually associated with being cooped up in winter. But it applies to a bad summer too. We got so desperate for relief that we took the dogs to the woods late yesterday and went wading in one of the Gunpowder creeks. Frieda, our basset hound loves to swim. All of us got plenty wet. Then we stopped to pick raspberries. When we got home, despite the heat — or, rather, to defy the heat — Jill and I made raspberry pies. That’s not exactly ideal food for this weather but we didn’t complain.

There’s no relief in sight for this too-hot Baltimore summer, I’m afraid. And, for the next couple of weeks, you can bet that Jill and I will be a bit jumpy in the house — until the cats evacuate all of our little visitors. Just now we caught another: I chased it into an empty tomato sauce can. Jill was going to help me bag it but then it leapt away when Jill recoiled at the sight of its tail draped over the can edge — Eek!  ”Oh, well,” I said, “we’ll get it eventually.” Jill laughed and laughed. I love a woman with a sense of humor.

Related posts

• The Problem With Basset Hounds (0)

Jill and I went to Phoenix last week to see my mother, who is 83 and “still on foot,” as she likes to say – and smoking Pall Malls. She said, ,”Nobody comes to Arizona in July.” It was 110-115 degrees every day.   It’s remarkable that people live in heat like that. More remarkable that they did so before air conditioning.

We visited a couple of friends in Tucson. They live in an adobe-style house on a rise west of the city. You take a dirt road to get to their place. Their yard is a wilderness. If you haven’t been to the saguaro desert, where cacti grow twenty-feet high and the creosote bushes are as tall as you, which means it wouldn’t take but a few missteps to get lost, you don’t know how wildly overgrown these places are. It’s not just sand and rock.

Our friend’s mom was a nature-lover. She had a few dead curiosities in her freezer — animals she’d found, like the gila monster that drowned in her pool. We petted the monster and a frozen rattle snake but not the bat.

Our friends’ house has evaporative cooling instead of air conditioning. It’s old technology, patented in 1906, and consists of a fan blowing air cooled by evaporated water — a system that costs about 1/5th as much as air conditioning.

We shook our head in wonder at how our friends were living in that hot, wild, prickly place. They collect rain water in a cistern and raise chickens for eggs but they’re not anywhere close to being off the grid, though they dream of it. A bobcat got their first brood of hens not long ago. Coyotes and hawks and great horned owls will pick off incautious housecats, they told us. They had dwarf owls nesting in the car port recently.

You’ve probably seen one of those cheapo horror movies from the 1950’s that features a giant tarantula or mantis or ant. The story always takes place in the desert. There’s a reason for that. We were walking to a Tucson taco joint and encountered a monster insect on the sidewalk. It was dead but totally intact and worthy of its own horror show. Jill didn’t flinch when I placed it into her cupped hands. You go, girl!

When we returned to Phoenix, we told Mom about the critters but she didn’t seem impressed. She’s a country girl from an Appalachian mill town. She’s seen plenty of critters in her time. We couldn’t leave Phoenix without going to Pizzeria Bianco. It is, believe it or not, one of the best pizzas you’ll ever eat. Go later rather than earlier to avoid the crowd. And ignore the heat: coal-fired crust is good no matter how hot the pavement is outside. At dinner we talked about living off the grid, which seems appropriate to Arizona’s quirky inclinations. Then Mom revealed that when she was growing up she didn’t have a flush toilet until she was ten. I never knew.

Related posts

• No related posts.

On Saturday, Jill and I went to yard sales with our friend Scott. Scott is the uber antiques lover and collects vintage Christmas ornaments and decorations. Every time we go out with him — usually to Pennsylvania — he finds something rare and wonderful. The appeal of antique hunting is just that, the hunt. It is a quintessential American pastimes because it underscores our can-do, anythng-goes spirit: who more than Americans can see treasure in trash? And who generates more trash than Americans? Let’s not forget that Antiques Roadshow is the most popular program on PBS.

Some of the most gratifying moments of Roadshow are when somebody has found something very valuable that he/she has retrieved from a Dumpster. Or bought at a yard sale for a dollar. What can any of us buy for one dollar any more? Antique hunting is like prospecting — panning for gold or digging a mine. You get dirty, you waste a lot of time, and, more often than not, you come home only with muddy shoes or a sunburn. But if you get lucky . . . .

It may be a sign of our waning Empire that, in this country, shopping — whether for old stuff or new — is recreation. My ex-wife used to love spending a full day in shopping malls. We once drove to a mega-mall for a weekend of shopping and stayed in the Red Roof Inn next door. I can’t do that any more but I will happily spend a day on the road, driving from yard sale to yard sale. Our friend Scott likes to drive north along Pennsylvania’s Susquehanna River and pass through the many picturesque river towns. On this trip, we came upon a community flea market at a riverside high school. It was our first stop.

It is surprising what people think others will buy. I often see piles of old VHS tapes stacked on sellers’ tables. Cassette tapes too. Battered shoes. Broken vacuum cleaners. CB radios. Rusted chains. Boxes of baby clothes. And a lot of new crap from China. But, every once in a while, I come across somebody who has cleaned out an oldster’s basement or attic. At this flea market, Jill and I were pleased to find some fifty-year-old brass lamp parts and some old tools. I found some old toys too. Scott found a feather tree for one dollar. He was ecstatic.

A feather tree is a 70-100 year-old table-top, artificial Christmas tree designed to display ornaments. Its branches are decorated with feathers dyed to look like spindly pine boughs. It doesn’t look like much but it is rare and, when found in an antiques shop, costs $300+. So there we were, at nine in the morning, and Scott had already scored the find of the day. But, of course, one find just makes you hungry for the next. And here’s where the trouble begins. If you know the market for an item, you may be inclined to pick it up — even if you don’t want it — just to re-sell it. I collect old toys, for instance, and pick them up whenever I find them cheap. But, then, you have to ask yourself, How much am I going to stockpile for resale? Do I collect any and every good deal I  find?

When I watch Antiques Roadshow, I often shake my head in dismay when I hear the appraisers (antiques dealers)  award an item some outlandish value. It’s easy for the dealers to claim a high price when they have a stable of prospective buyers in the highest end of the market (i.e., New York, San Francisco, etc.). But the average Joes and Janes don’t have those connections and they don’t have high-profile auction houses to sell from. Jill and I have tried to sell antiques at our annual yard sale and have discovered that nobody — at a yard sale — wants to pay market value for anything. Why should they?

Which leaves you to sell in an antiques consignment store or on eBay. Antiques stores are closing like speakeasies after the end of Prohibition. It’s not just hard times. It seems that the antique boom has waned. And the demographics are changing. Generations X and Y are buying stuff from the 1950s and 1960s, which aren’t exactly antiques. As for online selling: the good thing about eBay is that it has leveled the market internationally so that nobody can claim something is rare and valuable when in fact it is not. The bad thing is that eBay has glutted the market. Think that little lobby card (advertising the 1959 blockbuster Ben Hur) you found at last week’s yard sale is a treaure? Check out eBay and, guess what, there are fifty of them just like it — listed for $3.99 each.

Scott told us of a friend who has become a hoarder of old stuff. It’s a scary story of how a collection overtakes one’s life. The man in question is has no place to sit in his house because of the piled-high junk and now pays  more on rental space for his treasures than he pays in mortgage for himself. It starts when you keep picking up “bargains” with the thought that you are going to resell them. Notable examples of hoarding include the Collyer brothers in Manhattan, who both died in 1947 buried under mounds of old books, newspapers, and other junk they had amassed for twenty-five years. 130 tons of junk. It fell atop one brother, then the next, trapping both until they died of starvation. The most recent example occurred just a month ago in Chicago, where an elderly couple was rescued from their junk-filled apartment.

Saturday, we came upon an antiques warehouse that was clearly a hoarder’s stash. There was barely room enough to edge yourself down the aisles of junk, which was heaped in piles that, at one time, had been more or less orderly. The good thing was that owner was selling it off, or trying to. There was so much to pick through, we just gave up on the yard sales. We didn’t have time enough to do it justice, though, and promised to come back. As we drove off, Scott observed that the key to sane collecting is that for every item you bring into the house, something else has to leave the house. It’s a yin and yang thing. Jill and I decided that it’s time to sell off our many extras and bargains we have been accumulating in our too-big house. If all else fails, Scott says, just take your treasures to an auctioneer, dump the load for any price, and don’t look back.

Related posts

• Yard Sale! (0)

For Father’s Day, my mother sent me an old photo of my father holding me and my two brothers. I was two at the time.  It breaks my heart to look at the photo because Dad was handsome and healthy and could not have  imagined that he’d be dead twenty years later, just as my brothers and I would be growing into manhood.  I’m lucky to have had a father for that long, I know. But his sudden death by stomach cancer when I was a senior in college was a blow that felled me for years.

I held my grief in abeyance for the longest time. In fact, the day after he died, I helped a friend move into a new apartment and, thinking myself brave, never said a word about my loss.  We call that denial. For the first several years after he died, I dreamed of him frequently. Most of these were dreams of reunion: I’d fall weeping into his arms. When awake, I was haunted by the prospect of seeing him in passing — across the street or a few aisles away in a department store. I knew he was dead, of course, but I couldn’t help but look for him. Once, on a city sidewalk, I did see a man who looked very much like him. Quickly I approached him. But as I got closer, I saw that he wasn’t nearly the man he should have been. Not my father. That was the theme of my loss: Not My Father. Nobody would ever be Dad. It’s useless to look and pointless to long for. But that’s what loss does to us, reduces us to senseless wandering.

Dad was a quiet man, a World War II vet who never talked of his military service. I never saw him shed a tear, though I know he was a feeling man. He was especially reactive to natural beauty and wild animals. I recall him crawling under our station wagon to coax out a spooked squirrel that the neighbor’s dog had chased under there. When I built a bird feeder in the back yard, he set up his camera at the dining room window so that we could take photos of them. He took us camping every summer. He was a big believer in self-sufficiency, so he taught us boys how to tune a car, use a hammer and saw, cook over a camp fire. His lessons settled me and my brothers in deep ways that we would appreciate only much later in manhood.

My brothers and I aren’t exactly fearless but we were the kind of boys who loved to break into abandoned houses and crawl into caves and get lost in the woods. Dad’s love of travel and trekking made us adventuresome. My oldest brother, who inherited much of Dad’s quiet demeanor, became a competitive sky diver for a time, then sold everything he owned and traveled around the world for a year. He and his wife still travel widely. For years, my middle brother sailed the world on a ship, laying communication cable. I fell in love with Jill in part because she’s similarly disposed to adventure. I could not have taken on (at her insistence) this trashed former frat house we now call home had I not been Tom Tanner’s boy.

Dad came from nothing. His parents were itinerant farm workers who lived in tents. His father was a hopeless alcoholic. Dad himself failed at farming but went on to earn a masters degree in electrical engineering. He was the all-American, self-made man. That’s why he was, and remains, a hard act to follow. I’m not sure that my brothers and I tried to follow him exactly. He wasn’t perfect. We had our share of differences. But there was no escaping the energy and ethics of his example. We owe him a great debt.

Will, the young man who helps me and Jill around the house, learned recently that he is the father of his ex-girlfriend’s baby. When the DNA test confirmed this, Will shook his head sadly. He’s in no position to be a father, he says. He doesn’t have a steady job and he’s recently out of rehab. I remind Will that he has an opportunity to make a huge impact on his five-year-old son. He can show the boy what it means to be a good man — to work hard, to treat others fairly and kindly, to appreciate what you have. Fatherhood is not an impossible task. Daunting maybe, but not impossible. Will says he is determined to try.

I never became a father — by choice. But I did become a teacher because a large part of me wants to nurture as my father nurtured, by teaching young people to be self-sufficient, if not fearless. Just today I conducted an advising session for first-year students at my university. They are so young and so full of promise! When I talk to them, I feel tremendous hope and a quiet thrill and I think this is what a father must feel, motivated by the conviction that what he has to say, the many things he might show them, could make all the difference in their lives.

Related posts

• Houselove x 10 (0)