A House Free of Junk Just Isn't a Home

By CHARLES M. GUTHRIE
of the Minneapolis Tribune editorial page staff
published by the StarTribune
January 15, 1955


   WITH ONLY slight exaggeration, you could call me the tidy type. A place for everything, I say, and everything in its place. I am repelled and saddened at the way many people hang on to junk they can have but nebulous use for but which they save on the dubious premise that it "might come in handy."
   I do not refer to stamp or coin collectors or folks who gather butterflies and leaves and buttons as a hobby. As a lad I collected pictures of ballplayers and found it satisfying.
   I mean the string-savers, the characters who salvage bits of tinfoil and gleefully add them to a mountainous ball, the people who cleave to used nails and rusty bolts and beaten-up doorknobs.

   MY WIFE saves sacks. One cubicle in our kitchen, which might better shelter pans, is devoted exclusively to sacks. When I asked the other day if she intended to put them through a shredder and insulate the house, she said certainly not. You need sacks for school lunches, don't you? She constantly has occasion to use sacks, she said. They were just the ticket for picnics.
   I inquired how many picnics she planned--about four a day from next June to September? She gave me one of those looks, murmured something about what the pot called the kettle, and said we would see right now who the champion scavenger was.

   FROM an upstairs closet she extracted a box in which I keep my personal treasures and made this damning inventory:
   One handful pencil stubs, 51 paper clips, 34 shirt-collar stays, one PTA membership card, one shoe horn, seven old shoe laces, two letters urging participation in the church every member canvass of 1952, nine rejection slips, one unfilled prescription for athlete's foot, seven nails, eight faucet washers, five matchbooks, 10 rubber bands, three fragments of soap, 10 buttons, six safety pins and one cigarette butt.
   There, said my wife, was as nice a milieu of meaningless debris as she had ever beheld, and hereafter, before I smarted off about paper sacks, I might put my own little world in order.

   WELL, like I told her, it beats all how stuff collects. Take the canned rhubarb in the fruit cellar, for instance. We brought the stuff with us when we moved here in the early '40s from Montana. Nobody could stand to eat it, yet it was food--of a sort. We didn't want to throw it away but lacked the courage to offer it to anyone. So there it reposes, in spider-webbed neglect, awaiting the archaeologists. I suspect that by now a couple of gulps of the stuff would set a fellow to yelling "Happy New Year"

   We also have an ever mounting store of bacon grease, which my hillbilly forbears deemed the most fittin' article for frying chicken ever seen. But my wife, a butter girl, scorns it as a frying medium. She is always going to give it to a friend who makes soap--but she never does.

   I WENT to the garage the other day to find an old pair of hockey skates which I planned to trade in on a new pair for our 6-year-old. I figured they were in a steamer trunk , a family heirloom now serving ingloriously as a platform for oil cans, stiff paint brushes and a few of our countless flowerpots. In the trunk were a pair of fenders and a headlight for a bicycle we had given away about the time of the Reichstag fire and four battered wheels that had been on a bug used in the soapbox derby of '46.
   But no skates.
   We shall find them, I am confident, the next time we move. Then, also, will emerge many another inanimate acquaintance of the long ago and we shall stroll back along memory lane to our vanished youth. Forgotten books and picture frames and curtain rods will rise out of the past, and magazines which had "such nice poems and recipes" and now rate as collectors' items.
   When that notable moving day arrives I will build a fire out back and consign to the flames those barnacles which have gathered on out matrimonial ship.
   We won't burn everything, though. You never know when you might need a hunk of old linoleum.


Copyright 2018 StarTribune. Republished here with the permission of the StarTribune. No further republication or redistribution is permitted without the express approval of the StarTribune.
 
 
 

Leave Married Sons and Daughters Alone

By CHARLES M. GUTHRIE
of the Minneapolis Tribune editorial page staff
published by the StarTribune
February 4, 1956


   BEING, by virtue of long exposure, something of an elder statesman in the field of family relations, I am sometimes importuned by distraught parents for advice on how to meet trying situations. What would I do if I were in their shoes? My customary response is, "You've got me!" Or I suggest that they see a psychiatrist or someone else who is half smart.
   You can qualify as an expert, though, merely by advising them to do nothing. Often, if you do nothing, the problem will go away. I urged such a course upon a parent a couple of years ago and counted it one of the greatest favors I ever bestowed.

   THIS distressed lady was feeling neglected by her recently married daughter and son-in-law. It seems that the kids were minding their own business to an acute degree and asking none of the customary favors and handouts. They went their way and wanted the old folks to go theirs. There was little social contact, at least not enough to suit mama. She wondered what could be done about it.
   There was nothing that could be done about it, I said, nothing but to give thanks that the young ones were willing to be on their own, that they were not bumming meals or borrowing money or hinting that refurbishment of wardrobes would be nice proof of parental affection.

   MANY a youth and a maid today has an appallingly light-hearted approach in responsibility, I reminded the "neglected" mother. They buy cars on little but faith and $15 a month, get married without "eating money," and trust that fate will provide. Too often fate turns out to be the old folks. The kids figure that if they get in a jam the elders will bail them out. If the chips really are down, dad and mother also will provide shelter. This is a lousy arrangement. By this time everyone should know it. But it does get the kids in out of the snow.
   It's refreshing to encounter young ones of independent spirit and it would seem sheer folly to attempt to break down such an attitude. However, it's not hard to see why the mother in the case noted here was not moved to cheers and did not accept with good grace my advice to do nothing. She knew that marriage was a picnic--complete with bugs. She didn't want her child to suffer. She wanted her to have things, including advice from mama.

   PARENTS are natural eager beavers where married children are involved and nothing stings them quite as hard as the thought that they're no longer needed. It's difficult for them to do nothing but it's dead easy to meddle--in circumstances that are none of their business. I know what I'm talking about. I do some meddling now and again. Instead of leaving the kids alone, which is how a lot of married young folks prefer it, mom and pop either over-indulge and spoil them or make them resentful.
   There is marked stupidity on all sides. Newlyweds are stupid, not because they get hitched, but because they have not lived long enough to have perspective. Their parents are stupefied by their protective instincts.

   IT MAKES you shudder to think of fumbles made in early marriage. Back when I was a green husband, my wife and I would drive 100 miles into Wisconsin every other weekend to visit her parents. We wanted to be there and assumed that they wanted us. Up to a certain point perhaps they did. But my mother-in-law must have grown weary of the guests-for-dinner chore and wished that we lived a couple of states away. She should have given us the heave but didn't. She was too gracious a woman. Also the indulgence must have given her a satisfaction, a sense of being needed even though it meant extra work.
   When Josephine gets married, it's better that she and her mate take off for remote parts, where they are free of all the foul-ups involving relatives. But if they do live close by and insist on preserving their independence, it would be nice if they did not flaunt said independence to a degree that caused parental suffering.

   THE KIDS should not so well remember that trite warning of a year or so back that "if you're old enough to get married you're old enough to be on your own so don't expect any more help from us."
   This is a statement that on the face of it , makes complete sense. But it doesn't quite work out. Dad and mother live to learn that they did not flaunt said in- that strong.
   Nevertheless, the non-meddling policy is the right one. Do nothing and play for time, I say. Kids want to live their own lives and should, but they don't brush off the old folks permanently. After a while they have a way of "coming home" again.

Copyright 2018 StarTribune. Republished here with the permission of the StarTribune. No further republication or redistribution is permitted without the express approval of the StarTribune.