So Much Hot Air

Yesterday the CD-ROM arrived from the auction house containing every photograph that they took of the the things from my mother's house (at least, the things that were in the second auction just recently). The banner pictured above used to hang on the back stairway leading up to the guest suite. This was a part of the house that was once used quite often, was closed only in winter, but which in recent years had been completely shut off. It was one of the areas of the house that acted a bit like a time capsule: on the rare occasions I ventured in there, the back staircase felt a bit like an abandoned storage room in a museum.

I plan on using the photographs, which are beautiful, in an array of creative projects. I'm especially looking forward to an additional CD-ROM of pictures from the upcoming Toy and Collectibles auction. There is a children's story that I wrote years ago, based on Mom's collection of toys and dolls. At the time, I was just learning how to use a computer and programs like Photoshop, and my efforts at generating electronic illustrations were crude at best. Now I have some experience, and Creative Suits CS5, and I plan on putting them both to use.

One of the very few items of real value that I kept out of the auction was the star of that story. He is sitting upstairs in the studio right now. I will need more photos of him than the auction house would be able to provide.

The first line of the story is: "The bear was lonely, and his socks didn't fit."

Also yesterday, I had the first "bad morning" that I've experienced in a while. What brought it on, I wonder? Too little sleep, a hangover from the night before, both? When I came down to the kitchen a wave of sadness hit me, followed by the familiar claw of anxiety.

But -- it wasn't as bad as some of the bad mornings I experienced at the old house, and today I was the almost perky, practically OK person that is becoming the new normal.

It's been a peaceful week here. I've been Taking Deep Breaths. With the move behind me, a layer of stress is dropping away and the World That Was is getting smaller and smaller in the rear-view mirror.

It's still a part of me. I just don't live there anymore, and where I am living is so full of possibilities that I'm still just looking around.

I love the new house, and think that the basic layout of the furnishings worked out really well. The cats appear to agree with me. It's home now. Everybody's stretching.

Being able to write this blog from home is a danged good thing, too. It's both a daily task and a challenge. Getting into the habit of writing something, anything, every night is exactly what I need. It won't always be the blog. I hope that, sooner rather than later, I'll be able to find it in me to work on other projects.

Baby steps! That's my mantra!

Here's the soundtrack for this post.

There was a brief rearing of the past last night. The new owner of the house called. He wants the keys that I left with my lawyer, and he has questions about the things that were left behind. I understand his concerns, but I can't really help him. That part of my life is over. He needs to deal with the lawyer, or with my sister, who after all is the one who sold him the place right out from underneath me. It's time for her to step up to the plate, and do her part, and have her closure, if she wants it. I am done.

*

This evening over dinner I watched the animated "film," 9. I have to use the quotations for a couple of reasons. First, no film was harmed (or even touched) in the making of this motion picture. Second, as a movie it could be a great video game. Could, because as it stands, it doesn't even have the value of a video game, the interaction or the solving of puzzles. Even for a modern CGI animated movie, the "plot" is astonishingly thin. Why did they bother to hire such great voice talent when there is so very little dialogue in the picture, and most of what dialogue there is consists of grunts, wails and moans?

Literally, the plot is nothing more than an explanation for the graphic design. And, yes, the design is wonderful, but you know what? Wonderful design is everywhere these days. There's a surfeit of it, and I say that as a designer myself.

Literally, if you've seen the trailer for this movie, you've seen everything that it has to offer and then some. I'm glad that I was eating my dinner while it was on, so that I could say it wasn't completely wasted time.

I'm on my bike. Fiddle-dee-dee, tomorrow is another day.

-- Freder.

Here at the End of Time

The old house as I prefer to remember it.

I hadn't seen Tiger Grumpyface since the last really bad storm (more than a week), and I hadn't seen Tiger Whitestockings in two days. At first I wasn't too worried; the food was still getting eaten. But today I saw not one but two strange quats eating off the Tigers' plate, and for the first time I started to suspect foul play.

Instead, when I went out with their dinner just now, both Tigers appeared and seemed eager to see me. Whitestockings had lost some weight. But all is well. Phew.

*

It was all over at the old house by a quarter to two. I felt overwhelmingly sad as I pointed the car away, oppressively sad. But when I arrived home and came into the new house, I saw that my life was here, and was immediately cheered. It's been a damn lot of work, and it's not over, and the future -- as the fortune-tellers say -- is in doubt. But home is here.

That's a mighty powerful three words.

I was up at seven-thirty to do my chores and feed us all, started out with plenty of time but somewhere along the way I spent too much time online and ended up running a bit late. The mysterious plower had been back, and this time he had shoveled out the path to the front door as well. JA, my lawyer, was no more than a couple of minutes behind me pulling into the driveway.

I was glad that she came, because it was a help in many ways. But helping me wasn't her main motive in coming -- she was hoping to score some Free Stuff.

I was okay with that. She didn't take anything without asking first, and the auctioneer was leaving a fair amount of stuff behind. I still can't understand his thinking. Some of what he took was absolute rubbish, fit only for Goodwill; meanwhile, he left some perfectly good and salable things behind. I didn't want them; or, if I did, I didn't have room for them. As an example, Mom had a set of six giant children's blocks that were made out of wood. She used them for both packing and display purposes at shows and in her shop. I'd love to keep them, but there's no room, what would I do with them? I think they'd bring something at an auction, but Steve the auctioneer was disdainful. He tried to take two small, worthless, cardboard display pieces that I expressly wanted to leave for the new owners, but he won't take the blocks.

He is a loud, brash person. He is completely bald (not even having eyebrows). He persisted in leaving the main door wide open to the cold, even when no one was carrying anything out. 

The morning was a long emotional replay of the last two times that the auctioneers had come to tear the place apart. They made a terrible mess, again. In my old bedroom I pulled down a last couple of posters. I looked out of the window for the last time. I hid in there until the tears stopped.

JA sat down with me and told me about the auction. It did not go as well as anticipated; at any rate, JA thinks that we may end up with about half of what they had estimated. As she flipped through the catalog and showed me the lots, and the prices they had gone for, I felt sick and sad. It is galling and depressing to see my mother's life reduced to numbers, and such low numbers at that. Some few things went for more than expected, but the vast majority hovered at or below the estimate. I hated even seeing that catalog. I wanted her to put it away.

The day seemed to drag on so slowly. It was cloudy out, so the light was tricky. By noon, I was sure that it was coming up on four o'clock. I was astonished to see that it was just past one when the auctioneers left.

I gave JA a key to the house and one to the small barn. Then, with both of our cars loaded to the roof, we drove down to the neighbor's house. One of the new owners is his son-in-law. We spent about a half hour there, an awful lot of formalities to go through just to drop off the keys. And that was it.

I think it will take me two more trips, not because I have so much left to take, but because it's nearly all bulky. There is a wooden deer for the lawn that I am keeping, and a giant rooster sign that my mother and I made when she was trying to have a shop there at the house. There's a stepladder that's going to have to go down the middle of the car.

I'm going to try to get it all tomorrow.

And then, suddenly, my life is going to open up again, at last. As I unloaded the car this evening, I realized that next weekend will be Entirely Free. Tomorrow, this chapter in my life will be over.

-- Freder.

The Second Auction

Why am I the last to learn everything? The second auction featuring another chunk of my mother's collection is happening this week, Thursday and Friday. I haven't even seen a copy of the catalog (pictured above). I also asked Mr. Julia for a CD-ROM of every picture that they took, and I haven't seen that, either.

The auction website is here.

-- Freder.

The day the fire died

Yesterday I found, neatly packed in a box in the basement, a terrific hooked rug that my mother made in 1962. The design was almost Mondrian-boxlike, with a different element in each box: half a sun, my mother's name, and more. I'd forgotten all about it; had half-forgotten that she ever worked in that medium.

She was so creative and did so many different kinds of things. Signs, clothing, handbags, papier mache fruit and flower arrangements, wooden carvings, wire creations, toys, jack-in-the-boxes, engraved leather work -- and sometimes combinations of all those things. She made the papier mache clock sign in the picture above. She was always working on something, in between raising us kids and doing many antique shows every year.

She sold a lot of it. I remember the summer she got the commission from Unionmutual to do hand-tooled leather bags to be given away at a company event. The arrangements sold at antique shows, as many as she could make. Some of her pieces are still on display at a pancake restaurant in the state capital. Her Jack-in-the-boxes were exhibited at the Farnsworth Museum in Rockland, Maine, which is otherwise notable for its collection of the work of three generations of Wyeths.

And then, suddenly, she stopped.

This was in the early eighties, right around the time she and my father divorced. The flow of creativity just stopped dead in its tracks, and another flow began, as she started to fill every corner of the house with antiques, toys, books, magazines, Disneyana, vintage games, Disneyana, dolls, teddy bears, and more Disneyana. Whether or not it was antique didn't matter. If it tickled her or struck her fancy, it came home with her.

She claimed to be claustrophobic, but she created a house that had one narrow path to allow a person through. In a way, the house itself became her magnum opus, a collage of Fun Things done on a colossal scale. It wasn't like the homes of hoarders you see on television. It was all neatly and artfully arranged, until after the operation to amputate her right leg robbed her of her ability to venture very far into the house.

When she ran out of money and couldn't afford to buy anything anymore, it made her so sad that she cried.

It was as if she was filling the empty space inside of her that was created when she stopped making art of her own.

My uncle O____ once said to my father, "You broke her heart."

It was a cruel thing for one brother to say to another, but it was true.

The first of the auctions

Finding this on the web just now really made me sad. It's the notice for the first of three auctions to be held around my mother's estate. Click here for the listing. Be sure to look at the image gallery. It's coming right up, on December 7. What a day to choose.

Anyway, here's your chance to own a piece of the funhouse. Or for me to buy it back.

-- Freder.

The Torture-Proof Man

"Strange we hold on to things that have no grace or power
While death holds on to us much more with every passing hour

And all the time you thought it would last
Your life, your friends would always be
'Til they're drunk away or shot away or die away from you."

-- George Harrison

I'm proud to point out the obvious: you don't see many Family Portraits like this one. I found it the other night while going through a box full of stuff that the auctioneers had thrown together during those awful three days. I hadn't seen it in years.

It was taken at an Antique Show at the A________ Civic Center, probably thirty years ago. Mom always put up an elaborate booth, usually with the wooden "house" flats that she'd painted herself, but for a while she displayed this circus sideshow banner, and this one time we dressed for the occasion. My mother is the clown, I'm the Ringmaster, and my sister is in the lion costume.

This is actually quite appropriate, because for the last thirty years she's been lyin'.

Sam Pennington, the editor of the Maine Antique Digest, was tickled by our act, and he insisted on taking the picture. You can see it in full size at my Flickr account, just follow the link in the sidebar.

I still have the vest and tailcoat, but don't fit into them anymore, and my leather top hat tooled with a black rose was taken by the auctioneer's crew, sometime when I was distracted, along with my winter leather jacket! The clownish jacket that my mother is wearing is something that she made. I'm sure I still have it. And the lion costume is safe with me. Here he is in color:

 

The Torture-Proof Man sideshow banner is the real thing, a genuine relic from a nameless circus of long ago. I tried to find it in the weeks and months after Mom died, but had no luck. So I was actually pleased when the auctioneer's crew did find it, and laid it out on the front lawn. It wasn't lost after all. Perhaps it was under her bed. That wouldn't surprise me!

It's going to be auctioned off early next year, and I hope it gets a good home. I'm OK with that, because it was too big for my new home (and, psst! Don't tell the auctioneer or anyone else, but I withheld a second, smaller sideshow banner that will have a special place somewhere in my next life!)

Who was it said: "Damn it all. Damn everything but the circus."

-- Freder

Dreams of the Departed

This morning I talked to my mother in a dream. We were shopping in a Disney store (one of her favorite activities in her later years, until the Disney Company closed down the stores). She was walking on her own two legs, and looked better than she had for some months. This was an idealized Disney store, they had just about anything anyone could want. I found an animated movie on DVD about the adventures of a Steampunked-up Mickey Mouse. Mom wasn't interested in that.

(When I went to find an image for this post, I Googled "Steampunk Mickey Mouse" and look what I found. Apparently the Disney Company really is doing something along this line. How odd, on so many levels, that I knew nothing about this, and dreamed it, and it's real. Here's a link to prove it.)

We didn't talk about anything serious. We never did. Our life was all about escaping from serious things. Mom was in her element and enjoying her newfound freedom to buy anything she wanted. She had loaded up the checkout counter with a pile of things (I've actually seen her do that in real life). But then something happened. The scene was suddenly colored with a deep sadness. It was almost as if she knew that she could not take any of these things home with her.

She disappeared, and my dream went in a different direction. I woke feeling sad, anxious, and with a bad case of the shakes.

This is not the first time I have had this kind of a dream. The first time was years ago. As with today, it was early morning and I was on the way to waking up. Then Sandy P_____, a former co-worker and a friend, entered my dream. I knew that she had been suffering from cancer for a long time. The last time I had seen her (in real life) she was in a wheelchair, bald from chemo, horribly diminished, but her spirits were, remarkably, still high.

Now, in my dream, she looked great, just like her old self. I asked, "How are you?" and she said, "I'm great, I'm completely recovered! They were getting ready to put me in a pine box, but I showed them!"

We sat down at a picnic table and talked a while. Then suddenly the scene was colored with the same sense of sadness that I recognized last night. Something was making me understand that I had to go. I said good-bye, walked away from the picnic table, and woke up -- remembering everything clearly.

Half an hour later the telephone rang. It was my former boss, Ellen R________. She told me that Sandy had died during the night.

V-V-V-Vampires!

"Giff mee yourrr FUR-nicherrr! Giff mee your MAIMaries! I VANT yourrrr SHTUFF!"

Tonight the owners of the secondary auction house are coming over to see what's left for them to take.

There's a significant amount in the two barns, but the main house is going to be an issue. They are going to want to pull things out of there now, whereas there are only a few things that I can allow them to take. I need for them to wait until after I'm done moving, then come by and pick up whatever is left behind. I won't know until I get in to the new house whether some of the furniture is coming with me or not.

There's a large green icebox in the kitchen that I can't use, but I still don't want them to take it now. It would be too disruptive, the whole kitchen would have to be moved, and besides which, my cats like to jump up there to look out the window. Until we're gone, it stays.

For my part, I am just GOD damn sick of strangers traipsing through my house, looking at everything.

In a seemingly-unrelated matter, it comes as a surprise to discover that I must be weather-sensitive. All it takes is one dismal, dreary day, and the black dog is once again on my doorstep.

Now I want to say a giant "thank you" to all of you. I check the stats every day, so I know you're out there, some of you from as far away as Denmark, Russia and Japan. I don't know why you're reading this drivel, but you are. And that means something to me. The only time that I don't feel completely alone is when I'm working on this crazy blog.

-- Freder

"Borrrrrn Freeeeeee!"

Quats freaking out in an empty house. Compare with earlier photo of the same space.

By Tuesday night I was emotionally and physically exhausted. As I got up and set about getting ready for the auctioneer and his crew to arrive for their third day of stripping the house, I felt as if this had been going on for months, years. It felt endless.

The cats no longer fought to get out when I locked them away.

My father was the first to arrive. His wife was already out looking at houses with the real estate agent. It was a quarter to ten before the trucks started showing up.

They had left bins of things in the front room of the house. I volunteered to help carry them out, but I had only made two trips before I completely fell apart and had to go hide in the barn.

My father found me there and hugged me.

By lunchtime, my father's wife was back. Mr. J_____ invited us three to lunch at a little restaurant in Albion. I am sure that he wanted to regale us with more of his stories, but the entire lunch was co-opted by my father and his wife, and her report of the houses she had seen.

My father picked up the tab.

Sometime in the middle afternoon Mr. J______ stopped sorting items and entered the house. I believe he was determined that this was going to be the last day of his involvement. He went down the basement and all through the house, searching for value. He opened every door, including ones that were off limits. More on that later.

Among the things he found that he seemed to want were the boxes of my old shop stock from the Duck Soup days, ten or eleven big boxes full of comic books dating from 1982 and earlier. I couldn't believe that he really wanted them, but this part actually pleased me: I had been wondering how in hell I was going to get rid of the things. They will be auctioned off as a lot, included as part of the estate.

At some point I found myself in the front hall, looking into the study. My desk and everything on it were there, my computer was on its stand as normal, the sofa was against the wall. Everything else was gone. When they had taken down the painting over the fireplace, all of the plaster had come down with it and was piled up on the floor and mantelpiece. On the outside wall, a horrible amount of water damage had been exposed. The same was true in the living room. Plaster and paint chips everywhere.

When I looked up the stairs, I was shocked to see that Pandy Bear and Whitey were both out. They were starting down the stairs. The front door was open behind me.

I leaped forward at them and they split. Whitey ran back into the bedroom. I shut the door behind him. Pandy had gone off towards the bathroom. I ran down and slammed the front door shut.

When I went back to look for Pandy Bear, I saw that the doors that are usually closed, leading all the way through the back of the house, to the back stairway and the entry hall downstairs, were all standing open. No sign of Pandy Bear.

I ran down through the house and got to the back door just as Pandy was stepping outside. As I reached for him he took a fright of my action and what was happening in the yard, and ran off at high speed for a big fatty-bounce of a cat. He ducked into the bushes and dove into the hole that goes under the barn. He was gone.

I screamed at the workers. "Is there anything we can do to help, Doug?" Bill G___. said. What a stupid question. I went around the house calling for Pandy, but there was no sign of him.

When the day started to wind down, Mr. J____ walked me through the upstairs of the house, which was largely untouched. He said the beds and other furniture up there were not worth much of anything, maybe $50 - $150 a piece. His brother in law would be around in two or three weeks to remove them for his auction, but Mr. J______ advised me to keep them unless I was certain that I would not need them. They would not bring much at auction, and would be more expensive to replace.

He left. His crew finished packing. By five o'clock I was signing the final contracts, twelve or thirteen pages. The trucks drove off. All the grass in the yard was mashed down. The place was quiet and empty.

Pooky wandered through the house crying her head off, trying to absorb what had happened. Patches was totally cool and copacetic.

There was no time to look for Pandy Bear. My father and his wife had made a six o'clock appointment to look at houses.

This time, I drove myself. We picked up the agent -- Sue's husband Harold -- and drove to a house I had never seen before, in a good neighborhood. It was a plain white house with a screened porch for my kitties, sitting on a crazy knoll across the street from the Catholic Church. The garage was in poor condition, but inside it was nice, if on the small side. Very small, actually. I was conscious of feeling cramped even though it was unfurnished. The bedrooms upstairs were a little bigger than the closets in my mother's house. Not all the furniture that I retained would fit. Still, I could envision myself and the cats there. It would be a little on the cozy side, but it could be done. But that horrible carpet would have to come up. and the green paint in the kitchen would have to go.

Then we went up to the cute brown-shingled house that I had been looking at for so long. This was different. It was beautiful inside, and just the right size. I quite liked it. But the porch had a bounce and a droop in it and the screens were loose, and the house needed a lot of work: new shingles. Structural work. This did not phase me as much as it did my father. The deal breaker for me was the bathroom situation. There was just one bathroom in the whole place, and it was a horrible cramped thing, too small for me to fit a cat tray inside. It would be impossible to sustain five cats.

So it appeared the small white house was my only option, and I began to feel a little depressed at the thought.

We dropped off Harold, a very nice man, at his office and went up to MacDonald's for dinner. There we talked over the options, and they decided to come over to the house the next day to help me work on it. They said that they would investigate the Victorian that was For Sale By Owner on their way out.

The niceness and the helpfulness of everything they were doing for me actually made me feel uncomfortable. I drove home in full dark with such mixed emotions, not all of them sad.

There was no sign of Pandy Bear.

Shock of the New

On Monday night I stood in what had once been my mother's bedroom and screamed.

Then I went around the house and put signs on things that I didn't want them to take.

The next day was more of the same, with a couple of differences. Taking a lesson from the day before, I tried to spend more of my time in the house, keeping an eye on the pickers. This sometimes involved having to be in more than one place at the same time. I began to be more assertive and proactive, trying to define some boundaries. After talking to Sue C_______, I decided to keep the dining room table and a set of chairs to go around it. I decided to keep the apothecary chest, as much so that I wouldn't have to open and go through all the drawers as for its usefulness as a piece of furniture.

Other than that, it was very much like the day before. Panic, work, running around, pictures and tears.

Sue helped me sort through some personal papers and clothes. She left around 3:30, and I thought, it's just me and them, now.

About half an hour later, my father appeared in the yard. I went up to him and said, "I didn't expect to see you today."

He said, "M_____ and I are going to take you to dinner."

It was a nice thought, but not what I needed or wanted. I needed the evening hours to start cleaning up the disaster area that was my house and to start making the place habitable again. I didn't want to leave my kitties alone when they would no doubt be freaking out. But this was not so much an invitation as another one of his non-negotiable demands.

Once again Whitey and Honey had gone into hiding under my bed and had to be coaxed out. Once again Honey went tearing down the stairs, but this time she did not even make it to the bottom. The front hall had been cleared out. She saw the empty space, spun around 180 degrees and shot past me into the dark hall that leads to the guest room. I called her and called her, but she would not show herself.

My father was saying that we had to go. I just had time to quickly get some fresh food out for the gang, and no time to change or clean up. My pants were covered with filth.

I said I'd follow them in my car. My father's wife said, in her heavily accented, sing-song voice, "No, we drive you."

I sat in the back seat of their SUV with my head against the glass, staring blindly through the window and not saying much of anything. They noted a new building that had gone in on the main road. Without knowing why I said it, I said, "There are a couple of nice houses for sale in W_________ with screened porches on them."

My father said, "That's what you said in your email last night." (I didn't remember typing it, or even sending him an email the night before, I had been in a zombie-like state,) Then he said, "Let's go look at them. You show me where they are and we'll take a look."

My heart sank. I thought, Oh, me and my damn mouth again. Now this is going to take even longer.

When we got to town I directed them onto C___ Street and then W______ Avenue. At the very end of C___ Street there is a house for sale with a finished apartment above the garage. Just around the corner there is a nice looking Victorian with a sign out front reading "FOR SALE BY OWNER." My father actually stopped the car, and his wife wrote down the number. I thought, What is going on here?

We drove up the avenue to a brown shingled house that I pass every day. They wrote down the name and number of the real estate broker.

At the restaurant, my father took out a real estate magazine that he had brought with him and began leafing through it. It was only then that I realized that my off-hand comment in the car had played right in to the subject that they wanted to speak to me about.

They are going to help me buy a house.

They leave for Nevada in late October, and want it done before then.

The Corpse Pickers

It was a bit of black humor on Monday morning to go to my Halloween countdown calendar and discover that the picture for that day was a witch's broom, sweeping stars.

I rose early, did my morning chores as normal, and at about 8:30 started rounding up cats.

Honey and Pooky went into the bathroom, Patches, Pandy Bear and Whitey went into my bedroom. Patches was the only one who resisted, but the minute I closed the door on them they realized that something was not right. As I popped each succeeding cat into the room, it got harder and harder to keep them inside while I shut the door.

I went out and sat at the table sipping on my ginger ale, waiting for them to come.

Sue C_______ was the first. She is the paralegal who works with my lawyer, and was there for moral and practical support. Then Mr. J_____ himself arrived. The head honcho. He likes to hear himself talk and immediately took command of the conversation with stories from his life.and profession. It went on for what seemed like a long time before the trucks began to pull in.

We stood at the back door and Mr. J______ made a discreet speech about my mother and about the task that his staff faced and how they were going to go about it. He had to keep starting over again because more people kept arriving, including my father and my lawyer, Joanne A_____, who as always gave me a big hug. I'm certain that I looked like I needed it.

From the bathroom window upstairs I could hear Pooky wailing. I had expected to see Honey sitting in that window, as it's one of her favorite spots, but she never appeared.

Then the show began. On that first day, it was my mistake to position myself in the yard to watch the things being carried out of the house. When the first item came out of the door I burst into tears and had to hide.

It started as a trickle and turned into a flood. Things were coming out so fast that I couldn't keep track. Soon I realized that they weren't just taking things of value -- they were taking everything.

They took her telephone. I caught this and saved it. They took her Dustbuster. They took her bag full of prosthetic socks. They took electric fans. I had told all of them that I still lived in the house and hoped they would leave me with some furniture and other practical things; either they didn't listen to me, or they had been told to clear the place out to the bare walls.

They took our broom. Why? They took my hammer. Why? I began prowling the yard, which with its tables full of things and boxes on the ground was beginning to look like a flea market, trying to find things and rescue them.

Inside the house was chaos. They toy man, Andrew, was ripping things down so carelessly that other objects were falling to the floor, where they broke or were stepped upon. He would pull things out of the arrangements, and if he decided not to take it he would toss it aside carelessly. Dolls lost their hats, arms, legs. Sets were broken up. It seemed to me that they didn't even know what they were looking at.

The rugs were all tossed out and the dirt underneath them began to spread absolutely everywhere. If it was clean when they started, it was filthy when they left.

I felt so powerless and every so often broke down in tears again.

Mr. J_____ was personally sorting every item that came out of the house, first deciding if he was going to take the item, or pass it off to his brother-in-law's auction house, then sorting what he wanted into groups.

Sue kept on trying to impress on me that as executor, I had the power to keep anything I wanted, but the message was largely not sinking in. I was too distracted and distraught.

Around noon I went upstairs to switch out Honey and Patchy. I first I couldn't find Honey at all, and thought, how could she disappear? It turned out that she was cowering in the bathtub, trying to make herself as small as possible. She looked up wt me with a terrified expression. I was going to switch out Whitey as well, so that he could get access the cat tray, but as soon as I closed the door on him he began wailing. I put him back in my room.

Throughout the afternoon it was more of the same. One half of the crew ripped things out of the kitchen and then moved into the dining and living room; the other half started in the hall and worked their way into my mother's bedroom.

They took the things that she had made even though I had asked them not to. So again I had to be on my toes, going from bin to bin, trying to save pieces of her from going.

And so on, as Mr. Vonnegut says.

They stopped taking things out of the house at four-thirty, and concentrated on processing what was already out. I went up and let the cats out.

Honey came out of the room and went shooting down the stairs like a rocket into the front of the house. Pandy Bear and Patchy were completely mellow. But Whitey was hiding under my bed and afraid to come out.

As I carried their food plates to the kitchen, I met Honey coming back. She was running at top speed through the half-stripped living room, keeping low to the ground as though she was trying to hide and run at the same time. When she saw me she stopped dead in her tracks and looked up at me with her eyes as big as saucers, as if to say, "What have YOU DONE??!!"

What, indeed, had I done? Something horrible, that I could never change.

Possibilities for future lives

Soon I will be free as a bird. I will be able to move anywhere, do anything I want to do.

I have to start thinking along those lines.

Staying in the house is not sustainable unless the situation evolves in one of two or three directions.

One solution would be for me to follow in my mother's footsteps and enter the antiques trade myself, gradually dissolving the estate in a way that was not too painful while still allowing me the time to search for other employment on the side.

I thought about that for maybe five minutes. The antiques trade is not for me. Of course nothing is certain, but this game is more uncertain than most. You can work your tail off in dire conditions and still lose money.

Another solution is to start one (or more) of the businesses that I've been noodling on and run them from the house. My mother and I discussed turning the field beside the Barn into a real old-fashioned German style outdoors craft and antiques market with a Christmas theme. It would be harder to do without the field across the street to use as a parking lot, but it could still be done. At the same time, I had a notion about using the back field and the field beside the house for a Halloween-themed Spook Attraction. The tour would end out in front of the house, where there would be a kiosk selling comics and other gifty items tied to the attraction (I called it "The Shadow Lands" and had a full layout in my head, along with ambitious plans for expansion over time), and there would be a food service out in front of the barn. Over time, both barns would be restored and remade into additional attractions.

Then there’s the publishing business that I wanted to start up with the ex-Thorndike Press gang, using the successful Thorndike Press model. When they all moved away from it (investment money not growing on trees, and no one wishing, understandably, to stake their future) I transformed the concept into something called "Black Street Books," which would have specialized in genre fiction with an emphasis on series titles produced on the Stratemeyer Syndicate model. I have a business plan partially written.

None of these ideas are incompatible -- and they go in a direction that I actually could actually get some enjoyment or fulfillment from.

But I’m a lousy business man, and these are large projects that would require the help of others. No one, least of all myself, has any confidence in my ability to make even the smallest of these things happen.

My attempts to launch a simple web-based business were a dismal failure.

The only thing I know for certain is that I have to find a new purpose in life, and that purpose can not be the college bookstore.

It’s time to start a job search that includes the whole country, not just my current neck of the woods.

-- Freder.

The plunderers are coming. . .

The blows keep coming, fast and furious. On Friday I heard from the state police: as I suspected, they aren’t going to do anything about my sister’s thefts. And on Saturday I received the proposal from the Auction House.

They want to start ASAP, which I interpret as sometime within the next two or three weeks.

They plan on clearing the whole place out over a period of three days.

Although I knew it was going to be like this, seeing it in hard type was upsetting, to say the least.

I'll be left with a few sticks of furniture and some modern stuff that no one wants, yard-sale stuff, and a big empty mausoleum with just me and the cats to face the winter.

I won¹t even have a desk in my study. In fact, I have to clear all my stuff out (and off) of it so that they can take it out.

I know that it needs to be done, but I'm so not ready. A friend asked, would I be ready next year? No. But it would make the winter easier.

I have always hated and dreaded that terrible season. How bad will it be, alone in a big cold empty house? I don’t think there’s enough Prozac in the world to cover that prospect.

I would move somewhere else, but what to do about the outside cats?

Milestones that wouldn't seem like milestones to anyone else

With the proposal from the auction house pending (and I'm guessing they will want to start taking things out of the house ASAP), I've been slacking off the past couple of weekends when it comes to working on the place and its contents. Only three extra bags of garbage went out this week, and five boxes filled with styrofoam.

But I finally gave myself permission to make two big changes.

There was a rocking chair in the kitchen that was just one piece of furniture too many. No one could sit in it anyhow, since my mother used it as storage. Before her death we took out about three layers of reference books and moved them upstairs, but there were still about seven layers of other things in that chair. Recently I finally got it down to the point where there was just about one armful of stuff remaining.

And so, late Saturday night, with some Dutch Courage inside me, I moved that armful of stuff into the cat chair that my mother used to sit in, picked up the rocking chair, carried it out of the kitchen and out of the house and stowed it in the (locked) big barn.

Then I cleaned the floor. It was a real transformation. A whole world of space opened up. I no longer have to side-step around that chair to get from one end of the kitchen to the other. It's amazing. It's also amazing that the cats still manage to lodge themselves in front of me with all that extra space they could be using!

I dealt with the armful of stuff the next day. A big part of it was just two blankets that need washing before they can go into the cycle of things I use to protect the living room sofa from Pooky, my incontinent cat.

Now, look at that picture above this post.

See the blue child's chair?

That's the main entry to the house, and that blue chair has been troubling me for years. It has to be moved every time I go down the basement. When the door is open, you actually have to step over the chair to get into the hall. When the real estate agent was walking through the house, we both stumbled over it. I told him I didn't know why I hadn't moved it. I said, "Guess I'm still in the mode of not wanting to change anything."

That little blue chair (and the blocks and the pencil tin and the rabbit and the Jiminy Cricket and Pinocchio dolls that were sitting in it, that always fell on the floor every time I walked through) has been relocated to the kitchen space that was vacated by the rocking chair. They're small, they don't trouble me at all in that spot. And both places are so much easier to navigate.

This is all a big deal to me, a major milestone. It may not seem like much to you, and I wouldn't expect it to. But my world is made a little better by it.

I'm sorry, Mom.

-- Freder.

Trapped in a world the blogger never made

Saturday afternoon I was summoned to another lunch at my father’s house.

It was easier than the first time, but there were still the disconnects that my father and his wife don’t even seem aware of.

They had made the offer of their upstairs rooms as storage space for some of my things. I wrestled with that, decided that I wasn’t ready to start moving out -- then on Friday night I kind of told myself “You have to start sometime,” and with the fortitude of a couple of drinks inside me I carried six boxes of my comics collection out of the house and loaded them in the car. Then I packed up all of the original art for my two web comics and put all that in, too.

But when I arrived on Saturday the driveway was being blacktopped. It was impossible to park anywhere near the house. I would have had to carry all that stuff the distance of about two blocks. So I left it in the car, never mentioned it, and carried it all (except for the art) back into my house when I got home.

It’s probably just as well. With a self-storage unit I can access whatever I choose to store any time I need to; this would not be the case with anything I stowed in my father’s house.

I arrived when I was told to, at 11:00 o’clock, and my father wasn’t even home. His wife greeted me as if I had surprised her. It was an awkward ten minutes before he returned to the house. His wife speaks in monologues just like him. I suppose she was nervous.

We looked at the prints I’d had done of some of the 2,000-plus pictures that I’ve taken around the house. I need to make more. They turned out so well, much better than I expected from a dippy little $50 digital camera.

As he looked over the pictures, my father could not stop obsessing over the painting that my mother sold some time after they divorced. “That’s the wall where ‘Twins in Green’ used to hang,” he said, whether he was looking at a picture of the wall or not. He said it four times. It hadn’t been his painting for a long time when she sold it.

Lunch was Salmon, which I dislike, and potatoes and something called Korean Squash.

My understanding was that the reason they wanted me there at 11:00 (early for me on a Saturday; they live a little under an hour’s drive away from me) was so that my father could take me out car shopping in the afternoon. This, too, never developed. I was just as well pleased at that. I want to choose my own car in my own way on my own time.

Every year they buy season tickets at the B_________ Music Theater. They take a Sunday every month, drive down there with their friend Henry (I have heard so much about friend Henry that I don’t want to hear any more about friend Henry. I think dad has kind of a guy-crush on him), have lunch, take in a show, and stop for ice cream on the way home.

Next year, they want to co-opt my Sundays and for me to come along. This was presented to me in the form of a non-negotiable demand.

I do not like having my Sundays co-opted like that, especially, as I told them, since I don’t even know what my life will be like next year. I do not even know where I’ll be living next year. In any case, I don’t want to go to the theater, any theater, at least not with them. It just depresses me.

My father insisted that I take a POPPY OTT book that I already own, and a flyer about a space heater that he wants me to buy, and some legislation notes about town taxes that I most likely will never read. It’s typical of dad that, at a time when I have been working hard to clear my life of excess and valueless paper, he gives me more.

His wife gave me six bags of frozen pureed broccoli, and told me how to add cream or milk to make it into a soup. I was a little concerned about fitting it into my freezer, but I did get it all in there somehow.

She gave me a cooking appliance that she’d bought two of from one of those infomercials. She showed me how to cook fish in it, and described how to make an omelet. She is well-meaning and I’m not ungrateful for the gesture, but I will probably stick with my skillet.

It ended when my father declared that he had to leave the house again to buy a wheel for his wife’s wheelbarrow.

We walked out to where the cars were parked. He never stopped talking the whole way.

I know that they are just trying to help, and I don’t wish to be disrespectful of their feelings. But how much do they actually respect mine? At this moment in history, I need to be in control of the process of remaking my life. Every time I am with them I can feel that control being ripped out of my hands.

Missing Links from a Missing Link

I was excited this morning to stop by my brand-new PO Box and find something inside: the prints that I ordered of my digital photos!

Then I realized that much of the backstory is missing from this blog. For example, you might ask why I needed a PO Box when I have a perfectly good mailbox at my home.

Other than a brief post when I started the blog, I haven't mentioned my sister much at all.

I didn't want to obsess or vent or rant or rage, though I've been doing a fair amount of that away from here.

So: some missing links from the backstory.

The week after our mother died, my sister began entering my home illegally while I was away at work. She  stole a lot of my mother's things right out of the house, took them to an antiques shop on the coast and sold them at way below market value.

Why didn't I notice right away? If you've looked at some of the photos I've posted here (including the slideshow in the sidebar and at the bottom of the page, "Views from the Funhouse"), you can see why. My mother was a hoarder, and it's easy to take one or two things out of any given location, re-arrange a bit, and no one is the wiser. Also, I was stumbling around the house in a drunken state of despair.

But eventually, I did notice. I immediately had the locks changed and the burglar alarm system brought back on-line.

As soon as she could no longer access the main house, my sister broke into the barns and outbuildings and stole a large amount of things from there. To make it look like an outside job she broke a window. I can safely say that she is the one responsible; I have both a written confession and a voice message on my answering machine in which she doesn't deny anything.

That was when I called in the state police. I still haven't gotten any results from them. But I will press charges if I am allowed.

Then, someone stole my credit card statement right out of the mailbox and made a run on my card to the tune of $5,000.

I say someone, but this is exactly my sister's M.O.: she once stole one of my mother's Social Security checks out of the mailbox, forged the signature and cashed it.

So -- not only did I lose my mother and my best friend, but I have been fending off attacks from my sister ever since.

Hence, the PO Box.

P.S. -- the prints turned out really great! Not bad for a cheap $50 digital camera!

-- Freder

The Migration Habits of the blogger

The business of removing the things that belong to me out of the main part of the house is mostly done, that is, insofar as I am willing to go.

I'm not going to pull the computer out of the office, or clear the desk of my books and papers, I¹m not going to take the television and DVD players out of the kitchen, after all I do still live here and I have to be able to function as normal.

But most everything else, the books that were mine, a few puppets that I played with as a kid, a Steiff clown that was mine, things that I bought or was given -- most of that is now in my rooms.

It's getting crowded.

[Note to self: don't forget Pierre the Bear, or the Steiff Snowman puppet. They're yours, too.]

To make room for all of this meant clearing out my walk-in closet that has not been walk-inable for some time. Thanks to the VHS project that has opened up lots of shelf space in my bedroom, I was able to move all the DVDs in the closet out to other places.

But there were things that just had to go. Three enormous boxes of the comic book that I self-published way back in the early '80s had to be taken out. They are sitting in the barn right now, awaiting a judgment on their fate. I do not know if Goodwill would take them. If not, the only other option is for the recycling man to carry them away forever. There's the fruit of another dream going down the drain.

Like my mother, I had piles and boxes of magazines and newspapers, and it was time to give myself the same treatment I¹d given her in the kitchen. All my old MacAddict magazines, all my old issues of The Buyer¹s Guide for Comic Fandom (later morphed into The Comics Buyers Guide when it was bought out by Krause), catalogs and many other things of equal status, all had to go.

This time it was eight big, heavy garbage bags full.

When it was done I could walk into my closet again, and I had room for my things from the house.

I have also started choosing some artifacts from the estate that I cannot bear to part with. For the most part, these are not so much valuable as they are important memories to me. A set of oversized Babar books, and a doll of Babar as Father Christmas that I gave her as a present. A small, modern Mickey mouse figurine in Halloween gear. Her very new Sock Monkey Jack-in-the-Box. A couple of fanciful figures that she bought from Dollmasters. A Mickey Mouse soft car that I gave her for her birthday years ago -- she laughed and laughed. A Popeye lamp. A Halloween lantern and some other cheap Halloween things that we shopped for together in the last years of her life -- Halloween was always a fun time for us, more on that later.

These things and my own are slowly mixing together in my closet. They will go with me wherever I go from here.

But it's all come with a price. I was doing well emotionally until the last meeting with my lawyer. Reality is coming to Wonderland, and the two things are mutually exclusive.

Lately, I find myself crying all the time.

Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes. . .

It will begin soon. The auctioneer and the real estate appraiser have both been contacted. The valuations will begin next week. They may even begin to take things out of the house.

I am not ready.

I nearly lost it right there in the lawyer's office while we were calling the auction house.

All too soon, my sister will get her wish, and everything that was Mom's (and my!) life will be pulled apart and carted away. I may only be able to save a few pieces. I guess that's the reason why I've gone crazy with the digital camera. Day and night, I've taken over 2,000 photos in and around that place.

I've been told to start pulling the things that are actually mine out of the main part of the house and either put them in my rooms or get one of those self-storage units and begin moving it out.

And I need to winterize my mother's bathroom, so that I can close down that whole wing of the house.

This involves moving one of the cat boxes from her bathroom to mine, upstairs and on the other side of the house. I have no idea how that's going to work! Honey believes that she owns the upstairs and chases most everyone else away, especially Patchy. How will they react when I close the door and that whole space becomes unavailable to them?

I worry about Patchy in particular. She still likes to sleep on Mom's bed, and I believe she uses that litterbox exclusively. Honey has her so terrified that she never even ventures into my wing of the house.

It's going to be a horrifying change for all of us. I fully expect to be in the house through this winter. I have the right to live there for five years. But I can't stay in a big mausoleum like that over the long term. By next springtime, if we all make it, I expect I'll be doing my best Fagin imitation to the cats: "Come on boys, we're changin' lodgings!"

But what of the three outside cats? They are probably not adoptable, even by me. What am I going to do? Where are we going to go?