There seems to be a trend among those younger than me, which is the majority of the world, to have less stuff, rather than more stuff.
I for one, have lots of stuff. In fact, I have so much stuff, I don’t know how much stuff I actually have.
Old people do this kind of thing.
It just seems to happen in a natural sort of fashion. You buy some stuff for birthdays, anniversaries, Christmas and other important holidays in our lives and by the time you get to the end of the road you find you can’t pick any of it up any longer, much less carry it anywhere.
This is the main reason old people don’t move.
Take for instance, flashlights. Can’t have too many, can you? So, you’ve got them in just about every room since you never know where you’ll be when the lights go out, do you?
You have more than you need in your bedroom since it will most likely be at night and dark when you need to get up and go check on something when the lights go off. You won’t (can’t) just lie in bed and go back to sleep and check on the back door or the garage in the morning, can you?
Nope, never going to happen. You have to get out of bed, fumble around to find your slippers, try turning on the lights a couple of times just to make sure they are actually off. Then you locate one of the five flashlights in your night stand. Of these only one actually works since the batteries are dead in the others. So, you risk limb and life stumbling over (a) the dog (b) a toy your grandchild left on the stairs or (c) the ladder you propped up against the wall leading to the back door. Of course, about the time your big toe stops throbbing from the brick you dropped on it, the lights come back on. Now you have to return through the house to see which lamps and switches you flipped testing the power on your way to the garage.
You will have millions of pens. You can never have too many pens. So you have a pen or pens in every drawer in your house. You have enough pens to equip a medium sized elementary school. What you don’t have to go with your multitude of pens is …paper. Nope, no paper in sight anywhere. So you scratch that phone number on anything that will accept ballpoint ink. Including your palm in some cases out of desperation.
Old birthday and Christmas cards are covered with notes, recipes and phone numbers. No one ever throws away a birthday or Christmas card, so these are stuck in drawers (not ones with pens, mind you) to be around forever until you give up your mortal being and move on. Then those left to sort out your stuff will look at things like….”Call John on Monday about his…..”. Your survivors will never know what ‘his …’ was or if you did call him.
I think I will leave little notes around like….’Swiss bank account #2873z67s’…get latest deposit info.
It bothers me that I can’t remember notes I have left to myself. A long phone number, underlined ..twice…with ‘Oscar’ . since I don’t know any Oscars and don’t recall ever having met one, I have to wonder what the devil was all of that about and why did I underline it in the first place?
Old people remember phone books. Try explaining that to your grandkids….” now, Norah before the internet…” at which time she will look at you as if you have lost your ever-loving mind since everyone knows there has always been an internet…But as hard as it is to imagine, we used to have these big thick books called telephone books and you would open it up to ‘lookup’ a phone number. Telephone books were a great place to write notes and messages.
My grandmother used to write on the wall beside the telephone that was in the hall. That little space that had a shelf and a stool for you to sit on while you were talking to someone.
I am about out of time for this week and I know that I will have to come back to this topic later on to explain just why the telephone was only in the hall, with a little stool to sit on.
You will find out later that the telephones of the past had actual wires connecting them to the wall of the house.
Google it and see for yourself.
Till next week….
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