On Saturday, I was taking a break from wrestling with the lazy Susan. I was sitting on the Jimmy Hoffa bin on the front porch with our good friend and co-quarantiner, Tony. He is one of the many people who has encouraged me to write my life story in a book. So I shared with him a few more chapters. This is one of them. Oh yes, the “Jimmy Hoffa bin” is what we call the plastic poolside storage bin that we use to store our recycling and our garden tools, etc., on our entry porch. We nicknamed it that, because it is large enough to hide a body in.
As I mentioned previously, my dad built the house in Golden Valley in the summer of 1961, where I lived from first grade until Bethann and I got married in July, 1975, after my second year in college. Until we bought our first house, just after Thanksgiving, we lived in a tiny, one bedroom apartment on 19th and Upton in Minneapolis. I was going to grad school full time in the mornings. We were both working full time, 3pm to 11:30pm in housekeeping at North Memorial Medical Center. I am the youngest of my parents’ four children. The other three were already out of the house and had houses and kids of their own (or at least on the way). So my parents decided to sell the big house with the big yard, and move into a condo on the other side of Golden Valley.
One large house with six people for fourteen years can accumulate a lot of stuff. One Friday afternoon in October, between school and work, B.J. called. (B.J. is my mom. It’s short for Betty Jane.) She said, “We’re having a garage sale tomorrow. If you want any of your things, come early, so you can buy them. The sale starts at nine.”
Now my other siblings are all older than I am and had been out of the house for years. They had been living in their own houses, with real closets and attics and garages. So they had room to put things and opportunity to retrieve things that they may have wanted to keep. I had been out of the house for three and a half months. During that time, I had gotten married in Pennsylvania, started seminary full time, taking Greek and Hebrew and a senior theology elective, and was working full time.
I arrived at B.J.’s garage sale at 8:30am. I helped bring up the last of the stuff from the storage closets in the basement. I said good-bye to my childhood toys and games. I thought twice about buying my large “remote control” red sports car, but decided I had been too old for it when I bought it the first time. (Remote control is in quotes, because it had a 6′ cord from the controller to the car.) I think that all I went away with was a few books, some brass bells, and the chalk painting of my grandpa Ingham’s horse, Lady, which Wathena, his wife and my godmother, had given me when I was 10.
When I was done telling Tony the story, he looked at me and asked, “Did your mother drink?”