After the worst night ever, which is saying something, not that I said much, but mostly sat and took it, I woke with a simple plan: let’s take a thing of beauty and get rid of it. Seems to be the theme. The item was the original light fixture for the dining room, which we removed and replaced with a gorgeous Tiffany light that improved the room by 435%. (Rough estimate.) The old fixture was small, but it was original for the house. I kept it. It has spent 24 years in a ox in the basement closet under the stairs, and I have been cleaning out that space over the last few days.

Lots down there. Cold storage. There are three bins of archived childhood / family detritus. STBF bristled at their existence, a lot of junk stuck away, clutter, even though they were in the furthest place possible in the house, behind suitcases - but she has since come around to the virtues the archives present. What I did was sock away meaningless every day things, the stuff no one ever thinks to save, but actually stand in for a time, a place, the way life is lived, the things you did all the time without thinking that one day you wouldn’t. They’re like scrapbooks, except it’s not just pictures with Precious Moments foam gewgaws glued on the pages. When Natalie comes home for the last time at the end of the month, we’re going to go through them all, year by year, and see if we can recall the stories and the places. That was my idea. It will be bittersweet but necessary. Today while taking more boxes to the public storage facility an Easter SpongeBob fell out of a box, grinning up with his cross-eyed manic expression. I set him up on the top of the boxes and now he stands eyes wide in the dark, a speckled eggshell on his head.

I’d sent pictures of the light fixture to a big architectural antique outfit, and they’d responded with an offer. So I drove this morning to NE, schlepped them inside, waited for the evaluation, then got the money. Went home, and got the Cute Clock, because that was the next job. The Cute Clock is a midcentury kitchen wall clock that resided in the laundry room, mostly decorative. Absolutely charming. If you plug it in, it say “oh right I’m a clock I’d forgotten” and works, but then it doesn’t. There was a clock repair place in Edina near the Fred, and I thought I’d drop it off. The google page said it was closed yesterday but open today.

I drove to the location, and I wasn’t all that surprised to find it was a house. I wondered if it would be like Doc Brown’s, with hundreds of timepieces, or whether the shop was in the basement, a wonderland of cuckoos and grandfathers in various states of repair, dozens of tiny tools, the wonderful smell of machine oil, the proprietor being some stooped Gepetto with glasses halfway down his nose. Never found out - when I checked the address to see if I had the right place, the Google info now said CLOSED UNTIL THURSDAY. I guess he just didn’t feel like visitors.

The clock went back in the car next to the box of five videotapes, the last batch, the ones I have to Do Something With. One of the consequences of being driven out of your home is that you have to Do Something with things you were content to leave be, thinking that one day you would Do Something. They need digitization. One is a documentary about WW2 flying aces for which I wrote the narration, back in the 80s. Odd job. There’s a really, really bad copy of a cable-access Trek show in which I played a Klingon judge, and I am keen to see that again. One tape is nothing but MTV, which I taped for a friend who didn’t have cable. I used to have a VCR digitizing rig, but it was spotty, and all the cord paradigms have changed since. I have no idea how long I have to live but I would prefer it not have any need for a red-white-yellow RCA plug cord ever again.

So I will have to Do Something with that and Do Something with the clock.

While excavating the light fixture I found a crate of clips, and was surprised. I did a lot of work about which I’d forgotten. Magazines, newspapers. There’s no place at the Fred for it - I’ve already filled the storage facility room with more things than I can fit in the office closet - so I think I will have to join the ranks of people who rent a small dark space to put things for which someone else will eventually be burdened. I should apologize to daughter in advance but maybe she will look at the clips and think the old man had something there.