Anyone who has worked in or been associated with the fire service likely knows exactly what my title suggests.
Anyone who is a stranger to the fire service, or who does not go around looking for News of the Weird, likely has no clue what this diary is going to be about.
On Oct. 3, 1885, the second member of a pair of hoarding brothers was born.
Some pictures to give you the beginnings of an idea of what they kept.
For James Herriot, aka James Alfred Wight, born on Oct. 3, 1916, whose humanity and respect for all lives great and small showed in his veterinarian practice, his life and his writing.
There is a certain element of humor to the story of the Collyer brothers. I chuckled when I read a partial list of the items they kept.
Then I flashed back to helping to clean out my grandparents' house after my grandmother died, and the laugh became one of those things where you shake your head because you know it's true, however the less in your case, that people hoard things.
She had said, with varying degrees of annoyance and amusement, "I'm not dead yet!" when someone asked about possibly ever taking something of theirs out of her house or, perish the thought, removing some old things she "didn't need."
I was 16, and I had grown up around the idea that you kept everything you had. So I did not see this as a problem of personality so much as that it would mean maybe a bit more time cleaning the place out after her slow descent to death (and it was slow; if not for pneumonia, she would probably have lived several more years just hanging around doing not much of anything).
When she died ... she left behind a bunch of crap nobody wanted and took with her a bunch of crap a few tortured (and innocent) people desperately needed to know.
It was, for a few of my relatives, like being given a pomegranate that has no seeds left. All that remains is some white, vaguely hard stuff that's of no use or interest to anybody.
The process of cleaning out that house (and I mean cleaning it out, not cleaning it) was left until the summer so various of her grandchildren could come and basically be energy-full worker bees. And the work was fun. Who doesn't enjoy going on a scavenger hunt — with a blank checklist — through someone else's stuff, wondering what old and embarrassing pictures of parents are just aching to be discovered?
And to be fair, we did find out share of yellowed, fading pictures from the 1970s ... and the 1960s ... and back to the 1940s ... and 1930s. Imagine seeing a picture of a man you'd always known as thoroughly bald and gray ... with colored hair, or at least a workable combover.
Imagine him holding your oldest uncle, an infant in the picture and 60 years old, with a beard as big as the Ritz, in real life.
(This was before we discovered another, older, uncle, but that is a story for another day.)
The finds were not all so spectacular.
A funny thing happens to fabric when you leave it alone for about 30 years. Or more.
It ... ah ... sure does look like fabric. It smells like whatever's been in it for at least five years.
When you start to mess around with it, it becomes confetti. As you pull at it, it comes apart -- not under your fingers but where you're stressing it -- and you can make a real mess if your mother doesn't stop you in time.
And sometimes even if she does, because who honestly has ever seen fabric do that?
Fortunately for those of us who remained to clean up (by which I mean throw away or clean, depending), there'd already been something of a sweep-through before we had to get everything out of there in a matter of months.
When you live in a house for a while, and you use the same five or six mugs for your coffee for 30 years, you also tend (sometimes) to not think about upgrading your appliances.
Fair enough. A television from the 1960s can still work just fine today, just not with the accoutrements of something slightly newer absent ... intervention.
It's when those appliances start to act up, taking on what deniers say is charm and reality-based people say is a loud whirring noise that makes parts of The Exorcist seem peaceful, that you have problems.
Unless you're, for example, my grandparents (and I hope you aren't), in which case you just ignore the noise and lack of coldness coming from your box freezer in the basement, where you rarely go, and just figure you'll die before you really have to deal with it.
I think it was one of my parents who one day broke down and called the repairman, out of desperation, after a sort of "I'm not doing this for you, I'm doing this so I can trust that the frozen dinners I put in this freezer will stay frozen and not poison my kids, your grandkids, because wouldn't it be horrible if they died and you wished you'd just had that bloody thing looked at" conversation. (Those conversations can be a bit awkward if only one person talks.)
The repairman was ... professional about things with my grandparents and ... realistic about things with my parents, who wished desperately that he'd been realistic with my grandparents (not that it would have done them any good).
He had the part the freezer needed, all right, but he had it by chance.
OK, chance works. The freezer went back to humming mightily along and keeping our cold stuff cold.
The part was five years old.
It had been discontinued.
But that isn't the best part.
At that point, or probably later on when there was nobody around to complain bitterly about our throwing away decades of carefully preserved garbage (still in the original wrapping, in some cases, and honey, you only wish I was making that up), we did some excavation of that freezer.
You think I'm joking with my word choice there? Excavation?
Well, what do you call it when you go through frozen food items 10+ years old?
One of the items we found, in the mid-1990s, was a package of home-produced frozen food from 1979.
It predated me.
The more time I spent in my grandparents' basement (where the chest freezer was), the more I got the feeling it was where things went to die.
Now, plenty of people use their basement or attic as place to store old, broken things that have sentimental value. Or maybe they stow their 150 pounds of camping gear up there for that yearly trip into the wild. Or it's where they keep old jewelry and photographs, tucked away neatly so they won't get damaged.
This basement, though, was build into the ground. And I know that because you could see -- touch, if your arms were lean enough -- the dirt. So it wasn't so much where you'd store precious items that needed to be in a climate-controlled room.
But it was where my grandparents kept their croquet sets and their board games.
Fair enough. Ten kids, several dozen grandkids living within a day's drive, you need to get them out of the house.
Old stuff from the 1970s. I don't remember much of what was there, but it functioned, and nobody ever got hurt on it. And it's not like it was blocking anyone's path to anything.
Fishing poles.
That doesn't seem strange to you now. But:
- The next picture I see of anyone on my father's side (his parents' house, natch) fishing will be the first.
- There isn't even a lake nearby with fish. There's the Potomac, but good luck fishing in that thing in the 1980s, when everyone and their motor boat was dumping used motor oil into the Chesapeake Bay.
- It's one thing to have fishing poles being stored somewhere. It's another thing to have them stored in a narrow, confined area (the stairs down to the basement) and such that someone could pretty easily gore (or eye) themself on the things.
It wasn't just the basement, which was more an adventure than anything else.
The upstairs ... remember how I said I've never seen a picture of anyone in my father's family fishing?
I had never been in three of the rooms in that house. I first saw inside any of them once my grandmother died and we went over to dump all the garbage out.
If you spent about 10 years stacking stuff in boxes and on shelves, such that things were not going to cave in but were nonetheless pretty tightly packed in there, you'd have those rooms.
There was lots of well-kept stuff in them. We threw things away more because we had no use for them (old flash-pan books -- interesting on the first read, garbage thereafter), because there was no room for them anywhere (old papers from people's teaching days), because we frankly had no desire to keep after them (most of the rest).
And for my godmother, the second-youngest of those now-grown children, the one who had lived in that house for many years, who had developed Dissociative Identity Disorder as a result of the child abuse she suffered (which I covered in another diary), ... I can't begin to imagine the power and healing that comes from cleaning your abusers' home out.
From getting to decide what of their physical legacy remains, and what of it goes off to be someone else's problem.
From taking charge in the place where, for so long, you had no charge to take.
Mental health professionals will tell you, if you ask them, that hoarding is a sign of a deeper problem, whether one born of childhood troubles (poverty, sexual abuse) or simply a sign of mental illness all on its own.
In the case of my grandfather, it was likely both. He grew up in the Great Depression, was a victim of child abuse (I don't think I will ever have the specifics, but it was apparently quite heinous, judging by how it changed him) and ... hoarded. Seriously hoarded. Thoroughly.
But in his case, we did not have to throw out most of what they kept. We chose to, because there was no point to keeping it around, but it had not rotted (the sheets and blankets we had to toss were my grandmother's, I believe) or become otherwise unusable.
Not so when we cleaned out my parents' home when they moved.
My mother's childhood was unhappy, and my father's was beyond miserable. Child protective services should have been called in in the 1940s.
He was born in 1958.
So yes, my parents hoarded. To my father's credit, he recognized this (my mother did and does not), and he tried to fight it, but it never worked.
My godmother, also, is a huge hoarder. She and her husband have a condo-type place (it's been a few since I was there), and for a long time they had paths through to various rooms the living/standing/sitting space of which was occupied entirely by boxes of stuff.
Oh, they knew where stuff was. It was a simple matter of knowing that it was in a box, and they had a plan for it.
Last I heard, those plans were still theoretical.
If you have never known a hoarder, it's a hilarious situation if you're just getting introduced to it. It's sort of, if you don't understand the genesis, like watching a Tourette's patient, or someone with a particularly amusing tic or nervous compulsion.
They just can't stop, and the insanity of it is hilarious.
But it's one of those things that stops being funny fast. And there's still some humor in it -- you have to find humor in it if you're going to be able to deal with it. Ask me sometime about the books I saw in my parents' house that I would have liked to read, but something had gotten to the end before me. (Yes, that is as disgusting as it looks. In both senses.
But whatever humorous tilt you put on it, at the end of the day, you have someone with a disability.
And for most people, that disability, that manifestation of the mental illness, is finally conquered when the deceased's relatives rediscover the carpets and the floors.
And you really just hope nobody gets sick or injured handling anything old.