Shirley and Morris's Personalized Ashtrays

Dad died. He didn’t have to. He was only seventy-four, not overweight, walked long distances, had no family history of disease. But he smoked. A lot. Two-and-a-half packs a day for fifty-seven years. On his seventy-fourth birthday he was told he had lung cancer and emphysema. He was admitted to the hospital on Monday and was dead by Friday. 

That was six months ago. Mom had lived in the same house with him in Springfield (the one in Massachusetts) since the year after they married in another Springfield (the one in Ohio; that’s a long story for another time). Mom has decided to move. She no longer needs a big house. She won’t be able to take care of it. She doesn’t want the headaches. I helped her put it up for sale. I live two hours away, in Brewster, a suburb of New York City, and I have a wife and children of my own. But ever since dad died I’ve driven to mom’s house once a week to be with her. Twice I brought the kids along and spent a couple of hours with them at Six Flags New England, which is a few towns away from Springfield, before going to mom’s house for dinner. Mom stayed home because she doesn’t like amusement parks, and since she stayed home she said it was like we hadn’t visited at all because we spent most of the day at Six Flags. She’s a little ornery like that lately. I guess it’s understandable. So now I visit only by myself. There isn’t a lot for my kids to do there anyway.  

My sister Claire lives in California. All of mom’s friends and neighbors have moved away over the last two or three years. But despite all that, she really has not been alone for about fifty years. And now she needs a lot of help. She needs help to put her finances in order, to decide between several senior condo communities, and to prepare the house to show to potential buyers. There’s a lot to do. I love my mother, and I’m determined to do the right thing, and I have plenty of patience—but my visits to her house have not been particularly enjoyable. Some of the visits are okay, but they’re never wonderful. Emotions are still raw. I guess I’m still mad at dad for having smoked so much, and mad at mom for always having been so stubborn. Now, whenever I help her make decisions about her future and about the house, it always turns into an argument. What’s more, the traffic I inevitably hit going back and forth from my house to hers is infuriating. What should normally be just under a ninety-minute trip almost always takes more than two hours.  

*

This afternoon I’m attempting to de-clutter her basement so that when real estate agents start to bring clients down there next week for a house tour, they won’t be turned off by what looks like an underground warehouse. Mom isn’t a hoarder, at least not by the common definition or in the conventional sense—but she does have fifty years’ worth of memories down there, and most of the ‘memorable’ items are meaningless. To me, at least. Things of all different shapes and sizes. Mostly very old. The vast majority should be thrown away. Mom won’t have room for any of it in a small condo, and I certainly don’t have room in my own house to store anything for her, not even for just a few weeks. And who knows when Claire will be able to visit? 

So I grab five heavy-duty plastic garbage bags and five empty boxes and go down into the basement. I’m determined to be ruthless. 

Mom, always the willful woman, tries to obstruct my ruthlessness. 

“Don’t throw anything out if it isn’t broken,” she demands when she sees the plastic bags and the boxes. “Don’t. Do you hear me?”

“I hear you, ma, but we have to throw out a lot,” I insist, in a tone I hope is just as willful. “We have to. What’s down there is ridiculous. It will turn people off. Trust me.” Even as the words come out of my mouth I know I sound more whiney than willful. 

“No!” she says. “If something’s broken, throw it out. If it’s yours or Claire’s and you don’t want it anymore, throw it out. But don’t throw out any of my things. No matter what it is. No matter how small. Do you understand? I like it all, even though...”

Mom has a habit of leaving sentences unfinished. Especially ones that have ‘even though’ in the middle.

“Then why am I here, for crying out loud?” I ask, accepting the ‘even though...’ without further comment.  

“To straighten up,” she says. “To make it look neater. Do you understand?”

“Yes, ma. I understand.”

*

When I had arrived earlier today, I went over mom’s mail, paid some of her bills, and confirmed a few things over the phone with her real estate agent. After lunch I went downstairs with the bags and boxes. ‘Let the games begin,’ I mumbled to myself.

Just a quick glance around confirmed what I already knew—that the basement was indeed a subterranean depot. Here’s the extremely abridged short list: two Roaring Twenties Halloween costumes (one for a man and one for a woman); four hula-skirted dolls from Hawaii; seven or eight kazoos; soundtrack albums from “Bye, Bye Birdie,” “West Side Story,” “Oliver,” “The Sound of Music” and fourteen or fifteen other shows; a stack of framed photos and maybe a hundred unframed photos; two or three dozen empty picture frames; twenty or thirty glass, plastic and pewter ashtrays from hotels, weddings, bar mitzvahs and Atlantic City casinos; a few old phones; five stuffed animals from the Forest Park Zoo; a curled-up South of the Border bumper sticker that was never used; ten board games (with most of their pieces gone); two butterfly nets; mom’s childhood ballet shoes; ten wax apples and pears; the front page from a novelty newspaper (“Fran Selig Wins Mrs. America Contest on Atlantic City Boardwalk”); almost a hundred old copies of Life Magazine and Reader’s Digest; six coffee mugs for Great Moms and five for Terrific Dads (dad must have kept one at his office); three candy bowls; and seven embroidered couch pillows with scenes like a barnyard filled with animals and a silhouette of New York City skyscrapers. 

It goes on from there. 

I want to throw most of the stuff away. None of it is needed anymore. But every ten minutes or so mom yells down to make sure that I’m not throwing anything out. “Just straighten. No throwing out. Understand? I have my reasons, even though...”  

I walk over to shelf that has five “Welcome to Aruba” trinkets from a long-ago vacation that mom and dad had won from dad’s employer. Three of the trinkets are on their sides and two are backwards. They’re right next to six glass ashtrays from a cruise to Bermuda on which they had embarked for their twentieth anniversary. Two of the ashtrays are upside down and all of them are filthy. I take everything off the shelf, dust the shelf, dust the items, and then put everything back, facing the right way and neatly spaced. That’s what I’m supposed to do. “Damn ashtrays,” I mutter to myself. To me they represent the hundreds of thousands of cigarettes my father had smoked over the years. 

“What?” mom calls down. 

I suppose my “damn ashtrays” comment was a little more than a mutter, since mom heard me from upstairs. Either that, or her hearing is one thing that hasn’t withered. 

“Nothing,” I call up. 

“Everything okay?” she asks. 

“Everything’s fine,” I say. 

“Okay. I made iced tea, if you want. Come up soon. I also heated up your leftovers from lunch, even though...”

I tried to figure out what was supposed to have come after the ‘even though,’ but quickly gave up.

“You’re straightening up, right?” she continued. “Don’t break anything and don’t throw anything out. Understand?”

Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, I say—but in such a soft whisper that it’s impossible for her to hear. 

I am well aware that so much of what is down there holds thousands of memories for mom, but what I don’t realize until I start to find things behind and under things is that dozens of those items hold memories for me, too. My old Matchbox cars, for instance. My old magic kit. My deck of playing cards. My super-8 movie camera. My Humphrey Bogart poster. Wheels from a go-cart I built when I was ten.

Those are the things I know I can throw out—with mom’s blessing. They had been mine, not my mother’s or my dad’s. So I grab one of the empty boxes and prepare to stuff it with some of my old stuff. At least that will make a dent in decreasing the clutter. Every little bit will help. But something makes me sit down on the old threadbare couch (which also needs to be discarded). I need time to think. My mind is full of questions. How, I wonder, might my life have been different had I gone into filmmaking, which had been a passionate hobby of mine when I was eleven years old? The super-8 movie camera made me think of that. Would I have married the same woman and had the same children had I pursued magic and juggling instead of the career I eventually went into? My magic kit put that thought in my mind. Magic was my passion when I was thirteen. Then there were those two years in high school when I thought I’d win the Indianapolis 500 one day. Thanks for the memories, Go-cart wheels! If I had I followed that dream, who might I be today? (And would I still be alive?)

I stand up from the sagging couch and retrieve the magic kit. It’s on the lower shelf of an old TV stand. On the top shelf of the old TV stand is the old TV. On top of that are three yardsticks emblazoned with the name of my father’s old company. On top of the yardsticks are four upside down Happy New Year party hats, and inside three of the upside down Happy New Year party hats are noisemakers, and inside the fourth upside down Happy New Year hat are three more ashtrays, each printed with “Shirley & Morris’s 30th Wedding Anniversary” on the glass bottoms. I had never heard of Shirley and Morris, but I assumed that if they were still alive they’d probably soon be celebrating something like their fifty-fourth or fifty-fifth anniversary. 

Damn ashtrays. 

I grab the magic kit from the lower shelf of the old TV stand and place it in the box. It reminds me of how my dad was the only one in the family who seemed to take my interest in magic seriously. He always patiently watched me as I practiced levitating Claire, or juggling tennis balls, or making coins come out of his ear, or guessing which card was his. Although he may have given me the make-sure-you-have-something-to-fall-back-on speech more often than I cared to hear it, by no means did he make me feel silly or small for having the magician notion in the first place. He said it was good to be passionate about something—so much better than being aimless and boring. 

I didn’t become a magician. Or a filmmaker. Or a racecar driver. I made the choices I made, and I am who I am. And right here and now, amid all the junk, I am something else: a good son who, despite never having a particularly good time making the trip, has once again journeyed two hours to help out his aging, widowed, willful mother. The job is to straighten out and neaten up her chaotic basement without throwing out any of the countless memories down there that make straightening and neatening an impossible task. It isn’t fun. But I’m doing it.

With the magic kit in the box, I proceed to rip up the Bogart poster and stuff it in the box next to the magic kit. Mom hears the ripping noise and calls down.

“What are you ripping up?” she asks. “Nothing of mine, right?”

“Nothing of yours,” I confirm. I refuse to shout, since her hearing is apparently better than mine. “Just one of my old posters.”

“Okay. What are you doing with the pieces you’re ripping up? Don’t leave them on the floor, even though...”

“Don’t worry.”

I’m able to squeeze the movie camera into the box, too, on top of the ripped-up poster, which leaves just a little room for one additional small item. The playing cards, perhaps. They were part of my magic act. I chuckle at the memory. I wasn’t very good at card tricks. I tried hard, but never quite caught on. I never correctly guessed anyone’s card. Claire never levitated properly, either. But I did once get five tennis balls to go round and round for twenty seconds. I was ecstatic about that when it happened. So was dad. I’ll never forget it. Could I still juggle? Now, today, here, in the basement? An intriguing thought. I’m not deluded enough to think I can juggle five balls anymore, or five of anything, for that matter. But maybe three. I feel like trying. I really do. But I need three balls, and I haven’t seen any balls in the basement. I look all over. All that stuff down here, yet no tennis balls, softballs, volleyballs, beach balls—nothing. Odd. I mean—all that junk and not a single ball? There’s nothing to juggle with. I can’t use books (there are thirty or forty down here) because they’ll flip open. It would be impossible. Can’t use the ballet shoes; they’re so delicate they’d fall apart in my hands and mom would kill me. I look around some more. Yardsticks, party hats, noisemakers, ashtrays... 

Ashtrays! 

I walk over to the upside down party hat and pick up the three ashtrays that are inside. Even though they had not been used as ashtrays for dozens of years, I can still detect the faint odor of tobacco on them, and I don’t like it at all. While all three were from Shirley and Morris’s thirtieth anniversary, they are all of different shapes—one round, one square, the third pentagonal—but all nearly the same size, and each made of glass. Wow—Shirley and Morris were certainly ambitious trendsetters, weren’t they? Multiple-shaped personalized ashtrays for one lousy party! 

I begin to juggle the ashtrays. They stay in an airborne arc for five seconds, ten, fifteen. I toss them higher. Confidence reigns! Round and round they go. Higher and higher. It’s magic.

And then I miss one. And then I miss another. And then I miss the third. It all happens very fast. All three glass ashtrays shatter into dozens of pieces on the floor, from midsized chunks to tiny shards. Glass falling on glass makes a loud noise. A wonderful noise. A spectacular noise. My favorite noise of all time. 

I hear my mother rush through the kitchen on her way to the top of the stairs, where I’m sure she’ll yell something down to me. But frankly, all I care to think about is how, after four long months, I finally found a way to have the most marvelous time at her house, even though...