Leave the porch light off for me
After moving from the city to the country a few years ago I thought I was getting a handle on the way things worked.
I learned to wave at people as they went by in cars whether I knew them or not. I learned that when somebody asks you to bring a “dish to pass” you’re not supposed to show up with an empty plate. I learned that you don’t ask if somebody needs help changing a tire or is feeling poorly, you just pitch in. In other words, I’ve learned to do a lot of things that would have been considered in poor taste in the city.
But I still haven’t shed all my city ways. It still upsets my fantasy picture of country living every time I drive past Vardon Frazier’s sagging old farmhouse with its sprawl of old tractors, car parts and rusting equipment on the lawn.
Imagine how nice it would look if that ratty old overstuffed chair wasn’t on his front porch? And that broken exercise bicycle. It has no seat on it. What muscles do you exercise with that? Best not to ask. Leaning against the bike is a stack of balding tires from a car that hasn’t been made in 40 years. The porch is crammed with stuff that gets rained on and snowed on. What the sun hasn’t bleached it has peeled, what it hasn’t peeled it has dried. There is a box with a few old telephones in it, a collection of old TV chassis, broken children’s toys, a croquet set with one mallet missing and an avocado-colored washing machine.
If Vardon lived in New York and called himself an artist and this pile of junk was in the corner of a huge empty white salon in a famous museum, people from Manhattan would trip all over themselves to see it first. He would be the toast of the art world for “metaphorically showing us what is on the inside of us struggling to get out.” “His use of found objets to express futility of our existence is saying to us, ‘Why worry, it’s all garbage.'”
Or maybe not. It is a pretty ugly array of junk. I would love to say, “Vardon, why don’t I get my truck and we’ll load up all this stuff and take it to the dump. Your house will look so much better and my property values would go up.”
But you can’t say that. For the same reason you can never congratulate a woman with a protruding stomach on her impending happiness. If you’re wrong, she’s angry and you’re embarrassed. What if only some of it’s junk? I don’t want to insult him.
Then I had a brilliant idea. The six little words that have caused most of the world’s problems.
I loaded our pickup with a few bags of our trash in it and drove past Vardon’s even though it was in the wrong direction from the dump. I stopped. He was out on his porch.
“Vardon,” I yelled, “I’m going to the landfill with a half empty truck. You want to come along?”
“Yep,” he said, “Hang on a minute.”
Ah, diplomacy. This is the way things should work. I’m helping him, he’s helping me. It’s Woodstock all over again. There can be peace and harmony in the world. Let the sun shine in, it’s the dawning of Aquarius. This is the way to get things done. I don’t want to live in one of those towns where they pass laws that tell you what color you can paint your house and how many cars you can have in the driveway and when to mow the lawn.
Two minutes later Vardon comes out of his house with his “varmint gun” and a grin on his face. He sidles in the passenger side, slams the door and says, “I love to go down there and shoot rats. C’mon, man, goose it.”
“But isn’t there anything you’d like to take? Anything old and tattered you’d like to get rid of?” I quizzed him as unsubtly as I could.
“Nah, I got rid of all the trash yesterday. If there’s one thing I can’t stand it’s a messy house.”
Jim Mullen contributes regularly to Entertainment Weekly, where he can be reached at [email protected]