The Things She Carried

There are many ways to describe my mother. Because she knows how to read I will not elaborate upon some of them here, but I will say that one quality everyone loves about her is her generosity. She is giving in all the best ways - with her time, love, attention, and everything else it takes to healthily sustain a family - and also, I must be honest, in one really annoying way. She is very giving when it comes to crap. If "generous" was a pejorative term it would perfectly describe how Joanna reacts to dealing with things she does not want. The woman is a world-class philanthropist of detritus; a regular Chuck Feeney of Nutcracker butter knives and high-waisted jeans. You will take them, you will take them gratefully, and you will take them now. When I was younger and poor as shit I would sometimes find things that were maaaaaaybe marginally worth keeping within the boxes of stuff she'd give me - sort of a precursor to "Storage Wars", if every episode was held in her bedroom - but after I was no longer making $18,000 a year (got a big bump to $21k...who wants an orange whip?) I realized I probably could live without that lint roller that's 3/4 used and covered in fur. After she tried to gift my old roommate John Stamos and me with a rusted cookie sheet and a dead electric blanket (among many, many other things) I put my foot down about the big boxes. In more recent years she's had to force stuff upon me in small doses. For a while she was mailing things - one particular FedEx delivery that consisted of a melted spatula, a terracotta "Acapulco!" ashtray and a very hairy used hairbrush stands out for my sister and me mostly because Joanna's never been to Acapulco, and she swears she didn't know whose hairbrush it was (yikes on both counts) - but I suppose that was cost-ineffective because it ended shortly thereafter. She now comes to Atlanta and seeds my home with barely noticeable amounts of used shit, like Tim Robbins casually dusting the prison yard in "Shawshank". Her latest visit yielded, among other things, a miniature spun glass sailboat that I found inside the guest room dresser and this guy, who was hiding in my laundry room:

(It's really no wonder the RM is terrified of Santa Claus, is it? Talk about sneaky hands. And you shouldn't trust anyone who overbleaches their teeth to such a degree.)

It's a bit more of a challenge for Joanna to foist things upon me when the roles are reversed and I'm in her home - I long ago learned to check my luggage and car for any interlopers before leaving her house - but that doesn't stop her from doing her damnedest. This most recent trip to Memphis she fed me wine and somehow hustled me into accepting an empty cardboard cupcake box, a 1989 University Club Membership Directory, three pieces to a puzzle that I do not, nor ever have, own and a set of place card holders shaped like tiny chairs that she tried to tell me were for the RM (since she throws so many dinner parties, and all). By the time she came at me with a stack of 1997 Sotheby's auction catalogues I'd regained my senses and shut her shit down, but the damage had been done.

Over the years JHP has retaliated by bringing his own crap to my parents' house. He has two strategies; he will either outright give it to her, as if he's done her a great kindness by remembering to bring this particular Blanton's bourbon box all the way to Memphis just for her enrichment, or he'll also employ the Shawshank method and just leave it around the house for her to find later. The last time I was there I counted three sticks of old deodorant, two neckties and a huge stack of old newspapers hidden in various areas of the house, courtesy of my husband. My sister and I both take a different approach; we pick the worst of her offerings and give them back to my parents for Christmas. If it's awful enough she will gracefully concede and likely gift it right back to us at the next holiday. Items that have breathed this rarefied air over the years have included a particularly unfunny porcelain clown, a broken ship in a bottle and an oil portrait of Jesus that would have been most unpleasing in His (heavily crossed) eyes indeed.

I think she'll be getting a set of these for Christmas this year. After all, she does throw a lot of dinner parties.