Bob Bell's Lockdown Letter From California - The Great Bedside Drawer Clear-Out
One of the many supplements in the Sunday edition of The New York Times is the Times Book Review and, close to the beginning, there is invariably an interview feature with a famous author. The first question is always the same: “What books do you have on your nightstand?”
Well, my answer to that particular question will be the subject of a future column, but I bring up that little table by my bed because, inspired by both my wife’s and Martin’s recently documented industry in cleaning out drawers, examining ageing artefacts and weighing their worth, I decided to go through the drawer in that small nightstand beside my bed.
This modest piece of furniture has been beside me as I have slumbered ever since we moved into this bungalow in 2004, and I don’t believe I have ever really looked into this drawer before.
Oh, to be sure, I have opened it now and then, just to stuff in something that was in my pocket as I removed my pants before going to bed, and that I wanted to keep. Things of great value? Hmmm … well, let’s take a look.
A postcard, a bit bent and torn, of Mt St Helens erupting in 1980. I can see why I kept it - I had been in the country when it happened and had trudged through miles of volcanic dust when I had been in the region some weeks later. A business card from Laurence Cane-Honeysett of Trojan Records, coffee stained. I had worked for Trojan back in the late sixties and early Seventies, but I’m not quite sure why this piece of ephemera was a keeper.
Five pairs of cheap drugstore reading glasses, of varying magnification. Two of them are quite useless now, so into the garbage they go. Most of us, when we reach our forties, find that in order to read the paper we need to hold it at arms reach, and in bright sunlight. We start to curse the barely visible menus in artistically lit restaurants - remember them - the restaurants, I mean, not just the artistically lit ones? And so we wander the drug store aisles, seeking a cheap cure for the ageing process. For several years I preferred small slim little reading glasses, ones that would just perch upon the nose, and fold up into a slim little case. Two of the pairs of specs in the drawer are like that, and I’m gonna keep ‘em! Says he with emphasis. The last pair are regular size reading glasses, and the magnification is just right. Going to keep them also.
An odd assortment of bits of paper including a card detailing the care and maintenance of teak, which probably came with one of the teak loungers we have on the deck outside the front of the house, a book of matches and a box of the same, a photo of my late son Aaron and myself taken, I see immediately, in Martock, Somerset, the charming village where my mother used to live. A SIM card from o2, still with value on it, from my last trip to the UK. Two tickets to movies, one to see The Cup at The International Film Festival, and the other to see The Little Richard Story at The Pacific Film Archive in nearby Berkeley. Don’t remember either film. The sales tag from an antique Victorian Salters Spring Balance, priced at thirty-three pounds. The spring balance, in all its brassy glory, hangs in our kitchen, but I don’t believe the tag is a keeper. Another business card with phonograph cartridge and stylus numbers written on it. A ticket stub to the SF Jazz festival for the Fats Waller Centennial on November 7th, 2004. Yeah, I remember that show. They had Dick Hyman playing Fats’ stuff, with special guest Jay McShann who must have been nearly a hundred years old back then. Just checked - he would have been 88 - he was 90 when he died in 2006.
A battered but still serviceable leather wallet - predictably empty. A little extendable wooden back scratcher. A shoehorn - never use ‘em. Three pen knives, all predictably blunt. A pair of cuff links! Heck, where did they come from? Probably from dear old mum. I haven’t worn cufflinks, nor had a shirt that needed them since I was probably 18 years old. Three pens. Ooh, look, an eyewear cleaning kit, complete with tiny little screwdriver to tighten up floppy … whaddya call em? The long arms that go over your ears, and keep the glasses on your face. I’m sure there is a technical name for them. Anyway, this kit will be useful for those times when I’m reading in bed and need to make an adjustment. A keeper. A random selection of coins from Canada, the UK, Sweden, Peru, Morocco, and a token from the Santa Cruz boardwalk. Half a tube of Certs, those classic breath mints I used to carry for foul breath emergencies. I imagine that they probably don’t go bad in a thousand years, but into the garbage they go.
Two sets of small airline type headphones, the kind that you stuff into your ear, and then spend the rest of the damn movie pushing back in because, for those of us with both failing eyesight and hearing, things are never loud enough, and these cheap little earpieces never stay put. So why did I bring them home and put them into this little drawer? Dunno, but I’m too cheap to chuck them. Maybe Britt has a special place for them.
A small black common-sense turnbuckle. And what exactly is a common-sense turnbuckle, I hear you asking? To save you an unneeded google, I will tell you. It is a buckle often used on cloth such as canvas, and which probably fell off the top to my jeep years ago. It attaches to one piece of material and passes through a metal eye - a grommet - in another, and then with a twist, a simple forty-five-degree turn, the two pieces of material are held together. Sort of a mechanical button, so simple that all you need to operate it is common sense.
A Battery Caddie, which is a small plastic container to keep spare hearing aid batteries in, made for those fortunate souls who have taken the plunge and spent vast sums of money on very expensive hearing aids in order to listen to people mumble with far greater clarity.
Ah, this one is most definitely a keeper. A simple red aluminium name tag with Bess engraved upon it, plus our phone number. Bess was our very dear and much loved long-departed English Setter, who left us over five years ago. A gorgeous looking dog, she was the sleepingest dog Britt and I have ever known. I could take her for a ride in the jeep and upon our return, she’d refuse to get out. Just refuse. Dogs have a mysterious and innate talent of doubling their weight when they want to, which is usually when they don’t want to move from a chosen spot, to be lifted from a comfy seat. Bess had that talent in spades. She weighed a good seventy pounds anyway, so she was a good sized lump at the best of times.
Three keys. Two of them are the same … smallish, and I wonder if they are the keys I spent hours looking for a few weeks ago when our garage door opener failed, and I couldn’t find the little key that enables one to manually unleash the door from its electrically driven chain that pulls the door up. I ended up spending $80 to buy a new lock and key - I kept the old one so I’ll check these keys.
It has been six or seven years since I quit working construction, a fact belied by the presence of half a dozen nails, a motley selection of screws, washers and cotter pins. A magnet and a few irrigation widgets, a couple of carpenters pencils, a small spirit level, and a traveling toothbrush. Three or four plumbing bends and connectors, all copper of course, and some automobile fuses.
And lastly a few items of indeterminate use and manufacture, of no use to man nor beast, but whose appearance deem them to have a value beyond being garbage. I mean, just what are they? And they have been so beautifully made. And thus back into the drawer they will go.
And so that’s it. A sort of Jerry Seinfeld column, in that it really is about nothing. And if you have come this far, you too have too much idle time on your hands.
