4/14/24
Newsletter #583
The Crack of Dawn
When I was as little as I can remember, still crawling, my dad had his office desk – which was his business – located in their bedroom. He had a small desk, a white fiberglass Eames chair, and a trashcan covered with a map of the world that he had had told me at some point that he had gotten when he was fourteen years old, during World War II. The map was dated 1944. Therefore, it was a map of the world in such great flux that it didn’t really represent the world at that present moment. I suppose that to just stay in business the trashcan company simply kept using the map previous to the war. As opposed to showing, “Nazi-Occupied France” or “Nazi-Occupied Poland,” it just said France and Poland.
The trashcan was made of tin. The top edge of the tin had been folded over, thus avoiding a dangerous, sharp edge. But the folded-over tin, which was then bent into an oval creating the trashcan, couldn’t handle the stress and at some point, over the years, cracked about every four inches. It was a shoddy piece of wartime manufacturing; however, it was a wonderfully detailed map of the world from about 1935-1938.
Israel was Palestine, with an indication of “British Protectorate.” Zaire was the Belgian Congo, and every other European colonized country in Africa was shown. It was absolutely fascinating.
If this were a good dramatic story there would be some flashbacks at this point of my dad pointing out places on the map and explaining things, like where things are. Alas, he never did that.
However, when we moved from that house when I was nine, I specifically asked my dad if I could have his trashcan. He smiled and told me about getting it when he was a kid and said yeah, sure.
So, that was the trashcan in my bedroom throughout all of my youth. Certainly not with any regularity, mind you, but I do recall, every now and then, studying that old map, considering not only perils of the world, but those of mapmaking. You make the map, the world changes – like a war erupts – now your map is crap. But you still have trashcans to sell.
Somehow between moving back and forth between Detroit and Los Angeles five times between 1976 and 2001, then back here to Detroit, I managed to keep dad’s trashcan. The map was actually made of paper and stuck to the cracked tin can with some sort of pre-war mucilage that was peeling. It was shabby, but the map was perfectly readable. And it was dad’s from when he was a kid, which made it kind of cool.
Ten years elapsed. It was now my lost summer of 2011, most of which was spent locked in the sixth-floor psyche ward at St. Joseph Hospital in Pontiac. Envision One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and that’s what it is, with women, and no smoking. On a positive note, I did keep my walkie talkie rental business running while I was incarcerated. I watched 4th of July fireworks go off in four or five places around town, perched in the sixth-floor nuthouse.
Eventually, they let me go. As a blessing, a mitzvah, I came home to a cleaned house. My sister Pam, with help from my old girlfriend Carol, cleaned the whole house, including throwing out my bed and buying me a new one, compliments of my mom. It was a grand and glorious gesture of kindness and sanitation.
I was told by some neighbors later, when they saw my big pile of stuff, like a mattress, out on the corner as trash, they thought I’d died.
Meanwhile, at some point soon thereafter, I came to realize that I somehow now had no trashcan. I looked everywhere, and all through the garage, but I couldn’t find dad’s trashcan. Then it hit me.
I called Pam and asked, “When you threw out my mattress, did you throw out my trashcan, too?”
Without hesitation she said, “Yes. It was awful. Buy a new one.”
I said, “You know that was dad’s trashcan when he was a kid. It was one of the very few things I treasured of his. He actually gave it to me when I was nine.”
Pam did not have the slightest clue what I was talking about. When she came to understand the situation, she was very sorry. Abjectly sorry. But how could she have known that it was anything more than a shabby trashcan?
I think of that trashcan now and again. Not as an object that I want back, but as a representation that during my course of my life, the world has changed so much. That my trashcan as a kid represented a completely bygone era – the Belgian Congo, Rhodesia, empire, colonialism – and it was my dad’s as a kid, so it was not all that long ago.
And that’s the story of my dad’s trashcan, and of Pam throwing it out.
Now out into the beautiful day.
Thanks.
No good deed goes unpunished.