Like many others these past weeks I’ve spent hour after painful hour clearing away debris, hauling trash, dealing with the lack of clean clothing, throwing away armfuls of spoiled food, and generally just trying to make the place habitable again. I’m exhausted.
Hurricane Charley? No, no. I cleaned out my son’s room.
He started sophomorifying at the University of Central Florida this week. And, for the first time in his life, he’s completely on his own. Well, he’s completely on his own with three other guys who are also completely on their own, but he no longer lives at home.
Let me take a moment to savor that last bit. Ah. OK, I’m good now.
Unfortunately this meant that we had to spend the weekend drilling through the forty metric tons of memories he’s been accumulating around himself since 1985 to form an impenetrable shell of compressed plastic, fabric, and Coca-Cola cans. Since he has never in his life actually thrown anything away, preferring to let new purchases tamp down the older ones, simply maneuvering in his room was a dangerous enterprise.
We began by digging towards his bed. Precautions were taken to avoid falling through treacherously thin layers of papers and Styrofoam, mostly by using safety harnesses attached to the outcropping of calcified Long John Silvers cups by his desk. Some careful backhoe work got us through the embankment of old homework papers and we were able to completely chip away his bed for future study.
My son performed his usual room-cleaning chores: he sat back and told me what to keep and what to throw away as I held up excavated items for his examination.
“Oh, wow! I haven’t seen that in years, I’ve been missing that! You can toss it,” is what he generally said about every souvenir, computer component, or ancient box of leftovers I produced. Not all of our finds were easily defined. We puzzled for hours over what appeared to be a brake lining for a 1997 Geo Tracker but was finally proven to be cake from his 11th birthday.
Cursory surface searching turned up several truckloads of aluminum cans (most still containing various quantities of solidified cola syrup), mounds of unreturned textbooks, a thick substrate of cheese-flavored snack food, and over $3,000 in loose change that we deposited towards the site’s Superfund. The strata of sedimentary books, toys, and magazines that had been crushed behind his bed by intense pressure and heat over the past 18 years fascinated me, especially since many of them were actually mine.
Finally we managed to pull out just what he needed to survive in his new apartment, which we took over and dumped in a heap on his new floor, thus saving him the trouble of doing it himself over the next few months. I left him there, alone, to survey his new surroundings and to eat the cake.
That was two days ago and already I miss him. I hadn’t expected that, not this quickly. It’s not like it’s any quieter without him, especially with his remaining brother campaigning for his room every thirty seconds using Power Point presentations and environmental impact studies. And UCF is close enough that he can come back whenever he wants, which he did last night to use my printer and get another meal.
No, I think the real reason I miss him is because it turns out I liked having him around, and no matter how much warning I had that this moment was coming, it still wasn’t enough.
Besides, now I need help cleaning my room to make space for all the stuff I got back.