My parents made a number of inexplicable purchases in their late later years, one of which is a huge safe. That safe is taller than I am. The wheel on the door of that safe would suffice to steer a steamboat. In fact that safe is so big that they could not get it down the outside steps and into the cellar of the house, which is where it had to go. The floor joist under the floors upstairs are not strong enough to hold it. As a result that safe now sits in the old chicken house under some plastic tarps. Never been used.

I say “that safe” because there are already two safes in this house, each about the size of an average Coleman ice chest. Filled with nothing but crap . . . okay, not crap but stuff of only sentimental value. Such as my report card from First Grade, which is marked “Unsatisfactory” after “Keeps Hands to Self,” among other things. Anything that is critical, the Abstract of Title to the farm for instance, is in the big lock box at the bank.

My classmate, Rick, who also had difficulty keeping his hands to himself, gave me a ride home from the mechanic's shop early yesterday morning. Having some work done on my truck. Rick is interested in purchasing that large safe for reasons that are beyond me. I am surely not going to try to talk him out of it, however. We stood around in the chicken house for awhile in the cold yesterday morning scratching our asses, looking at the safe, measuring the safe, pondering how to get it out of the chicken house and move it to his house. We know it will take more than the two of us. We don't think we can get a forklift into the chicken house to pick it up.

Of course, were he to purchase that safe, he would be passing interested in having the combination to the lock. After he left, I asked Velma if she knows where that combination is recorded. Velma is my mother. Why did I ask? Why did I bother to ask? Every other day she asks me if I know where the combinations are for the two little safes with the crap in them. Because of course she expects her own demise at any moment now and wishes to make sure that I will then have immediate access to the crap that is in them. She no longer has any idea where those combinations are recorded either. It seems as if my whole life is revolving around these fucking safes right now.

Since I am temporarily stranded here—neither the Chrysler LHS nor that piece of shit Chevy S-10 pickup, which by the way does not deserve the noble appellation “pickup,” are running right now. Both batteries are bad. So I suppose I will paw around a bit in my father's office today looking for the combination to that big safe. And fill another garbage can with the jetsam and flotsam. Another stack of thick booklets explaining Medicare that have never been cracked. Another stack of booklets explaining the coverage afforded under the supplemental medical insurance that was in effect twenty years ago. Looking on the bright side, I may find another neat jackknife or key chain or something like that.

But I am not complaining. I am not complaining. This kind of thing is why I am here for a time. To act a curator for a massive collection of plastic flowers, plastic souvenir coffee mugs, plastic platters commemorating the trivial, plastic Christmas decorations, plastic plates, plastic furniture, plastic kitchen utensils, plastic ephemera of all sorts—well, you get the idea. The miracle of plastic came on big during my parents' lifetimes. And paper. Mountains of paper. Two quiet lifetimes documented down to the last nit on the gnat's nut.

I need an industrial size dumpster parked outside this house, but that would upset her. Poor old gal. The perfect mother. Perfectly adoring. If I had slaughtered an innocent family of six with a shotgun, she would have been upset with them for getting in the way of my gun. She loves me with a love that passeth all understanding. Even my own understanding, which is saying something.

Speaking of Rick, here he is on the fiddle: