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the meaningless noise of dozens of clothes pins
Wednesday, March 19 2025
location: the couch in the Shaque, Stingy Hollow Road, rural Augusta County, VA
Throughout today, I continued with my removal of heavy and bulky material from the Shaque. First I created a place beneath Don's trailer to put my Dad's old x86 tower and a single specimen of an IBM i386-based PS/2 from a collection of them that I salvaged nearly 30 years ago from UVA. Then I piled all the old National Geographics neatly on top of them. After that, I borrowed one of Don's wagons (which he uses to bring groceries home from town) and used it to bring load after load of books from the Shaque to a place under Don's trailer, where I built a wall of them uphill from a concrete block column. As I stacked them there, I was fully aware of the fact that they would probably remain there for the rest of my life. None of the books I put there interested me; any I found that I had an interest in was pulled from the stack and put in my car. So, being in contact with the soil, they will gradually disintegrate. Perhaps, though, an apocalypse will happen first, and some survivor in a post-technology aftermath will seek shelter in that dank low-headroom space and find the basis there of all the knowledge that the apocalypse wiped away. In that wall of books, after all, are books on chemistry, physics, geology, sociology, psychology, and math. There is even a bible and a large-type siddur. There are also a number of novels. Deprived of the internet, it would be a great resource, which makes sense given that I assembled it just before the internet arrived with the idea that I would use it as study library. But books are much harder to dip into when I have a question than the internet is, so the internet would have to go away before I'd have a use for them. And then I'd have to contend with the information in them being at least 30 years old.
At some point as I was removing books from the bookshelf under the Shaque's bunk, I found a small black book that had been hidden behind them. I opened it up and saw that it was a diary written in an unfamiliar handwriting. Reading it, I realized from the people mentioned in it that I was looking at a diary written by my mother. It dated to 1952, when my mother was just about to turn 15, and it was written a labored cursive that looked like something written by a boy. I'd never seen such writing before; I'm only familiar with an ugly printed script that she fell into at some point. The discovery of the diary hidden behind the books on my bookshelf suggested she knew that someone some day would remove those books and find it. Perhaps she knew that I would be the one to find it and that it probably wouldn't happen until after she was dead. It's rare that I'm struck by the my mother's cleverness, but in this case, I had to admire her for it. She must've done it while she still had enough sense remaining to know what she was doing.
One thing that's striking about the middens of layered material that accumulated around my mother in any space she controlled is the clothes pins. They're everywhere: on bags, on boxes, and especially on envelopes. They seemed to have signified the concept of importance and substituted for memories as dementia gradually destroyed my mother's ability to remember where she'd put things and what things she needed to do. Perhaps at first there were only a few such clothes pins, and every time she'd see them they'd trigger an increasingly hard-to-access memory. But at some point there were dozens and then hundreds of clothes pins, and then of course even things with clothes pins on them were being buried beneath papers and objects that couldn't be thrown away. By then clothes pins no longer conveyed any meaning at all. I've looked at many envelopes with clothes pins on them, and whatever importance they'd had was no longer clear. And there's no evidence that things ever lost their clothes pins once they lost their significance. Removing clothes pins would've been like throwing things away, an essential function that my mother was loathe to perform. While physically and chemically, losses of memory and function within her head were accelerating, outside in the real world, nothing was ever lost. It accumulated like snow falling on an icy planet, gradually spreading out and compacting into glaciers. Perhaps this endless ongoing accumulation in observed reality is comforting to someone who has trouble forming and maintaining memories.
I'd built the Shaque in 1991 as a place to live cheaply while I figured out what to do with my life after college. It remained largely a space that I controlled throughout the 1990s, even while I lived in rooms I rented in Charlottesville for a couple years. In my absence, the Shaque came to be used by my parents as a "computer room." My mother would go to the Shaque to escape the clutter and commotion of the house to use my computer, an old Macintosh IIsi in mounted inside an eight inch floppy drive chassis that I'd obtained Johnny-Cash-style. She'd mostly play games, though she also would use it to write documents. Eventually my mother bought a mid-90s Power Mac to work with, though she usually found using computers a highly frustrating experience.
While I was living in California and then in Brooklyn, my parents' use of the Shaque increased. At some point I set them up with a Windows computer, which my father used to type up the findings of his botanical surveys of the Appalachian wilderness. (To do so, he had to teach himself how to type, something he used to leave to secretaries back when he worked at NASA. He had a greater aptitude for computers than my mother, figuring many things out for himself as she generally retreated into frustration and books marketed "for dummies.")
I don't know when exactly my mother started using the Shaque as an art studio, but based on the dated documents I was finding, it was in full swing by 2007, around the time my parents bought the Creekside parcel across the road. Once my mother started using the Shaque as her personal space, her midden spread out across everything, burying artifacts from my 1990s life beneath a blanket of clothes-pinned envelopes, magazines, printouts, paintings, linoleum blocks, and horse supplies. The purchase of Creekside gave an expansive new space for my mother to spread into, and the Shaque seems to have fallen into disuse after that, becoming a time capsule mostly of the first seven years of this century.
When I was briefly at the Creekside trailer, Don had Joy Tarder (the woman my mother got to be her power of attorney as she faded into oblivion) on the phone, and we discussed the possibility of moving the Shaque across the road to join the trailer at Creekside. Joy had some people she knew who could do the job, but from the way she was describing things, it sounded like much more of an ordeal than I was envisioning. She was talking about them coming out with a crane and then building an elaborate platform for it rest on at Creekside. I wanted to move the Shaque if it could be done cheaply, but I didn't want to spend thousands of dollars on it, especially given how little I anticipate using it. I would only use it when visiting Don, which I probably wouldn't do more than once per year. And otherwise it would sit unused. Instead of spending that kind of money, it would be far cheaper for me to stay in a hotel when I visit, and then I'd have a proper toilet! My vision for moving the Shaque was to do it the way the guy on the YouTube channel Shed Happens does it, that is, using a little "mule" tractor to push it onto a flatbed truck. And then it could just be dumped on the side of the driveway at Creekside for me to jack up and put on concrete blocks at some point. But as I was discussing this with Joy, it soon became clear that something about my mother's estate is causing Joy to want to spend lavishly on things. She told me that the Shaque could be moved "as part of your inheritance," And it's clear she has other big expenses she wants to blow money on. For example, she thinks the bathroom that Don uses in the trailer has a bad floor and needs to gut-remodeled. The floor has one small bad spot near the toilet, but otherwise it's perfectly fine and definitely good enough for someone who cares nothing about such things like Don. I'm not sure why exactly she's looking for ways to spend so much money, but it might be a consequence of the fact that Don must remain indigent in order to continue receiving benefits. I'd rather have just inherited the money as, well, money, but it looks like we're beyond all that at this point.
Another interesting thing regards the specific benefits that Don now receives. He used to get Supplemental Security Income (SSI), but now, since my mother died, he has apparently inherited her Social Security benefits, which amount to $200 more per month than he used to get under SSI. (I'd thought maybe somehow he'd been switched to Social Security because he'd recently turned sixty, but no, apparently dependent adult special needs children can inherit such benefits.) All this additional income needs to be burned off as it arrives, since Don's bank accounts must contain less than $2000 for him to continue receiving benefits. And we certainly don't want to enter a situation where Don's benefits get cut off and then need to be re-applied-for, at least not under the current government of predatory sociopaths.
A drawing of Beauford the Cat dating to 12-24-1990. I probably drew it as a Christmas present for my mother. Click to enlarge.
A photo of my grandfather Clarence DeMar winning a race. This was framed and shipped to my brother Don by our cousin Deirdre. Earlier today it was covered by a translucent blue plastic protective film, which my brother hadn't had the initiative to remove. Click to enlarge.
A marked-up printout of 68000 assembly code that I was probably cracking to remove copy protection, circa 1994. It had been buried beneath subsequent layers of papers deposited mostly by my father back in the naughties when he was spending a lot of time typing up his wilderness botanical surveys so that I could publish them on the web. Click to enlarge.
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