FROM THE LOWER LEFT CORNER
Tag Sales & The Birds of Spring
commentary by George W. Earley
Many are the signs of spring. For the sports
fan it is the end of basketball and hockey and the
onset of baseball fever. Fitness buffs leave indoor
gyms and take to roads and jogging tracks, while
college students jet o ff to Florida.
But for the average homeowner, spring means
other things. Winter equipment must be cleaned
and stored, while lawn mowers and garden tools
are primed, polished and set in ordered rows
awaiting the growth of grass.
Then come the birds from the south, seeking
out last year's nests. Those which have survived
w inter's storms are battered and in need of
repair, a fact that does not seem to bother their
cheeping tenants. In short order they divide the
debris into reuseables and discardable and then
bring in newer material — often scrounged from
the discards of other nests.
Meanwhile, down on the ground in human
habitats, a similar process is under way, as the
ancient rite of spring shares time with a newer
event -- the tag sale.
Tag sale habitues may not stop to think of it,
but this practice is a recent human variant of the
age-old avian one of feathering ones nest with
someone else’s discards.
Watchers of the parade of possessions from
old homes to newer ones cannot help but notice the
tru th o f the old adage: “ One man’s trash is
another’s treasure.”
For better or worse, the flow of dollars from
these tag sales appears to be overlooked by our
revenue-hungry bureaucrats. Confess -- who
among us have reported our tag sale profits on
April 15th?
But, taxes aside, our bureaucrats should be
reminded of a positive aspect to this rite of spring
-- recycling. Just think how much more crowded
our overworked landfills would be were it not for
tag sales.
I’ll bet Uncle Harry’s moose head has graced a
dozen homes since he shot it 40 years ago.
Outgrown bikes, trikes, and baby buggies get a
second, third, or even fourth lease on life as
seasons pass and riders go on to newer, bigger
wheels.
Clothing too, Long-sleeve shirts become
short-sleeve ones. Once-dressy gloves move to
the garden, while tired towels turn into wash
cloths or polishing rags before being sent to the
tool shed.
By the time our perambulating household
discard makes its final m igration to those
crumpled curbside cans, there is far less of it
than when the cycle began years before,
So thank the busy birds for their example and
sing a happy song as you tackle your spring
cleaning and set up you tag sale tables in the yard.
A Pot For Every Chicken
Victoria Sloppicllo
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George W. Earley observes birds and other
beings from his home on one of Mount Hood’s
ancient glacial moraines.
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I UNIVERSAL-# YIDEOJ
I heard recently that a hotel with shared
baths has a d iffic u lt time surviving in America,
that is, surviving economically. Apparently
Americans, unlike Europeans, expect, even
demand, a pnvalc bath with their room, and
therefore old hotels arc forced to do d ifficult and
expensive remodels in order to create private
baths with each and every room. So much for
character or charm, we just want more plumbing!
I've traveled outside the States and often
on the cheap, so that is an attitude I don't totally
understand. Somehow wc Americans got the idea
that wc had to have our very own facility to poo
and pec or wc arc somehow deprived or unsafe.
Maybe this comes from our pioneering past
when a trip to the necessarily shared outhouse
might hav e included an encounter o f the worst
kind: grizzly bears, rig htfully irritated natives, or
worse.
Maybe it was because our culture has
had such a high tolerance for alcohol
consumption, and that combined with a manly
man attitude, you never knew what you'd find on
the scat.
Maybe it's our preoccupation with
science and over interest in germs, disease
transmission, and a belief that sexually
transmitted diseases can be passed on toilet seats.
Maybe we've read too much Freud, and
we have the notion that i f someone else uses the
same toilet, sink and shower, they'll pick up our
scent, know something about us that our own
conscious mind refuses to acknow ledge.
Maybe it's because late 19th and early
20th century child rearing practices pul an
emphasis on regularity and hav ing to share the
facility during potty training might have been
just too disruptive to the potty training regimen.
My theory, though, is that it's due to
advertising. One car became not enough, nor is
one T V , or even one house fo r a lot o f people, so
certainly one bathrcx>m, at only four or $5,000 a
w hack, certainly couldn't be enough in an
American home. Therefore, since w hen we travel
wc expect to be treated even better than at home,
i f at home we have one full bathrtxim for every
two or three bedrooms, we certainly expect a
better bath to bed ratio on the road. Plus we can
afford it, right?
We're the country o f life, liberty and the
pursuit o f happiness—so let's pursue bathrixims.
A fter all, in some large families a mere 40 years
ago, the only place a person could get enough
peace and quiet to read was, you guessed it, the
john. Maybe that's why there's been a
proliferation o f bathrixxns. As more o f the
population attain college educations, and with
TVs in almost every rixim , the readers among us
need a small, warm place to sit and do our
studies.
How things could deteriorate, or is it
ameliorate, in only a century, from the shared
outhouse, even to the point o f a two-holer, to a
balhrmm ev ery place you turn, is one o f the
truly significant phenomena o f the industrialized
age. Like so many things American, our
collective attitude is, you got it, so Haunt it.
While some folks struggle with sleeping in
doorways and sneaking into gas station restrooms
to sponge bathe and wash their hair, others have
a plethora o f bathrmms all to themselves.
M y dad's wife didn't like visiting me in
Portland because our four-bedroom, un-retrofitted
Queen Anne Victorian house had only one bath.
It was a split bath at that, with a true w.c. and a
separate room w ilh a large clawfoot tub and
marble sink for bathing. In fact, when traveling,
this lady refused to stay in a rixvm unless it had
not only a private bath, but also two sinks.
Maybe my dad was messier than I thought, but I
never noticed him leaving the cap o ff the
toothpaste, and he certainly didn't have enough
hair to sully the sink.
Oh well —those historic hotels on the
East Coast, loaded with charm, real wixxl
furniture and hand plastered walls, some o f their
proprietors are justly adamant about keeping
things just as they arc. They still think they have
a market niche that w ill never be overtaken by
the Hojos, Shilos, and other glossy cookie-cutter
hostclrics that show up at almost every freeway
off-ramp and are now spreading to the
hinterlands. Those old places arc counting on
customers like me, who remember the times
w hen sharing a bathroom was just an
unremarkable fact o f life.
Victoria Sloppiello is a writer living in
Ilwaco, at the lower left corner o f Washington
State.
" A u "’•♦re U suai . C h m »
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