things I wish I didn’t know

I don’t buy into the idea that humans only use about 10% of our brains.  I believe that we use every square millimeter of our grey matter, but we may not know exactly what we are using it for.  I know there have been many times when a large portion of my brain must have been occupied with some important unknown task while my body was left to stumble and flounder with only basic brain power keeping me upright and breathing.  This is the only explanation for why I keep buying bags of shredded cheese when I already have half a dozen bags in the fridge at home or that time I thought gold eyeshadow was a good idea.  And, while some may swear by the Cliff Clavin buffalo theory, I am certain that more than a few herds of my best and brightest brain cells were run off a cliff by rampaging glasses of red wine. 

Wouldn’t it be great if we could free up some of the space in our brains? Remove some of the information we no longer need or didn’t even want to know in the first place.  Maybe if my brain had more viable cells to play with, I wouldn’t have to turn down the radio in order to concentrate on driving to an address I’ve never been to before.  Possibly I could finally learn proper math.  Or learn how to force choke people like Darth Vader!

Knowledge is power, but some knowledge is just dead weight.  A sampling of some of the things I would delete from my cerebral hard-drive if I could:

 - The lyrics to “American Pie” by Don McLean.  Damn, that’s a long song.  I could probably fit a dozen e.e. cummings poems in that space.

 - What an Experience Modification is, the minimum and maximum executive officer payrolls for workers compensation, the difference between occurrence and claims made policies and how a fleet automobile policy works.  If I could forget all this information it would mean that I have a new, sparkly job that has nothing to do with insurance.  Either that, or I won the lottery.  Or, I’m serving time for arson. 

 - How to re-spool a cassette tape with a pencil.  There is no time in the future that this skill will be relevant. 

 - My old home phone number when I was growing up.  Maybe if I forget it, I will finally be able to remember my cell number. 

 - That Davy Jones’s (The Monkees) birthday is December 30th.  It’s not like I send him a card or anything. 

 - What a dead kitten looks and feels like.  That really brought the room down, didn’t it?

 - The prologue to The Canterbury Tales in the original Middle English.  This has never come in handy.  Ever. 

I am sure that there is more knowledge that I could easily sacrifice, but since I am now thinking about “smale foweles maken melodye” I have no idea what it could be.  If that space in my brain were free, I might be able to conjure up a better way to end this post.

keep the change

Where do I begin, to tell the story of how crammed full a condo can be?

Eight days in Hastings and Battle Creek, Michigan.  Never heard of these places?  Well, look on the side of any box of Kellogg’s cereal and you’ll see Battle Creek, MI.  It is Cereal City, where the Road to Wellville ended and typical Small Town America.  Hastings?  Well that’s even Smaller Town America and there’s not much there except for a kick-ass market, Toms’, that sells fresh cut steaks, homemade sausage, jerky and alcohol, of course (gotta love the north!).  There’s also the Waldorf Brewery that serves better food than most people in the area appreciate.  And then there’s the Superette.  The Superette is about the size of a small house and sells everything you need for a good time (i.e. snacks, liquor, cigarettes and lottery tickets).  My grandma, after purchasing her weekly lotto tickets, once mistook D for R and slammed her Chevy Lumina into the front wall of the Superette.  No harm done except for a few broken liquor bottles and an old lady’s pride.  That’s just one of the many reasons why she is now living at my mother’s in Florida and why we (my mom, husband, sister and I) were in Hastings cleaning out her condo.
 

What unfolded at the condo was an adventure of rediscovered history, unchecked pack-rat-ism and change.  Not butterfly from a cocoon type of change.  Not even Obama campaign change.  I’m talking “in my pocket going jing-a-ling-a-ling” change.  More change than most people who don’t work in the banking industry will see in a lifetime.  Mountains of quarters, nickels, dimes and pennies with the odd handful of dollar and half-dollar coins. 

A lot, huh?  Well, that’s not even all of it.  There were dozens of velvet boxes with plastic encased silver dollars and another box full of nothing but rolls of state quarters.  We found buffalo nickels, indian head pennies. mercury dimes and steel pennies.  There were quarters from the 1930′s and, since we were in Michigan, an assortment of Canadian coins. 

Now, this change wasn’t neatly divided into baggies and boxes when we arrived.  No, it was scattered about the condo in random jars, bins and plastic bags which were shoved into every drawer, closet, desk, nook and cranny of the condo.  Modern coins mixed in with coins from the 1800′s.  We had to sort through it all, and by “we” I mean my poor husband.  He didn’t feel comfortable going through the drawers and deciding what papers should stay and what should be tossed, so he was put in charge of the change.  Every time we found another plastic bag or jar full of coins we would bring it to his station in the bedroom for him to sort.  At first he thought it was interesting and had fun finding the rare coins.  By the fourth day he never wanted to see another coin again as long as he lived.  I think his soul died a little every time we would bring him more coins. 

When we finally sorted the wheat from the chaff, we had $750 in everyday change.  Probably double that amount in “special” coins.  Sounds pretty impressive until you learn that my sister and I were up in MI a few years ago and had already found most of the coins.  We dumped them into a plastic bin and left it for our mother who was going up to visit grandma later that year.  Mom found more coins that we missed, loaded up the back of the Jeep and took the whole lot to the bank.  A couple hours later, the bank tellers let my mom know that she had just deposited about $10,000 worth of change into my grandma’s account.

So, yeah.  Grandma has a coin fetish. 
Next, maybe I’ll tell you about her stamps.