Tick tock tick to ck t i c k

I dropped of a trunk load of toxic chemicals at the Haz-Bin site today. Colleen and I have been s-l-o-w-l-y cleaning out Dad's garage, and I went out yesterday and got all of the jars, bottles, and cans of poisonous crap off the back shelves in the garage. No kidding, I could have easily knocked off a small village with the stuff I hauled away from there.

My favorite aerosol can of the bunch was one called "Cabinet Magic." It had a "wood" label on it featuring Mrs. Happy Homemaker in her dress and apron, holding a dusting rag in one hand, sporting a mean beehive updo, and smiling like she was just so darn happy to be polishing cabinets today. I promise you in all of my 41 years, I have never, ever cleaned kitchen cabinets in a dress and apron, and even if I had, I would not have been smiling about it!

I also liked the can of "* Shine Brite *" glass polish in the powder blue label. I wish I could show the kind of font the text was in. It was so typically 1968 Bewitched. That can was probably loaded with enough CFCs to add another couple hundred miles to the hole in the ozone.

There was a plastic bottle full of something. Dad and I had no idea what it was, but Mom had written, "POISON XXX" all over it, so we touched it very gingerly and put it in the corner of the box so it wouldn't fall over and kill us with fumes.

I hauled away several bottles of transmission fluid, power steering fluid, grub killer, rose dust, paint thinner, spray paint, varnish, Liquid Gold, and lighter fluid from when Dad smoked, oh 35 years ago, and would refill his lighters when they got low.

I took about 15 odd cans of paint to the back yard and filled them up with the old sand from the sandbox. Some of that paint hadn't been on the walls for 2 or 3 layers. There was a full can of black latex paint that I have no idea about, and a red that I think was on the basement floor. (The basement was finished and carpeted in 1983.) Toxic chemicals and paint being what they are, they were all still mostly liquid. The only way to dispose of them, according to MetroCall, was to take off the lids, fill them with sand, and let them dry out. I guess the fumes are okay to release into the air, but I wouldn't want to hang out in Dad's garage for any length of time for the next couple of weeks. We'll keep checking on them and put them in the garbage once they are dried out. It could be awhile.

So as much as I'm ragging on all of this poisonous stuff in the garage, it was really pretty sad. I would hold up each item and tell Dad what it was, and he'd say yea or nay to keeping it. When we got to the automotive stuff, I thought about how long it had been since Dad even checked the fluid levels in his vehicles, much less topped them off. I could see the wheels turning in his head, "Do I think I'll ever be needing this again in my lifetime? No, probably not..." We did that with a lot of things: paint, lawn chemicals, WD-40, mineral spirits. We kept a few cans of spray paint, some fertilizer for the yard, and a car cleaner that had "GM" (General Motors) written on the can that Dad got as a gimme from when he worked for GM. Remember, Dad retired in the late 80s.

I stood there holding up cans, and it was like watching him shut door after door while he analyzed his future possible use for each item. There wasn't much need for a number of things.

He helped me take the paint cans back to the garage before I left for home. He is so slow. His steps are very short, about the length of his foot, and he shuffles pretty badly. He'd take a couple of cans at a time and then have to stop and sit down every trip or two. Watching Dad is like watching a wind-up toy winding down or a clock ticking ever more slowly. Only there is no key on his back with which to rewind him, and I know that sooner than later the last tick is gonna come, and he will stop.