Beware the Kitchen Monster

For the record, I don’t really care about the blender. We won’t need a blender when we’re living on an RV. Especially a blender that big. But it’s emblematic of the temporary insanity that goes with selling your house and getting rid of your stuff.

Beth and the kids know I’m a little bit OCD when it comes to the kitchen.

OK, a lot OCD.

Those of you who know me know my reputation for being a fairly chill dude with a pretty long fuse. That’s Dr. Jekyll. You’ve never seen Mr. Hyde, who makes his appearance after somebody (or a lot of somebodies) trash my kitchen. Count yourself lucky you’ve never met him. Mr. Hyde is, shall we say, a little prickly?

Mr. Hyde would make his appearance, when, for the 1,000th time, one of the kids (or some random millennial, living in our house) left trash in the sink drains, tossed trash near but not in the trash and left trash on the counters. That last one will puzzle me to my grave. The counter is here. The trash, there, about 18 inches away. Why, for the love of Mike, is it so hard to move trash from the counter to the trash? Did someone, by any chance, ship the trash bin to Dubuque, Iowa, without my knowledge? Somebody please explain this to me like I’m a four-year-old!

I digress.

And I’m Italian. Here’s a bit of advice for you non-Eye-Ties: never, under any circumstances, mess with an Italian’s kitchen. You will rue the day.

So, about once a year – in a bad year, twice – multiple transgressions would reach critical mass. I’d find all the misplaced trash, plus other things. Unidentified goo on the counters. An oil slick on the range top. Uncooked rice and who-knows-what-else scattered about. On the floor, a spot so sticky that if I’d stepped in it, it would remove my shoe. An unattended pot, boiling away, spitting gunk everywhere, the cook, nowhere to be found. A frying pan returned to its cabinet, dirty.

Blood pressure spiked. Nervous tics became involuntary spasms. And I’d go on a cleaning jag. Not just any cleaning jag. A full-blown Italian-completely-out-of-his-ever-loving-mind cleaning maelstrom. It was physical. It was loud. It was something no human should ever witness, complete with airborne cooking utensils.

Fortunately, the banging of pots and pans masked the expletives.

“Son of a BANG!”

“BANG!dammit!”

“What the BANG! is wrong with you people?!”

“How many BANG! times do I have to BANG! ask you to clean up your BANG! messes in my BANG! kitchen?!”

If anyone was home during one of these category-five storms, they’d wisely retreat to their rooms and bar the door.

This should give you an inkling of an idea of how an Italian feels about the state of his kitchen. Messing up an Italian’s kitchen causes him physical pain. You might as well stick an icepick in his foot.

Granted, Italians are not normal. I get that. I admit it. We’re not. Nor do we pretend to be. But in my defense, if you live a house where the guy in charge of the kitchen is Italian, you should BANG! know better.

It was no surprise then, the day Beth approached me to say, “I’m not doing anything with anything in the kitchen without clearing with you first.” Good plan, I thought.

I also thought it meant the kitchen was exempt from Post-It notes. As you may have learned from a previous blog post, in the weeks leading up to settlement, everything in the house was adorned with a Post-It note, denoting its destination. “2Chance.” “Trenton.” “Max.” “Gordon.” “Goodwill.” And so on.

So I was a little surprised when, from my weeks-long garage-cleaning project vantage point, I saw a friend of ours loading my blender into her car.

Wait, what? The blender was in the kitchen, right? She said she’d clear getting rid of kitchen stuff with me first, right? I didn’t raise a fuss. No big deal. I wasn’t the least bit miffed. I was just confused.

You see, it wasn’t any piece-of-crap blender. It was one I’d carefully researched and worked diligently to discover. It was a monster, with a motor the size of a SmartCar. Like one of those $800 as-seen-on-TV jobs that grind concrete and smartphones into noxious dust. Just as powerful, just as loud, just as menacing – but it only cost $189. A triumph of beating the system.

Tapping my inner Queen Elsa, I let it go. Not too painful. I knew we’d have nowhere to store a blender on a small RV. But my curiosity got the best of me. So I queried my better half.

“You gave away my blender?”

Without missing a beat, she replied, “Sorry, Dude. Your name wasn’t on it.”

Wait a minute. My name wasn’t on it? I opened my mouth, prepared to defend my kitchen Post-It exempt status. Thought better of it. Closed it. It would have been unwise. And it really didn’t matter, after all. I know my better half well enough to know what happened.

It all came into focus.

What she said was, “I’m not doing anything with anything in the kitchen without clearing with you first.” Unfortunately, because selling your house and giving all your stuff away causes brain damage, I didn’t hear the part she didn’t say: “… but if you don’t figure out what you want to keep by September 1, all bets are off and I’m giving it all away, whether you had a plan for it or not. Deal with it.”

Under normal circumstances, a husband can easily read such silent thoughts of his wife of 33 years. These were not normal circumstances. Selling your house and giving away all your stuff messes with the reception. Like, in the old days, when you were trying to watch the Three Stooges on UHF TV, through rabbit ears, and your mom flipped on her World War II surplus vacuum cleaner. The Stooges became The Static. Obliterated by electrical interference.

So I missed the unspoken bit. My bad. Suffice to say, the kitchen got its share of Post-It notes in short order.

A few days later, our youngest was looking for a floor lamp he’d had his eye on. But it had already been gifted.

“Sorry, Dude,” I said. “Your name wasn’t on it!”

BANG! always rolls downhill.

Editor’s note: The kitchen pledge was made July 6. The blender left the house September 6. Blender Owner had nine days worth of work left in the garage and we were five days away from closing. Blender Owner was showing no signs of altering focus to kitchen. Desperate times call for desperate measures.

TO BE CONTINUED

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2020 move