The annoying thing is that you had noticed, just that morning, how precariously perched was your late mother’s country kitchen bric-a-brac. The oval-shaped, white pottery container thingy – what do even call this this dish-basket filled with dusty crap? – that you brought back from their home. You had noticed your mother’s cheerful china tchotchke creeping over the edge of your boxy rectangular stereo speaker – 12 by 12 by 18 inches high of particle board and mahogany veneer old-school sound imaging – that was stationed, for maximum vertical space in your tiny studio, atop the refrigerator. Just that morning you had seen it up there, on the edge of the speaker atop the refrigerator, and a thought like any other had passed through your mind to push this maternal memento away from the precipice.
So, in a way, it’s not really excusable, since you saw and did nothing, to hear yourself shrieking “Damn it” three times like a madman after she, the cat, not your mother, jumped up and then came crashing down in a small avalanche of pottery, batteries, folded up pieces of paper, yellowed receipts, some pens you took from work, an old cellphone, an incense burner, a lint roller, the black mesh speaker cover and a bottle of gin caught in the slide. “Damn it,” you yell three times like a crazed shaman unloosing a curse, as your terrified cats – including the one who didn’t do anything – scramble for the far darkest corner under your bed.
Now you’re faced with bad parent guilt AND the decision whether to glue back together the several pieces of your mother’s kitty cat knickknack, including the decapitated orange tabby’s head and its separated ear. An ordinary object which has no value other than sentimental, in that it is representative of the low-brow ceramic crap she liked; and she’s gone now, 11 years.
Or do you just gather the pieces along with the dried-up pens, receipts from 2013, instruction pamphlets to small devices you no longer use and toss it with the other detritus of years gone by?
