Moving Experience

A family in our neighborhood are moving house. A group of us spent most of yesterday helping them.

There are two boys in the family, both still young enough to be interested in Lego and PlayStations and profoundly disinterested in cleaning their own rooms, and it took three grown women – veteran mothers all – well over three hours to sort out both of their rooms. It can be argued that I am given to exaggeration, but in this case, the truth can hardly be embellished. You’ve never seen the like of it. We certainly hadn’t.  

To start with, you could hardly see the floor in either room. It was covered with the sort of things you might imagine little boys to have – things little boys have loved over the ages. Mainly stuff you collect:  seashells, stones, Lego, blocks, cards and the like, but there was also stuff that I am less familiar with – gizmos with tangles of cords and wires and plugs – basically, enough electronic miscellany to fill a suitcase. There were the inevitable small plastic toys obviously necessary for raising modern boys: armies of action figures, blocks, miscellaneous bits of train track that, laid end to end, would surely have stretched for miles. These will no doubt haunt my dreams for days to come: legions of hyper-muscled, overly-armed, scowling Action Men and their vehicles coursing past me in an endless, dusty, cookie-crumb speckled procession. Scattered everywhere were clothes, clean and dirty, candy wrappers and half-eaten candies and cookies. And there were dishes and empty yogurt containers (when I got to twenty in one room, I stopped counting). Last week, I spent two hours packing the boys’ books and magazines and I would have sworn I’d gotten them all. But I must have missed hidden caches: there were books, book covers, out-of-date calendars, homework assignments, comic books, magazines and newspapers, in sickening abundance. There was hamster food and hamster bedding material everywhere – and the entire room was perfumed with a mixture of L’eau de Boy and Fragrance of Hamster.

We packed up box after box after box until our backs and hands ached. The boys' collection of stuffed toys alone could have supplied a good-sized orphanage with Christmas gifts for a couple of years. When we’d finally finished – when my friends had hauled down the last black bin bag stuffed with old homework assignments, socks without partners and empty yogurt containers and I had at last taken down all the light fixtures and posters – and unstuck every single star, astronaut and planet sticker from the walls and ceiling – the room looked like a bomb had hit it. Shredded wood from the hamster cage. Dust lying about in drifts. Beads and tiny bits of broken Action Men, wheels from their vehicles, candies stuck to the carpets. My friend Margaret looked at me and mouthed, for perhaps the hundredth time that day, Can you believe this?  Then we found the cupboards.

I would estimate that the width of these cupboards was about six feet and the top shelf was higher than I, a taller-than-average woman with long arms, could comfortably reach. And they were packed from top to bottom with games, jigsaw puzzles, videos, and toys. I could have sat down and wept. 

What is going on? Who in the world needs that much stuff? I know that by saying this I am firmly establishing myself as an Old Fart, but when I was a kid, my collection of toys would have fit into two pillowcases. For reading material, I somehow managed to make do with a modest shelf of books, one thoroughly-devoured Kid Magazine a month, a shared set of encyclopaedias, and weekly trips to the library. I was a slob and a packrat, but if we’d had to move, I believe I could have gotten my worldly goods together in one-fifth the time it took the three of us to do one boy’s room. In the dark ages before personal computers, our family owned a chess set, a television, a checkerboard, and a deck of cards. 

My parents frequently marvelled at how much we kids had in the way of personal possessions. Like a lot of people their age, they remembered getting oranges and raisins for Christmas and nothing but good wishes for their birthdays. 

I can’t help but wonder: how far is this going to go?  If the current trend persists, we won’t have to worry about global warming and nuclear holocaust:  here in the 'developed' world the next generation will buried under thousands of small plastic toys.