White Garbage Bags

A Blue Shorts vignette, obsolescence, and claims of responsibility

This morning I load a white garbage bag into my car, buckling the passenger seatbelt first and then putting the bag in the seat. The garbage bag, plus my purse, plus my computer bag, are heavy enough that my seatbelt sensor will think a small human is unsecured and in danger of being hurtled from the passenger seat as soon as I reach 15 miles per hour. 

I have had to pull over multiple times to buckle in my groceries, so I’ve learned this trick of buckling the seatbelt first. Shopping for the deli and our household often fills the entire back of my Jeep, with seats down, plus the passenger seat and floor. I don’t know exactly what the weight limit is for the seatbelt sensor, but it’s somewhere around a Costco double pack of milk plus my purse plus my computer bag, which is usually full of rolled quarters, dimes, nickels, and pennies, after a bank stop. 

I am annoyed and a little offended whenever that sensor goes off, blaring a warning of impending danger for any unsecured passengers. As if I have room for passengers. As if my driving is cause for alarm. It’s just me in here and I always buckle because I feel naked without a seatbelt, not because I fear for my life. Just out of habit.

I buckle the belt and load the car. Garbage bag (check) purse (check) computer bag (check) water bottle (check) coffee (check) snack (check). 

Grocery day is no joke.

I text our daughters a picture of the white garbage bag in my passenger seat, with this message: “Guess what item of clothing finally made it into the Goodwill bag?”

Yesterday I found a pile of my husband’s clean clothes on our bathroom floor, a bright blue pair of cotton shorts sitting on top of old, earth-toned flannels and t-shirts. My brain is funny or I am weird, but it could have been a modern art installation in a museum somewhere, captioned “Earth and Sky: Shades of a Working Man”.

We have both been in a mood lately about all our stuff, and we have agreed to set about a great purge. His purge is much more overwhelming than mine, I think. Our shop¹ is full of treasures saved from a lifetime of building and logging and squirreling away material from old houses, for someday, some project, some one who will need this. Screws and bolts and chains and tools and spare parts and extra wood, all neatly organized in cans and bins and piles. He is a collector, but he is also fastidious. It’s an overwhelming job to look at purging the shop, but at least he is organized.

“I purged my closet,” he said proudly—which is like me, fiddling with organizing my desk drawer when I have a year and two businesses’ worth of taxes I should be working on, or ordering hooks for the inside of the kitchen cupboard so I can hang my measuring cups and spoons neatly.

We like to start small, claim the easy victories.

“Not the blue shorts?” I asked.

We will have been married twenty-eight years this June and the blue shorts have never not been with us. They have moved with us five times, survived the ridicule of five children, been worn for innumerable treadmill miles, and traveled to Africa and Southeast Asia a time or two.

They show up in our children’s baby pictures. They are part of our family vernacular, a shorthand for anything enduring or out-of-date, anything that will simply not die, like our almost-fifteen year old Yorkie/Cairn Terrier.

The blue shorts have been in the give-away pile before, but they always mysteriously reappear in my husband’s closet. This morning they are next to me in the passenger seat, stuffed on top of old work shirts less than a tenth their age. They have served their time and purpose, more than any other item of clothing any of us has ever owned.

These shorts are indestructible, I think. They just don’t make clothes like they used to. Still bright blue after so many washes and wears. Bright blue like the sky, enduring over an ever-changing earth. They will live on in some other home, travel more miles, subject their wearer to more ridicule.

I feel weirdly sentimental, like a piece of velveteen history is leaving us.

I send the picture to our girls and they guess right away, “Not the blue shorts????” They feign sadness, threaten to storm the Goodwill, but there are laughing/crying emojis. 

“They’re going to be back in style next year, you watch,” my husband says. And maybe he’s right, but they will be someone else’s style.²

Tabs I’ve had open too long:

Our washing machine breathed its last earlier this month, and we replaced it with a new “scratched and dented” model, for less money than a repair. I did the math, and that broken machine lasted us twelve years—practically a fossil in appliance terms. I also replaced a thirteen year old MacBook last year.

These things feel like a victory, but imagine a world where machines are made to last a lifetime, like The Blue Shorts. It’s possible, but not fiscally advantageous to manufacturers. They don’t make money by selling you a machine once.

In Praise of Repair Culture

This essay at Plough has been open on my computer since December, before The Blue Shorts disappeared. The author makes a compelling case: “…perhaps throwaway culture can be resisted by building a repair culture.” It’s a wonderful ethic and if Tim reads this article, it will make purging his shop even harder.

Where You Are Is Where You Are

This is another tab I’ve kept open, and somehow this way of local living

Hadden Turner

reflects on relates to both The Blue Shorts and the essay at Plough. I haven’t made all the connections yet, and they are meandering, but I keep them together.

Drifting Clouds, Caspar David Friedrich

“But perhaps the most important reason I must return my gaze to Chelmsford is that this city, its people, and its wildlife lay a claim on me — a claim of responsibility which every inhabitant of every city, town or village has — to do good to the place you are in and one day leave it in a more convivial state than you first came to it. Where you are is where you are — and is where you must be.”

1. Let’s be real: it’s his shop. I have zero items in the shop except for a few random boxes from our move twelve years ago, which, by this time, are finder’s keepers/his/not my problem.

2. If you’re the type of reader who likes “a point”, you may be disappointed with this post (but I hope you appreciated that play on words just now). I am practicing under-thinking and freedom and play. I still do serious writing, but now and then I write these vignettes and let go of my own rules and expectations. The surprising thing is how deeply serious the silly sometimes is.