Fifty Things That Aren't My Fault

by Cathy Guisewite

  My generation was the last of that era, producing more boxes of unorganized prints and negatives than any people in history . . . AND we were the first generation of the digital years. Pioneers who could suddenly shoot thousands of pictures per event, before there was an easy system for downloading or storing. Pioneers who didn’t read the instruction books, so the first 4,500 pictures many of us took say they were shot on 00/00/00. Thousands and thousands of pictures taken in the early days of digital. Some saved on current computers, some on old obsolete computers, some printed, some transferred to now-unreadable CDs, some never even downloaded. Some of life’s most special moments on tiny unlabeled, un-downloaded memory cards tossed in random drawers throughout the house for “safekeeping.” My child’s sixteenth birthday is there somewhere, possibly mixed in with the paper clips and rubber bands in the kitchen junk drawer. Who knows? I didn’t take the one second necessary to even write a date on the memory card. Each time I proudly thought: “I’ll never forget what’s on this one!” as I tossed it in the drawer.

  I know my friends have photo situations waking them up in the night just like I do. I know women in my same phase of life share an overwhelming urge to sort and organize everything right now. And I know what’s driving this: a deep maternal calling to put our family’s life in order.

  Women have always been the sentimental historians, saving little pieces of this and that, re-creating and preserving events with the pictures we frame on the walls, the scrapbooks we give to loved ones, the stories that can be told and handed down through the albums we make. We’re the glue guns of the family. Keeping it all intact. Providing the comfort and security of seeing an order to the past. We do it for ourselves, to make sense of things. We do it for our children, to help them know who they are. We do it for friends, to show them how much we care. We do it for the people who will come after us so they’ll know we existed, so we can inspire them from the other side about the importance of family, the need to stay connected to each other.

  But we haven’t done it yet.

  How could we? Our shoeboxes, storage tubs, Ziploc bags, and random envelopes of predigital prints and negatives, along with the unbacked-up hard drives and un-downloaded, unreadable memory cards full of digital pictures, are overwhelming. Overwhelming and buried all over the house. No one will make sense of any of it or put it all into pretty albums or beautiful scrapbooks if we don’t. No one will ever even know the pictures exist if we don’t find them. We’re the end of the line. The guardians of the biggest, most impossible collection of unorganized photos in the history of the universe.

  We’re the last champions of photo album guilt.

  There.

  I shut my eyes, feeling self-righteous and proud, at least, of how well I’ve fully expressed the enormity of my generation’s burden . . . when I’m suddenly jolted by two words:

  IMAGE DEGRADATION!

  A 6.0 on the Panic Scale. Followed almost immediately by two wrenching aftershocks:

  FORMAT OBSOLESCENCE!

  UNRETRIEVABLE FILES!

  Eyes wide open again. I instantly, horribly, remember that my lifetime of precious memories are not only unorganized, un-albumed, unprinted, unedited, unlabeled, un-downloaded and unbacked up . . . but are all disappearing. Photos are fading. Nonarchival album pages are eating away at the few beloved images I actually got into albums. Memory cards are deteriorating. DVD backups are warping. Backup drives are becoming outdated and inaccessible. Every single way that pictures are saved is becoming obsolete and everything needs to be resaved a new way.

  AND IF IT’S HIDEOUS TO THINK OF ALL THE PICTURES, WHAT ABOUT THE 50,000 HOURS OF TREASURED FAMILY VIDEOS THAT ARE ROTTING IN THE CLOSET???

  And that’s that.

  I pull the covers over my head to protect myself from whatever I think of next. There’s so much to put in order at this time of life. So much to do and redo.

  I squeeze my eyes shut. I will myself to imagine that I’ve dealt with the photo situation. I force myself to visualize neat piles of pictures in chronological order. I visualize boxes of heirloom photos scanned and digitized so they’ll never fade or warp. I see a happy picture of an updated backup system. Then a shot of a backup to the backup. An online family archive. Grandchildren poring over the meticulously labeled family history I’ve left.

  I fill my mind with these happy pictures. I make mental pages of the mental pictures. I put them in a lineup of pretty mental albums. Label them in gold nonfading acid-free archival-quality mental Sharpie.

  Finally I sink back into my pillow and flip through my future. It’s all so beautiful and peaceful, I think as I drift back to sleep . . . It’s all so possible . . . At least until I wake up.

  36.

  PRINCE CHARMING

  I wake up first and will myself to stay completely still.

  I listen to him breathing next to me. I think of his kind face, how he smiles in his sleep. I think what a miracle he is, how my life changed forever the day we fell in love.

  I think without moving one cell. If I even peek through almost closed eyelashes he’ll wake up. If he wakes up, he’ll want to do all sorts of things I don’t want to do at six in the morning.

  His breathing changed. He is awake . . . but he’s not sure I’m awake. I feel his loving eyes, searching for any sign of life, feel him straining to hear me move. The extreme connectedness I cherish in the evening, so utterly unwanted at 6:00 a.m.

  I try to beam a silent message across the pillows: Leave me alone! Let me wake up at my own pace for once! My breathing is so shallow, I’m barely conscious. I consider holding my breath until I pass out rather than letting him win the morning again. No part of me is relaxed anymore, but at least I’m not doing what he wants to do.

  I beam another silent message: Can’t you get up without me?! Just get up and walk away!

  And that’s that. Walk is definitely a word he can hear even if I just think it, and unfortunately, I just thought it. He’s up. He’s an animal. Paws all over me! Drooling, pouncing, barking orders:

  “Walk!”

  “Food!”

  “Tuggy game!”

  “Belly rub!”

  “Ball!”

  “MUST YOU DO THIS EVERY MORNING??!” I snap at him.

  He forgives me for being grumpy.

  “MUST YOU SLOBBER ALL OVER ME??!”

  He forgives me for being ungrateful.

  “MUST YOU BE SO FORGIVING??!”

  He forgives me for being insane.

  “MUST YOU BE A DOG??!”

  He grins his goofy grin, and this day, like every one of the thousands of days we’ve been together, he forgives me for being human.

  37.

  UNEXPIRED LOVE

  Your mayonnaise expired in 2016,” I say as cheerfully as possible, considering this will be my last meal on earth and the woman about to murder me is my mother.

  “I should have expired in 2016, too!” Mom chirps back. “And here I am!”

  Here she is, lovingly preparing the nice lunch that will poison me during another quick trip I’ve made to Florida. She plops an extra-big scoop of the mayonnaise into a bowl full of chopped hard-boiled eggs.

  “Um . . . did you get new eggs or are those the ones that have been in there?” I ask as politely as I can.

  “Why would I get new eggs when I had all these to use up?” she answers matter-of-factly.

  “Because those eggs expired in July and it’s September now,” I say.

  “Eggs never go bad!” Mother announces, a slight edge to her voice.

  “Well, actually, Mom . . . ”

  She sighs, plants one hand on her hip, and shoves a container of mustard toward me. “Here! Want to reject my mustard while you’re at it?”

  I check the label. “This says it expired in 2011.”

  Mom’s eyes flash, arms stretch outward
. “I should have expired in 2011, too! And here I am!”

  It’s hard to argue with a healthy ninety-year-old.

  No time, anyway. She’s plucked an ancient-looking little jar of allspice from a shelf full of other ancient-looking little jars, and is tapping it on the counter to un-congeal the contents so she can sprinkle some into her bowl of old mustard, mayonnaise, and eggs.

  I hold out my hand.

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake,” she grumbles, shaking her head and handing me the jar. “Spices last forever.”

  Forever or—I squint—according to the blurry, faded allspice label, until March 7, 1998.

  There’s no time to discuss this, either. Mom’s sticking a plastic food storage container full of frozen soup into the microwave.

  “What . . . are . . . you . . . doing . . . Mom??” I stammer.

  “Heating up some nice soup to have with our egg salad!”

  “You can’t microwave food in plastic! The toxins in the plastic get activated and contaminate the food!”

  Mother’s glaring now. “I’ve never tasted any toxins!”

  “This isn’t even BPA-free!” I continue, opening the microwave and grabbing the frozen tub. “It’s old plastic, Mom! Expired plastic! And the soup . . .”—the freezer frost has cleared enough to make out a faint Christmas, ’92 written in Sharpie on the top—“the soup is from—”

  “It’s been FROZEN!”

  Mom, the most joyful human I ever met, the most sweet-spirited, even-tempered, open-minded, easygoing, gracious, benevolent, happy person I know, isn’t any of that anymore. Mom is ticked.

  “Here!” She smacks a frozen baguette on the counter. “Bread! Are we allowed to eat bread?!”

  “I’m sorry, Mom,” I say, picking up the frozen loaf and cradling it, feeling suddenly terrible for ruining the nice lunch she’d planned. I flash-forward, as I often do in this wrenching time of life, to when Mom won’t be here. When I would give anything to eat one more of Mom’s beautiful expired-ingredient meals with her. When I will be standing here sobbing in Mom’s mom-less, ancient-food-less kitchen, filled with remorse for having spent one second of our precious last time together criticizing anything she does.

  “Of course we can eat bread, Mom!” I say. “Yes! Let’s eat bread!!”

  “Don’t bother looking for an expiration date.”

  My eyes dart up from the bag they might have been scanning while I was thinking about how sad I’ll be. “I’m not looking for an expiration date!”

  “Why did you put on reading glasses to look at a loaf of bread?”

  “Um . . .”

  “Doesn’t matter,” she says matter-of-factly. “You won’t find an expiration date. I always repackage bread in one of the nice long plastic bags in which they deliver our newspapers!”

  I quit cradling. Stare at my mother. She lifts the baguette from my hands.

  “The bread is on the inside of the bag!” she announces. “Perfectly clean! The ground only touches the outside of the bag!”

  My nineteen-year-old daughter won’t eat a cherry tomato that was picked five seconds ago from a pot on our back porch if it has one fleck of brown on it. My ninety-year-old mom joyfully uses last month’s lettuce, last year’s cheese, and anything put in the freezer in the last century, wrapped in anything reusable from anywhere.

  “Expiration dates are a big scam,” Mom announces with the moral authority of someone who survived the Great Depression, World War II, and the invention, death, and reincarnation of the Twinkie. “They want you to throw out perfectly good food and spend money on new food!”

  With that, she plants a nice big scoop of expired egg salad on each of our plates. She pulls the vintage baguette out of the used newspaper bag, slices it on her salmonella-infused wooden cutting board from 1952, and carefully lays two pieces of bread on an ancient, carcinogen-emitting plastic plate in the microwave to warm. Gets out a chunk of butter still partially in the shape of a chicken from last Easter. Sticks the now partly thawed tub of frozen Christmas ’92 soup back in the freezer for when I’m not here to comment.

  Mom’s graceful ninety-year-old hands have made thousands of meals with 100 percent unexpired love and patience. I see her amazing spirit, which has risen above a lifetime of disappointments and disagreements with grace and humor, carry on. So much was taken from Mom’s generation. Choices, chances, opinions, power. She’s at least always had this: Her Kitchen, her helm, where she’s always gotten to be the boss. I think of everything she’s made happen here—the babies she raised, the crises she solved, the impossibly disconnected egos she magically blended and baked into one deeply devoted family. I think of all her education, dreams, and talents channeled through that gracious spirit, played out by those graceful hands, working her Mom Miracles in the kitchen, and of how far she came to get here.

  Mom was born in a tiny log house with a woodburning stove, no plumbing, and no refrigerator in a remote village in Slovakia. Also no trash cans, because nothing was ever thrown out. They raised all the food they ate, stored brined meat in outdoor sheds, cabbage and potatoes in frozen holes in the ground. They speak a language called Rusyn in that region which, even though Mom has no trace of an accent, can still roll off her tongue like a beautiful, exotic song.

  When she was three years old, Mom came to the United States on a steamship with her terrified mother. When I used to travel with my three-year-old daughter, I brought two carry-ons stuffed with toys and games to entertain her for a two-hour flight. Mom says she remembers seeing a ball of aluminum foil sparkling in the sun on the ship deck, and that that’s what she played with all the way across the Atlantic Ocean. My grandfather had been working in Cleveland’s steel mills to bring them over. My grandmother was twenty-three. She left her homeland with toddler Mom and never went back.

  My grandmother never saw her own mother again. Never even got to talk to her. The only way to communicate was letters, but neither she nor her mother could read or write, even in their own language, so it was up to other people to write for them. Everything my grandmother and her mother said to each other for the rest of their lives was written down for them by their husbands. No pictures. No phones. Just letters that went by boat. Months and months between letters. Oceans between hearts.

  Mom told me once, “I finally taught my mother how to write her name so she didn’t have to put an X when she needed to sign something.”

  I am one generation away from that.

  My mother grew up in an immigrant community in Cleveland, learned to speak English in the first grade, and loved to write. A high school teacher thought she was so gifted, she worked to get Mom a scholarship to Kent State University. Mom was not just the only one in her family to go to college; it was considered disrespectful in their tight community for a girl to leave her household duties to go on to higher education. She graduated from Kent with a BA in journalism, dreaming of a writing career.

  Mom still glows when she talks about her first job, as a copywriter for Rike’s Department Store in Dayton, Ohio—how she loved going to the bustling office, loved the challenge of deadlines and the thrill of seeing her words in print. She had a great, brief taste of what it was to earn her own living as a writer. But it was a matter of pride for men at the time that their wives “didn’t have to work,” so most women gave up their jobs outside the house once they were married, especially once children were born. Careers for women were mostly not an option, no matter how long the women had studied and dreamed or how excellent they were at their profession.

  Instead, Mom helped Dad get his first job as an advertising copywriter by writing all his trial assignments for him on the kitchen table, which he submitted with his applications. Dad had returned from World War II knowing he needed a more secure career than the song and dance comedy team he’d been so brilliant in in college, but he didn’t know anything about copywriting. After Mom helped him get h
is first job, she helped him keep his job by rewriting much of what he did at the office during the day when he brought it home at night. She redid his work for months—taught Dad until he was an excellent advertising writer on his own. She still tells the story modestly, not wanting credit or praise now any more than she wanted it then. Dad’s the one who’s always made sure we knew that Mom made his career possible. Still . . . Dad went on to become the president of an advertising agency. Mom never had a chance to go back, not to Rike’s, certainly not to any form of more personal writing. It’s incomprehensible how my father or any man back then would have felt to be married to a woman who fully expressed her feelings on the printed page.

  Grandma had a one-letter identity—“X.”

  Mom got six letters—“Mrs.” and “Mom.”

  Just last year, Mom mentioned for the first time that she went back to school and earned her master’s degree in journalism when my sisters and I were in school, but never bothered to fill out the paperwork to get the certificate or even tell us she did it. “Why would I talk about it?” she asked. “I didn’t do it for praise or a paper to hang on the wall. I just loved to learn.” She briefly tried being a kindergarten teacher but told us that by then, it was too hard to leave her own children to teach other people’s children. She lived with all the modern complications of trying to be a working mom at a time when there was almost no support for it.

  Mom didn’t get a writing or teaching career. She got my sisters and me. She got to be a beloved voice for mothers all over the world as Mom in my comic strip, even though I was the one who got to write the words. It’s why Mom always had a bigger speaking part in the comic strip than Dad, because I was always aware that in real life, she had way fewer chances to be heard. I filled in the blanks on her behalf, with a special thrill that I could give voice to some of what she felt. Everything I’ve ever written, including this, has been a little bit for her.