Years ago, I found myself in quite a mess. Self-inflicted as usual. While on a winter consulting job in the frigid northern Midwest, I secretly started dating a woman I worked with. I knew it was unwise and unprofessional but there is something about those cold lonely frozen bleak winter nights that make you do crazy things. That might explain why nomadic Eskimos in drippy cold muckluks were content living in icy igloos for so many years instead of building cozy ranch style farmhouses with a big ass fireplace.
I was still a bachelor back then, but she was dealing with the later disentanglements of a messy divorce. It was important to us both professionally and privately, that no one knew we were seeing each other. Sure, it was googly-eyed fun exchanging knowing glances at work and turning dates into covert secret agent like adventures, but the romance quickly moved from exciting, to overly complicated, to as doomed as the Titanic after it played kissy face with a 400 ft iceberg.
During one of the early days of our dating dance dalliance, we were walking together, but not too together, in a winter wonderland touristy area about an hour’s drive from where we worked. She had wanted to stop into a cutesy collectables store she liked. It was one of those little places that obviously thought they could elevate themselves from junk store to boutique by simply spelling ‘shop’ with an extra ‘p’ and ‘e’.
The minute we stepped inside, I started sweating profusely. Not a good look for a person trying to suavely impress someone. I understood that the staff wanted to be all cozy roasty-toasty, but the heat was up ridiculously too high for people walking off the street wearing winter garb. This was (and still is) a massive pet peeve of mine that tweaked the problem-solver consultant in me. As always, in that situation, I wanted to emphatically yell, “wouldn’t it be smarter to make it comfortable for the customers, so they might hang around and spend money. They are the reason you are here.” But again, a socially awkward irrational outburst was likely not going to score me any relationship brownie points, especially with someone who left her ex over his anger issues.
I immediately unwound my scarf, then shoved my gloves and woolly cap into the now bulging pockets of my puffy parka. I wanted to completely take my coat off too, but the sauna-like small gallery’s aisles were so narrow there was no way I could slide it off without my gangly arms or poofy clothing smashing the shelves full of very breakable cheesy artsy glass objects de’ art. Being a clumsy oaf was also no way to impress someone.
The stuff in the store was not to my taste at all, but it turned out my ‘secret date’ collected those little handblown breakables. Despite the excessive heat in the place, she wanted to slowly take her time and look around. I tried to be polite, patient, and indulgent but after a while I started dropping a few less than subtle hints about how uncomfortable I was. As a distraction, I made a “blue roses” joke, but she did not get it.
After we had been in there for quite a long while, it began bothering me that she was either oblivious or unsympathetic to the fact I was miserable. Neither was a good thing. It started me thinking about how little we really had in common aside from both being lonely and unhappy with our lives. That might be enough to start two people on the road to dating, but surely won’t carry you very far down the relationship highway.
It was at that exact moment I truly realized the complexity of the situation I had stupidly put myself in. How would she react if I brought up her unintentional selfishness, or worse, if I questioned the potential of our budding romance before it even got started? If she was willing to leave a husband, she certainly would have no qualms dumping me.
If she suddenly thought I was an ass, my life could become really difficult. Not only would I again be alone and lonely, but work could become miserable and tense. And if she grew vindictive, she could damage my career. And my body; if she told her short-fused body building almost ex. I remember standing there in the sweaty shop thinking to myself in an Oliver Hardy voice “well here’s another nice mess you’ve gotten me into.”
I’m not sure if other humans talk to themselves in wacky voices, much less in the voice of one-half of the slapstick film duo Laural and Hardy repeating a 100-year-old catch phrase. But it should come as no surprise that I do. I mean, if you think the stuff I say out loud is goofy, you should hear what is in my brain. Or maybe you shouldn’t?!?!
Another time I said that same “here’s another nice mess” thing to myself, was back when I was doing a consulting job in Albuquerque. An important client of my company, that I needed to work closely with for several hours a day, kept persistently inviting me to his house for a “home cooked” dinner made by his “excellent chef” wife. You see a theme here? Mixing business with pleasure is fraught with dangers. I knew he was just being nice, but like that failed relationship with the glass figurine collecting co-worker, it’s never wise to socialize with people you might later have to negotiate with or be a mean boss to. Having a “home cooked” dinner made by this client’s “excellent chef” wife had more red flags than a Canada Day parade.
I repeatedly tried to weasel my way out of it, but after a month of different invites, I ran out of good, bad, and astoundingly lame excuses. Besides, I only had three weeks left there. Even if things went horribly wrong, I would not have to deal with the messy ramifications for too much longer.
Now I am going to try hard to not offend anyone reading this as I describe what was in their house. But this is not going to be easy. Not as tough as looking the guy in the eye and working with him for those last three weeks afterwards. But almost.
As I got out of my car, I was warmly greeted by the couple on the front steps of their modest suburban house. They purposely met me out there because they felt the need to warn me about something in their home before I entered. As they hemmed and hawed, my mind raced, imagining what could be inside this bland average looking couple’s home: A Breaking Bad / Los Pollos Hermanos style meth lab? A wall of kinky bondage equipment? A basement pit with a drop basket full of lotion? A collection of Klu Klux Klan paraphernalia?… Okay that last one was close.
You see every single wall of every single room, throughout their entire house, was covered with multiple long thin shelves filled with various sized, grossly offensive mammy style Aunt Jemima dolls. There were hundreds of them… maybe thousands. In the entire house, there was literally no place to stand or sit without staring into the wide eyes of these derogatory dark-skinned wildly inappropriate dolls. They were even in the bathroom across from the toilet and over the mirror. It was so over-the-top, I wondered if this was this some sort of elaborate Punked Candid Camera stunt to see how much blatant backward racism I would tolerate?
The only thing more offensive than the massive collection of disgusting dolls themselves was the astoundingly racist term the woman nonchalantly used repeatedly to describe them. Now certainly many times in my life, I have vigorously shoved the boundaries of good taste and appropriateness. And growing up a Jew in a German New York City neighborhood I heard just about every derogatory term there is. And traveling as much as I did for work, I saw a lot of crazy inappropriate shit. And I even put up with an employer on a three-month gig in southern Georgia that constantly introduced me to all his redneck buddies and clients as his ‘pet Yankee’. But I have to admit I was completely shocked and stunned by the situation that night.
A massive ‘moral ethics’ verses ‘selfish job preservation’ debate raged in my head. Do I say something, do I walk out, do I just sit through this knowing less than a month later I would never have to deal with these people again? He was an important client and if I pissed him off it could cost me my career. But would my silence mean I was condoning their collection and his wife’s vulgar language? Suddenly one voice broke through the mental clutter. Above all the arguing inside my brain, a hardy voice cried out, “Well here’s another nice mess you’ve gotten me into.”
Now if I am being honest, had the woman not talked so horribly, I might have somehow been able to rationalize the doll collection. Would I personally want that anywhere near me, noooooooo. But I didn’t want that woman I briefly dated’s cheesy glass thingies around me either, which was only offensive in a real art versus kitsch crap sorta’ way. But I get it. There are people that collect Nazi paraphernalia, which based on my heritage, is pretty darn offensive too. But everyone is different. I was definitely more offended by the things the woman said than by her collection.
Collecting is a weird thing in general. Often it starts by accident and before you notice, it becomes a habitual obsession. If that woman had started collecting those dolls when she was a very little girl, before she understood the ramifications of their insensitive insulting representation, I could see how she could convince herself that it was not a bad thing. Then again, I’m sure serial killers collecting victims likely convince themselves that they are not doing a bad thing either. Not that I am comparing my client’s wife to a serial killer, though a “home cooked” dinner with either is not optimum.
My dad collected antique restored toasters. My brother Neil collected old tube radios. That woman up north collected those little fancy glass doodads. And when we were kids, my brother Arthur collected coins. He even helped me start a collection of them myself. But that did not hold my interest, and as I got older, I found something that meant a lot more to me. I forgot about the coins and started collecting strange and obscure record albums. Some that certainly might offend someone else’s sensibilities.
At one point, I had a massive record collection. But something has been slowly changing. I stopped listening to my records as frequently as I used to. I realized I was just collecting them out of habit and was not getting as much enjoyment out of them anymore. I guess half the fun was the intense exciting hunt, and now with E-Bay and on-line streaming, most obscure rarities are just a click away for anyone to quickly find. And despite its retro trendiness, it’s a lot easier to play a streaming playlist than to crank up the old turntable.
About 10 years ago I started selling a lot of my records. I still have more than most people, but the collection keeps getting smaller and smaller. I likely will always keep the ones that are tied to a memory, but I just do not feel the need to have so many. The weight of the huge collection was starting to sometimes feel like an anchor that I was pulling around behind me. A burden from an earlier part of my life that I just kept dragging due to habit or inertia.
Sitting here writing this, I started wondering if in the decades since I was in those doll people’s house, if they ever also experienced a similar desire to move on. Did that woman ever have some sort of epiphany and realize it was time to get rid of all those nasty negative stereotype dolls and her offensive vocabulary. My brain started having an old-style debate. The optimist in me hoped they grew, while my realist side had its doubts. Within my skull, each side argued back and forth like a ping pong match proposing possible scenarios of what happened to the people. Then suddenly a different familiar voice rang out in my head trying to break up my mental argument with comic relief. “Well here’s another nice mess you’ve gotten me into.”
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