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Buddy reached under the belly of the Looner Module and pulled out another bag. He’d worked halfway through the plastic-wrapped midden of his former life with Leanne, but the more he sorted and tossed, the harder it got to push on.
Too many memories mixed in with the junk, he lamented, wondering how they were going to fit in the crowded and cluttered confines of his new home: the framed photos of Leanne and the kids blowing out candles at birthday parties, looking proud and solemn for graduation shots, floating down the Cowichan River on tethered air mattresses; ceramic bookends he’d received as an all too poignant gift from an author—succumbing to the gnawing theft of Alzheimer’s—whose biography he’d condensed into a feature article; the goofy clock he kept on his desk in the den, an elf with its right arm pointing out the hours, its left the minutes, telling exact time twice each day—10:33 for coffee in the a.m., bedtime in the p.m.
He sighed. The first bag of today’s dig was filled with clothes, he guessed by the way it slumped on the gravel at his feet. A bowler hat, spray-painted green, sat on top of the bundle inside the opened bag. He laughed, remembering the Paddy’s Day party he and Leanne had gone to that year, her saying, “You don’t look Irish at all in that rig. You look more like a guy with the top half of a watermelon on his head.” Beside the hat, a pair of brown Oxfords, which he’d worn to work once, then stowed in his closet because they rasped at his ankles. His tweed jacket, which he thought made him look comfortably dignified, but couldn’t button up anymore by middle age. “You’ve outgrown it,” Leanne observed tartly. “At least in the physical dimension.” The brown baggies he’d worn in the era before jeans were fashionable in the newsroom…
Buddy knotted the top of the bag shut and set it aside. “Thrift store,” he pronounced over it, imagining himself decked out in its haberdashery, soft-shoeing down a sidewalk, perhaps with a cane added, which he could twirl like Fred Astaire.
“You’d look like a clown!”
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