The History of Shredding

Like you, I have a need to shred. I have a small shredder, was told when moving here that it was necessary when one's trash can sits one day per week out by the highway, but ten bags or about 60 pounds was too many papers to shred, and I'd always jam the teeth with more paper than it could hold so the motor overheated and quit, and the teeth should be sharpened, and stores asked me to pay for shredding per pound, and pay an upcharge should I want to witness it, so I kept the bags in the garage.

This rainy weekend's spring-cleaning highlight (pity me! I didn't leave the house otherwise) was a free "community shredding event" at the community center. Pop your car's trunk and they grab your plastic grocery bags, dump the papers into the mobile shredder (a huge trash truck) and return the bags. I had half-hoped, at 8:30 a.m., for doughnuts and coffee, a string quartet and communing. I wondered how shredding came to be and why my parents never went to shredding events.

The paper shredder was patented in 1909 but the patent holder never made one. During World War II a guy put secret papers through his pasta-cutting machine, and so was born the shredder that sits unused in my mudroom. Only the government and military shredded their papers until the 1980s when we all began feeling personally very important and courts ruled that people were allowed to paw through your trash.

Breeding in the Dark

Spring cleaning reveals that much has gone on in closets, cabinets, baskets, and drawers that I did not have a clue about. Certain items reproduced themselves. Perhaps at your house a similar laxity of morals and discipline among your inanimate objects has caused the same situation. I dealt with them ruthlessly. The culprits at my house included:

Throttled and sent to the cleaners

1. Hangers
2. Gift bags
3. Forks
4. Socks
5. Condoms
6. Hoodies
7. Key rings
8. Lip-care products
9. Pesto cubes in the freezer
10. Spice jars


Also, certain species have diminished, died off, evolved (in the Darwinian sense), ran away, or vanished into the Great Wheel of Karma:

1. Spoons
2. Scissors
3. Shot glasses
4. Pens
5. Drinking glasses
6. Safety pins
7. Ammo

A Five-Day Houseguest

The club chairman asked for a volunteer to host a distinguished astrologer in May and nobody raised a hand so I said, "I will, but it'll be the weirdest experience of his life. My house is Green Acres. And it's 35 miles from the city." The club didn't listen, was merely relieved that somebody would put up this stranger, a Minneapolis man of 67 with a national reputation, while he gave talks in the area and read horoscopes for clients.

I prepped my place with 2 spring cleanings and stocked the fridge with man food: beef and beer. After the cold wet spring, Missouri was suddenly blessed with perfect weather full of lilacs and irises. He said that in Minnesota trees don't have leaves yet. Cardinal birds, bluebirds and hummingbirds amazed him. My woodpeckers drummed on the old TV aerial (sending metallic ringing throughout the house) early each day to wake me up to feed them. Fortunately he had a sense of humor.

Unfortunately he was tall and my guest room, a former garage, is low-ceilinged, but he was extremely gracious -- after all, he'd elected to stay in a stranger's home, not knowing whether I was a nut or neat freak or nympho or what. Fortunately I am none of those and enjoyed his companionship and cooking for him and he gave me a free three-hour horoscope reading. He said he liked horses so we walked to the horse farm (in the photo). He said, "You live in paradise." I said, "Yes, I know."

A city friend asked, "A strange man in your house? What if he tries to hurt you?" I said I'd shoot him. But he was a perfect gentleman and a mensch, into ice cream and fine bakery, and we indulged in these as well as dark beer and spiked lemonade.

He was one of the rare guests that after he had showered and shaved you could not even tell he had been in the bathroom (a very obvious sign that he is married). The old saying is "houseguests, like fish, stink after three days," but he spent five days here and I actually wished he would have stayed longer.

Lucky Lager

About once a season I clean out the road shoulder and pick up trash that high water has left at creekside on the Divine Property. Here's today's take:

Lucky Lager Beer, while still purchasable in states that border on Canada, has been scarce in this area since 2005. It's a Canadian beer company bought out several times, and around 1978 during the "generic" craze, Lucky was said to be the generic beer in those cans that said simply "BEER." Lucky Lager bottles and especially their caps are collectibles, but this is a mere can. My haul is mostly cans and bottles, and sometimes a soccer ball or a patio chair, but the vibrator found today is a first. I wonder what story it would tell if it could. I believe someone used the Prestone bottle for target practice.

Change, Adventure, and Surprise

I won't look farther than my own backyard for an epic task that will change my entire life. I need only to clean the garage. And then stuff my little car with junk and go to the recycling place.

Today, a rainy day, I got at it, wrestling with cardboard boxes, stacking the empty five-gallon buckets, bagging up a lot of plain trash, some inherited when I moved in 8 years ago: bags of concrete mix that absorbed moisture and solidified; avocado and yellow vinyl window shades. For the first time I noticed a ladder had actually been built into the garage wall so that junk laid across the ceiling beams could be retrieved, although it seems that the point of putting it up there was that it would stay there for all time.

So I staggered around with my two obsolete TVs and as much of the cardboard as would fit and drove in the pouring rain to the recycling place, my first visit. Duller than a cemetery: rows of battered dumpsters, a corrugated building with a driveup ramp and a big scale for measuring the weight of aluminum, copper, and whatnot. They pay by the pound for those metals. They'll take computers, appliances, plastics, for free. But the one thing YOU, the donator, have to pay THEM to take -- is TVs, at $20 each.

The man was good enough to bring my 50-lb., 25-inch TV out of my car for me. Sighing invisibly, because I wanted to be perceived as a good brave recycler and savior of the earth, and finding that this left me feeling very Caucasian, I began writing a $40 check, taking out my driver's license as I did so. "No need to show a driver's license," he said. "People who recycle don't write bad checks. We know that from experience."

Which Twin Has the Toni?

OK -- raking an acre of "lawn" -- if you can call clumps of weeds, cedar-tree sprouts, and mole holes a lawn -- is a big job -- especially because I didn't do it last year. Raking the the leaves (oak and hickory) into a pile, I then very cleverly sweep them onto an old shower curtain and drag the curtain to a place I can dump the leaves . . . smart. . . brains. . . no dumb bunny.

The Eight-Year Garage Cleaning

It’s a 2-car garage and 2 cars will fit if I move the 50-lb. bags of potting soil and green sand. 106-lb. me did this by rolling them onto an old shower curtain and dragging the curtain. Tried to move the full-sized wheelbarrow. Couldn’t. And then the old barbell weights, the plastic ones filled with concrete: 350 lbs of those stacked against one wall. But I can’t get to the pile ‘cuz of the chest-high box of jumbled parts for a huge, useless computer table. Not to mention dust, dry leaves, mouse droppings, spiderwebs.

Interesting things I found: Box of short stories written by friend now passed away. A solar-powered calculator. Bag of pink sheets. Dutch door for porch. Brand-new reel still in packaging. That I can use; I got my ’09 Missouri fishing license just last week. Five-gallon leaky red gas can stuck solidly to the garage floor. Bags of concrete mix so old that they are now solid concrete. A hard hat. An inflatable raft. A bluebird house.

A house is about hopes, but a garage is about plans: Gonna. Will. Wanna. Ought to. I’m All Set.