I’m baaaaaack. For real. De-media week is over and I celebrated last night by watching a movie (Enigma, it’s very good, I recommend it) and an episode of Degrassi I had recorded earlier. Quelle fromage! And I read before I went to bed.
I tell you, I sure had my ups and downs. The next few posts are going to be from the transcribed notes I made during this past week, which I have now mentally re-framed as a “Media Lite” week, because guess what! I wasn’t able to cut it out 100 per cent. Who knew!
Monday 16th. Operation Basement
The first stage of Operation Basement was to get rid of Accumulated Clothing. My god it piles up. How does it do that? Most of it was old stuff belonging to the girls. So I sorted into three piles: Keep, Give Away to Friends, Goodwill.
We have makeshift closets down there, and I went through them and removed some of the older things I wasn’t wearing anymore. One biggie: a giant wool poncho. Yes. A poncho. It was a Christmas gift from Significant Ex. He gave it to me along with a pair of light-up earrings and a ring with diamonds so tiny you need to squint to see them. (Not a diamond ring, a diamond crumb ring silly! Those are two very different things!) Anyway, the poncho. It was an, um, interesting gift to give an 18-year old. And since he was a few years older (six, to be exact), Significant Ex should have known better than to give the gift of a poncho to a teenager. But there it was. I guess I liked it. I don’t remember exactly. I liked it enough to bring it with me when I moved away to go university in Ottawa. I liked the Significant Ex enough to bring him with me too, but that wasn’t until second year. We lived together on the seventh floor of a high-rise on Cambridge Street overlooking the back parking lot of the McDonald’s on Bronson Ave.
I wore the poncho to school sometimes. It was amazingly warm. And versatile, and you can’t say that about a lot of the stuff in your closet. Heck, it was a coat, a picnic blanket and a cozy cushion all in one! I didn’t consider the impression I was making on my peers until a certain friend who I shall call RON brought it up some years later. The context of our conversation escapes me, but it may have been a party…. picture if you will a large group of people laughing at his retelling of me, a veritable vision in my poncho. Hmph.
I haven’t worn that thing since my student days. It’s been packed away at the very back of our basement closet all this time. When I brought it out I hadn’t actually taken a close look at it for several years. I took it off the hanger and ran my hand along the heavy wool panels. It was brownish grey with a large red shape in the middle. I debated whether or not I should keep it. I supposed I could fold it up and leave it in the car as an emergency blanket. After all, it could cover our whole family if we were ever caught undressed in a snowstorm. No, it was time for it to go. I rolled it up and shoved it into the garbage bag.
I know I wouldn’t have worn it again. And it was only taking up space. But it makes me a little sad to know it’s gone. A tiny part of me regrets giving it away, but it’s for the best, isn’t it?
More about my media-lite week to come later.
