The other day, my daughter and I ran a carful of stuff over to the thrift store to donate it.

This is just the latest result of my having read “The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing” over the holidays six months ago. Now if something doesn’t “spark joy” in my life, it’s gone. (Family members excluded.)

So, inside the car went:

• a pair of crutches from when my son broke his leg or punctured a shin or something about 10 years ago
• dozens of plush dinosaurs and monkeys and turtles and other animals from the bedrooms of my children
• a lime-and-yellow checked blazer that I would now swear I never wore in public
• must-have kitchen implements and utensils that were never cooked with
• a Dell computer screen my youngest found on a street corner and excitedly brought home, never stopping to think that we’re a Macintosh-only household
• the inevitable jumbo bag of mismatched pieces from pirate- or outer-space- or construction-themed Lego sets
• and far, far more

In particular I noted a boxed set of four animatronic toy hamsters, and a matching set of a course or play set or something for them, and remembered this as one of those “must have” Christmas sets that a grandparent or other, or perhaps my wife, had exerted such energy on finding five or six or 10 Christmases ago because to not have this would mean that Christmas was a failure, that there would be no joy or glad tidings if somehow these generally impossible-to-find-at-the-time furry and fun fake little rodents were not found under our tree. They had been pulled out of their wrapping paper on that long-ago Christmas, and the responsible adults had done their best to coo and sigh in appreciative delight, but the faux hamsters had never been played with or, indeed, rescued from confines of their boxes. And recently, my elder son had tried to sell them on eBay, and Craigslist, and something called Local5, and even at a yard sale, but no one would buy them.

We pulled in the alleyway behind the monolithic thrift store and asked the people on the loading dock, two men and a woman, where to unload.

“Oh, you can put it right into the truck,” said one, pointing to a cargo truck parked near my car, with the name of the thrift store and its cause painted onto its doors.

“Okay,” I said. Although I was confused as to why these things were going onto the truck (perhaps for more sorting elsewhere?), I was giddy at the prospect of unloading all of this stuff — and more! — for the thrift store, where it would be sold on the cheap, with proceeds going to help the blind and the infirm. I positively vaulted from my car up to inside the truck bed and back down repeatedly, arms overflowing with donated goods, enthused and excited and envisioning a house with less stuff in it. And, again, an ultimately positive impact on those who are needier than I.

Finally fully unloaded, and my car sighing with relief, I asked the people on the loading dock, who had watched this operation while offering no assistance in loading or unloading, or, actually, appearing to do anything except cluster around the loading dock to, as they say, shoot the shit, about the receipts I’d like for my taxes. Proof for the IRS, along with the photos I’d carefully taken, that I’d made these donations.

They directed me to the front, where I had to wait a minute before getting handed three scribbled blue scraps of paper noting my donation. I pocketed those and ran back out to my car with my daughter in tow, feeling liberated and successful. Mission accomplished. Everyone was benefiting from this. I got back to my car and noted:

Those same three adults, on the loading dock, splitting up some of the proceeds from my donation. That quickly, they had divvied up the toys. One of them was back inside the truck, pawing through the other contents, making a quick assessment, while the woman and the other man played with the self-propelling toy hamsters on the edge of the loading dock. I thought about this for a moment — was I outraged? was this right? — and then realized I was somewhat in the position the ex-president Richard Nixon had been in when he learned that investigators were going through his trash and were within their rights to do so because, after all, it was trash. He had thrown it away. Once I’d donated these goods, they were no longer mine to worry about.

And that is how, after all those years, those Zhu Zhu Pets finally found a home.

This entry was posted on Friday, June 10th, 2016 at 7:38 pm and is filed under Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.