Maximum Stuff

In what has become a normal errand for many, I had to return something to Amazon. Back in the beginning of our national romance with the company, as they were wooing us and we them, they would come to our home and pick up things that were too large, the wrong color or not working. But as our mutual courtship has matured from infatuation into a multi-year marriage, they no longer feel it necessary to make that effort, and indeed, we have to go to them. It recalls my wife's observation about our own relationship. In the beginning, if we were out of the city and heading back to her place in town, I would pull into the garage in the bottom of her building. She says she knew I was getting both comfortable and serious about her when I stopped paying for parking, and started driving around looking for a spot on the street.

Amazon gives you multiple options to make returns depending on the item in question and your location. It might be Whole Foods or UPS, Kohl's or FedEx. We've cycled through all of them depending on what other stops we have to make and what we will be close to. At this point the default option in our household is Staples, as there is one in the middle of my usual circuit. Experience has also shown that they also have very few shoppers, making parking and returns quick and easy.

Usually it's a quick in and out process. I walk through the entrance, go directly to the service counter, have the clerk scan the stuff, and walk right back out the door. But this time, because I had to kill a few minutes waiting to pick up a visitor from the nearby train station, I decided to wander the aisles. 

As a small business owner and a parent of long-ago school-age children, it's a store in which I used to spend a good deal of time and money. From office supplies to technology, from chairs to filing cabinets, from construction paper to glue sticks, they had it all. But as I did a slow amble around the aisles and looked at what was on the shelves, I realized none of it held any real interest. It wasn't just a matter of being able to get those things online at a better prices. The bottom line is that in terms of what they had, I didn't need anything. Ever again.

For sure I will still need to replace things that break or run out, whether it's paper or ink, a router or a mouse. But in general we have what we need. We have a closet full of basic office supplies, such as paper, pens and pencils. We have all the electronics we can use, as well as bags to carry the stuff when we travel. We've got wires to connect things and power supplies to charge. There will surely be new gadgets, toys that are faster or slicker, and might be fun to play with. But I no longer feel a requirement to be on the cutting edge; trailing from behind is just fine with me.

Indeed, it's a feeling I can extrapolate beyond this one particular store and its assortment of merchandise. Well beyond our office and its supply closet we have more than we need. Yes, we will have to replenish our supply of toilet paper. My socks are going to wear out. I simply won't allow us to run out of peanut butter and other rather important foodstuffs. But from the bedroom to the family room, from the kitchen to the garage, from the dining room to the living room, I would say we're good. We have achieved maximum stuff. 

The fact is we need to go in the other direction, and minimize our accumulations. When our first kid went to college we said it was time to start cleaning the house out at least a little bit. That was some twenty-odd years ago, and we're still backing off for a running start. It's not that we're planning on going anywhere soon, but after 30 years in the same place we are pretty well set several times over. Reduced to pure arithmetic, our possessions have multiplied, and we need to divide what we keep and what we give away. In our current state, subtraction is way more important than addition.

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Marc Wollin of Bedford keeps finding things he has that he no longer needs. His column appears weekly via email and online on Substack and Blogspot as well as Facebook, LinkedIn and X.

Bestest Ever!

Like most of the world I have been sucked into the World Cup. It's not something we Americans come to naturally, with other sports such as baseball, football and basketball baked into our childhoods. Indeed, other than the "soccer unit" that was part of the PE rotation in high school, the most first-hand exposure I had to it was when our kids were small and part of the local youth teams. My wife characterized them as the "lemming leagues:" regardless of their positions, all the kids just followed the ball around the field. 

But increasingly every four years we reacquaint ourselves with a sport that the rest of the world is crazy about all the time. Add in the intermediate 2-year intervals, when the Olympics take place and the US women or men's teams make a run at the gold, and it's almost like we really care. This in spite of the fact that we Yanks generally have no real knowledge of the rules or strategies of the game. 

It's not because we couldn't understand them if we wanted to. After all, we are marginally conversant in things like the infield fly rule and a false start penalty. If we can handle the convoluted rules of American baseball and football you'd think we could understand when a midfielder is offsides. But no. All we understand is that while everybody on the field is restricted to kicking the ball one guy in a different color shirt is allowed to catch it.

Yet primarily because we are the host along with our neighbors to the north and south the interest in this year's tournament seems heightened. Other factors, such as the expansion of the field to 48 teams, the appearance of generational talents such as Lionel Messi, Kylian Mbappé and Erling Haaland, the timing in the gap between other major sports championships, not to mention the primetime broadcast and streaming slots of the games, have all contributed to record interest. Indeed, the US team's win over Bosnia and Herzegovina drew a record American television audience, reaching more than 33 million people, placing it among the most watched television events of the year.

What has also reached new heights is the commentary. Viewers of our traditional US sports are used to relatively even, and even critical reviews of what is happening in the contest. True, there are superlatives bandied about, but generally achievements and challenges are put in the context of the game, the team and the season. Unless it's the Super Bowl or the World Series, you generally don't hear lots of GOAT references

No so with this Cup. Maybe it has something to do with the task of filling the time when not much is happening. Maybe it's the quadrennial nature of the event, a period which, in today's accelerated cycle, seems as if the next instance is not four years hence but four hundred.  Maybe it is our collective lack of imagination brought on by not having to stretch to remember anything as opposed to simply looking it up on our phones. But follow along in any medium, and you would think that there will never be anything more amazing than what you are seeing.

Every scoring chance is a one-of-kind shot. Every defensive stand is the most courageous stop ever made. Headlines reflect the same: "Are we witnessing the greatest US Men's soccer team ever?" and "Harry Kane just played a game that will be talked about for decades." Sometimes it might be a legit observation, as when Alexi Lalas remarked on Cabo Verde going to toe-to-toe with Argentina, "We were nearly witnessing the greatest FIFA World Cup upset of all-time." But everywhere, all the time always the most amazing/bestest/worstest/greatest play/player? As put in "The Incredibles" by the villain Syndrome, "When everyone's super, no one will be."

When the tournament first started, due to a mix up with our account, the only way I was able to stream games was on the Spanish language network Telemundo. Not a speaker of the tongue, I turned the sound down low, let the commentary blend in with the crowd sounds, and just watched the artistry on the field. Some was truly amazing, some not so much, but it was still fun. I do confess, however, that when there was a score, I did enjoy Argentine sportscaster Andrés Cantor's call of the one over-the-top expression that sets the standard: "¡Goooooool! "

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Marc Wollin of Bedford used to play goalie because it couldn't run very fast. His column appears weekly via email and online on Substack and Blogspot as well as Facebook, LinkedIn and X.

Paper Cuts

It was not an uncommon way to spend a Saturday night when our kids were young. We would go out for an early dinner, often to a diner or IHOP. Then we would head to Borders or Barnes & Noble and browse for books. Everyone got to pick out something they liked, be it fiction or history, comic or biography. And if the weather was right we would cap it off with a visit to a local ice cream place. In our world it was the perfect way to while away an evening.

Our kids are long gone from our home but we still enjoy Saturday nights out, though more than likely with friends, and usually at slightly better restaurants. Regardless of the season, ice cream at a local spot is still high on the list. What has changed is that after the meal and before the cones we no longer make a stop to add to our library. 

The fact is we couldn't even if we wanted to. The large chain establishments that sold books barely exist anymore. Borders went belly up in 2011, and while Barnes and Noble is in the middle of an expansion, it slashed its footprint around 2018 and only recently returned to our area. And while there are still some small independent book stores, they are generally not open late on weekend nights. Add to that the 9000-pound gorilla that is Amazon. While publications represent just 10% of its total today, when it started in 1995 it billed itself as "Earth's Biggest Bookstore," and we are more likely to browse its virtual aisles. 

We also made the switch from paper to digital. Starting with my first Sony version to our current 11th generation Kindles, we swapped hard and soft covers for slim tablets that at last count have over 400 titles on each. Mind you, it's not so much a preference for the form and format – I still love the feel and smell of reading on paper – as much as a marriage of convenience. Besides simply running out of shelf space, the tablet enables me to carry multiple options when I travel in a fraction of the space. It also hurts way less when I drop it on my face as I fall asleep reading in bed.

All that means that our shelves are like a bug frozen in amber. Yet even as they ceased to expand I still loved our collection – the look, the smell, the colors, the shapes. They were a tangible representation of different worlds and ideas, covering a long history of crawling between the pages and losing myself. On our shelves are books I got from my dad and gifts from friends and family, not to mention a smorgasbord we acquired of fiction and biography, how-to and history. Our kids inherited the same bug, filling shelves in their rooms with their personal preferences, as well as pilfering select volumes from our main stash. And yes, between the two are well-thumbed copies of all seven Harry Potter novels, as well as several duplicates to cut down on the "My turn!"

Still, the time has come to start pruning that tree. Not that we have immediate or even not-so-immediate plans to go anywhere, but we know that sooner or later it behooves us to lighten our load. And in terms of volume and impact, the books are low hanging fruit: easy to pack, not accessed on any regular basis, not integral to our daily existence. And so I box up stories by Ken Haruf and biographies by Robert Caro, histories by David McCullough and thrillers by Jeffrey Archer. I hope they find a home with some inquisitive person even as I speculate they will more likely be sold for scrap by the pound. 

I won't lie: it hurts in a way that parting with a pair of old pants doesn't. We were brought up to treat books as revered objects, ones that offered us a chance to glimpse into worlds and minds that we admired. It's true that they were merely the carrier for ideas and not the ideas themselves; giving them away doesn't mean those thoughts are gone. Indeed, we have access to them almost instantly through a multitude of platforms, in a manner far easier than plucking a dusty tome from a shelf. Still, I'll keep a few as a way to remind myself of a more tangible way to visit a wider world.

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Marc Wollin of Bedford loves to read. His column appears weekly via email and online on Substack and Blogspot as well as Facebook, LinkedIn and X.