Idiot Ex Husband .com

Hidden treasures

March 30th, 2007

After more than two years of pestering and pleading, my soon to be ex-husband, Endicott, finally gave me back some of my stuff. Old college textbooks and essays, twenty year old greeting cards and candles from my French pen pal, Agnes — or as my family lovingly called her, Ann-yes — a yellow plastic Snoopy lunch pail I picked up at the Rose Bowl swap meet that looks EXACTLY like the one I had when I was four years old. Oh yes, there were other beauties such as my Buddha and Shiva sculptures, and the equally reverant limited edition X-Files Barbie and Ken dressed as Scully and Mulder. (Yes! Oh yes!)

It’s not all goofy stuff. I’ve been reunited with my acrylic paints and brushes, zip files full of old design school projects and a Polaroid camera with three photos still in the cartridge. (I noticed my self-portrait has a natural sepia tone to it though it’s not supposed to be there!) My favorite returned items are my books, such as the Tao of Pooh and Te of Piglet. (Okay, maybe those are a bit goofy.) Two dozen books with the words digital, typographic and design in the title; each a lovely reminder of my academic adventures at UCLA.

There were two dozen boxes of my stuff piled up inside Endicott’s duplex. Because he packed them — apparently has no idea what does and does not belong to me — I also received lots of stinky, dirty, oxidized crap such as his mother’s old tube socks, nail polish that separated into half oil and half goopy mess, and other equally appealing items all covered in a thick coat of dust. Yuck.

Only half of them came home with me as he was kind enough to let me dump old textbooks and homework in his large recycle containers. He offered to store the first few boxes in his home with his usual, ‘I’ll just take them to Goodwill so you don’t have to throw them away,’ nonsense. I didn’t go for it as I just saw a pile of my stained, faded and worn out clothes and shoes five minutes earlier in his downstairs duplex. On more than one occassion, I threw several of those items into the trash bin only to find them months later stashed away in a back room of his house. Just before I moved out in December 2004, I consented to his Goodwill run. ‘Sure, take that stuff to charity. Yeah, right!’ Boy, was I wrong! I am soooooooooooo glad to see how well my completely useless items helped so many others. Way to go, Endicott…This time, I wonder how long he waited before he pulled everything out of the recycle bin?

Beside the recyclables, I purposely left behind my housewares which were indistinguishable from his; two of my lovely vintage chairs were better suited to his home that my apartment; I didn’t bother with the china, flatware or even the Pottery Barn dishes (picked up at a yardsale in the mid 90s) because his junky, dirty, tattered piles of stuff made me feel claustrophobic. I’m not going back inside his sad home until I get the inevitable call from the authorities telling me he’s been trapped under a pile of trash. Even then…

Out of all the boxes I brought home, there are six big, dusty ones I haven’t completely sorted and emptied. Tomorrow morning, I’m throwing the whole lot of them in the dumpster. If I could live without them for two years, I could probably live without them even longer — like the rest of my life.

One man’s trash is another man’s Goodwill pile,
Flo

Entry Filed under: