A Tale of Unfinished Business Offers a Lesson to Middle Class

I came face to face with the scooter today. I couldn’t avoid it. I had to get out the Christmas decorations that were boxed in the deep recesses of our garage. And when I dug my way back to them, there it was, forlorn and despairing. One wheel on and one wheel off.

His mother and I had given it to my stepson for Christmas four years ago. Or was it five? He rode it a few times and then blew a tire. It wasn’t the kind of scooter I remembered from my own boyhood, the kind we made sometimes with a piece of board and discarded wheels. This one had brakes and balloon tires. And one of the tires blew out.

My stepson asked me if I would fix it, and I said, “Sure,” and put it in the garage, out in the open where I would see it every day. After about six months, I took off the wheel with the blown tire. And that was it.

The wheel rested on my work bench--an oxymoron if ever there was one--for a while, then got moved to a remote shelf, then to a remoter shelf. Same thing with the scooter; it got put farther and farther out of sight. I don’t know where the bolts are now that hold the wheel on.

So today I found the scooter and had to deal with my guilt. My stepson asked about it several times early on, then went on to other things--of which he has an ample supply. I was defensive--”been so busy I just haven’t been able to get to it”--and then the inquiries stopped and the guilt receded and the scooter disappeared from our lives.

Looking at it today made me face some other unfinished business in the garage. In even deeper recesses are an electric train and a pool table. The electric train is from six years ago, the pool table probably a year later. My wife bought the train, badly overestimating both my skills and my persistence. I got it to run in a kind of half-baked fashion, but never properly. The engine kept jumping the track, and in an effort to fix that, I jimmied the track so the car wouldn’t run at all. So out to the garage, to the shelves, to the dark recesses.

The pool table was a little different matter. There was no room for it in the house, so we set it up in the garage where my stepson and his friends used it in a desultory fashion for a few months, then it was just in the way. I stumbled over it whenever I was working in the garage, so I pushed it to the side and finally took off the legs and stored it. No one objected.

I have a feeling there’s a disassembled aquarium back there too. It lasted about a year and had to be cleaned constantly--or should have been--and fish kept dying in it. This was no fish bowl. It had machinery and temperature gauges and other devices I never quite understood. It’s in pieces, too, taken apart gratefully when the last fish--a very tough customer--finally died.

So today, instead of brushing it aside as I usually do, I looked straight on at all this largess and allowed it to speak to me. It said two things loud and clear: we fall into conspicuous consumption in our comfortable middle- and upper-middle-class environments so easily that we never stop to examine the validity of it. And we get ourselves tied up with work and life stresses so inextricably that we don’t allow ourselves time to smell roses. Or fix scooters.

I could have fixed that scooter. I wouldn’t have done it easily--I don’t do such things easily--but I could have done it. I would have required time and energy and attention, and I seemed to be in short supply on all three counts when it came to scooters. So it didn’t get fixed.

Conspicuous consumption is a more pervasive problem, a disease of the haves in this Orange County society that is being split ever more sharply between the haves and the have-nots. I’m as guilty as the next guy, even though I can still remember quite vividly a period in my life when a single present at Christmas time was the norm. It’s a big mistake to look back at the Depression as the good old days, and yet there were some real virtues. I learned the value of a single, loving, hard-to-come-by Christmas present. I didn’t feel discriminated against. And that single present sure as hell didn’t end up buried in the garage while it still had life in it.

It would be easy to blame greedy kids for all this, but that isn’t fair at all. Our kids are the products of their times, their social condition, and their environment. . . . If their friend next door gets a pair of $200 shoe skates, then pretty soon every kid in the neighborhood has them.

This is the way we live, and this is the climate our children reflect. God help them if they ever find themselves in a situation where they have no money for necessities, let alone exotic shoe skates. I suppose most of them are tough enough to survive, but it will be a lot more painful than it would have been had the elders in their lives controlled consumption more than we have.

I don’t fight this any more. That also takes time and energy--and it makes me feel like a brontosaurus. Maybe the scooter and train and pool table were small protests on my part. You don’t have the scooter, then use the bike with all its expensive accessories or the overpriced shoe skates. You want to shoot pool? Go rent some movies instead, or get out your Nintendo games.

But that’s probably just an excuse for my own laziness and dereliction of duty in not repairing those toys--or getting them repaired. Maybe I allowed them back into my life today because I was ready to do something about them.

They will be removed from their hiding places. And they will be fixed. Our stepson has long since outgrown them, so they will be put in hands that will love and cherish and enjoy them. If we can’t make such decisions at Christmastime, then there would seem to be no hope at all.