Normally I am a fairly efficient person. I pay the water bill on time
(though I admit only because they’ll shut it off if I don’t), I return
phone calls promptly, and I empty the trash when it is full (cough).
Well, actually my roommate Stephen empties the trash most of the time.
And on Monday nights it is his job to take the trash can to the end of
our driveway for the trash collectors to pick up the next morning.
In this endeavor, at least, Stephen is not so prompt. He is engaged in
an ongoing game with our neighbor and landlord, Alan. Though Alan does
not know it, the object of the game is to see who can put the garbage
out later on Monday night.
Stephen waits eagerly for Monday nights. He passes casually by the
dining room window, which faces Alan and Donna’s house, to see if their
trash can is still in the yard.
If it is, he giggles quietly. The game is still on. If it isn’t, he thrusts
his arms
triumphantly in the air. He won. Now he can take the trash out.
So while Stephen sometimes purposefully procrastinates, I normally do not.
There are certain things, however, on which I do procrastinate, because
I resent having to do them.
Buying dish soap, for instance. I resent buying dish soap. I already bought
dish soap once, when I was 16. I don’t think I should have to buy it again.
I think that once you’ve bought dish soap once in your life, you’re done.
You graduate. You’ve done that, time to move on to the next thing.
It would be different if using the dish soap were fun. But I resent
doing dishes almost as much as I resent buying the dish soap.
And dusting. I procrastinate severely on dusting. I’ll wait weeks, walking
over
the same dust motes 10, 11, 12 times, so much do I dread the task of dusting.
But eventually I do it even though it is no fun, because let’s face it:
You have to dust.
But the yearly Christmas tree provides a unique set of circumstances in
my life.
It is fun to decorate the Christmas tree, but it’s not fun to take all
the decorations
off and throw the tree out. That makes the task doubly distasteful because
it once
was fun, now it’s not.
So I procrastinate.
Last year I was in CT for Christmas. I had given up my apartment in the
city a month
earlier after Osama bin Laden made me lose my job. I had already moved
my things
down to Georgia and was spending the holidays at my mother’s house before
I left.
That year my mother disposed of the Christmas tree while my sister and
I were out
spending her gift certificates. My mother lives in a second-floor apartment
and didn’t
want to drag the tree down the stairs and didn’t want to wait for Charity
and I to
get home to take the tree out.
So she opened the kitchen window and pushed the tree out onto the roof,
where it
slid down into the back yard. Only trouble was the tree was about six inches
wider
than the window frame and when my mother forced it through, the entire
window
frame tore loose from the wall and went with it.
“Those kids of mine,” she said to the landlord as he stared at the gaping
hole where
his window used to be. “I guess it’s true if you want something done right
you’ve
got to do it yourself.”
The year before that, we were in New York for the holidays. We put off
looking for a tree for weeks and weeks, until finally on Christmas Eve
day, my roommate Stephen called me at work.
“I took the day off from work and got us a Christmas tree,” he said.
We decorated the tree that night and had a lovely Christmas.
But as you know, sooner or later the tree has to be disposed of.
Some people get rid of their trees the day after Christmas. Others wait
until after
New Year’s. But these folks had already had the enjoyment of their tree
for a week
or two beforehand. And since we hadn’t gotten our tree until Christmas
Eve, we
reasoned it was all right to keep it up until March.
St. Patrick’s Day, to be precise.
That’s when it got embarrassing. Everywhere we went folks were wearing
green clothes, drinking green beer and walking their green dogs, while
in our house, it was still Christmas.
We resolved it was time to dispose of the tree. But of course we couldn’t
just
put it out at the curb where everybody’s trash is exposed for their neighbors
to see.
When your tree is one in a line of trees waiting for the trash pick-up
right after the
holidays, that’s one thing. But spring was four days away. We couldn’t
just put our
Christmas tree out in broad daylight for everyone to see.
So we waited until four o’clock in the morning.
We were fairly confident all of our neighbors were asleep, because our
downstairs
neighbor, who kept the latest hours on the block, had shut off his stereo,
which had
been playing “I Will Survive” by Gloria Gaynor every waking hour for the
last
month-and-a-half since his girlfriend broke up with him.
So at 4 a.m., we dragged the tree down the three flights of stairs to our
stoop,
then carried it down to the street.
But of course we could not deposit it with our own trash. People would
know we had
kept our Christmas tree up until St. Patrick’s Day. What kind of idiots
do that?
So we carried the tree three houses down and put it in a neighbor’s trash.
The next day walking home from work we made a point of exclaiming very
loudly as we walked down our street, “Look at that! Some idiot kept
their Christmas tree up until St. Patrick’s Day!”
A few neighbors looked at us as we passed by.
“Look,” they no doubt said to each other, “Those are the damn fools who
threw their Christmas tree out at four o’clock this morning.”
The trail of pine needles that led from the tree down the sidewalk to our
stoop
was no doubt also a tip-off to the true owner of the Christmas tree. And
if they
entered our house, they could have followed the trail all the way up the
three
flights of stairs to our front door.
This Christmas is no different. We finally took the decorations off the
tree last Saturday. It took another three days for the Christmas tree
to make it to the front porch. It’s sitting there right now, tinsel
dangling pathetically from its limbs, looking like a girl whose date
ditched her at a party and went home with somebody else.
We told ourselves that we would only leave it on the porch until Alan got
home
that night, when we would ask him if we could put it in his burn pile.
That was last Tuesday. The tree is still on our front porch. Maybe it
will make it to Alan’s burn pile by St. Patrick’s Day.