Some people really know how to celebrate

NATURAL PERSPECTIVES

Most good movies start with an explosion. So did our weekend. Not a

recent blast, but one that probably occurred a few years ago. The

full effects became apparent only recently. But we’re getting ahead

of our story.

Mother’s Day weekend is often a big celebration for both our

household and the elder Leipzig family in Northern California. May 11

is the date of Vic’s birthday, is father’s birthday and one of Vic’s

five brothers’ birthdays. The birthdays often coincide with Mother’s

Day, as happened this weekend. Sometimes we go north to join in their

celebration. Some years our boys come to visit us. But this year we

had no big plans.

Because Vic and I were both honorees of sorts on Sunday, we were

in a conundrum of how to celebrate. Because it was Mother’s Day, Vic

asked if I wanted breakfast in bed. I jokingly replied that I’d

rather have it on a plate.

Because it was Vic’s birthday, I asked what he’d like to have for

breakfast. He had a hankering for an apple fritter, so I made a

doughnut run to Golden Boy. I also procured some glazed

old-fashioned, one of his favorites, and some French crullers, one of

my favorites. Forget the diet, this was a holiday.

We sat on one of the benches in our front yard, eating our sinful

pleasures, sipping coffee, and admiring the California natives and

other flowers blooming by the pond. It was shortly after breakfast

that Vic learned of the explosion. I’m afraid I had known about it

for some time, but had been ignoring the aftermath.

While searching for something in the back of the kitchen cupboard

that holds canned goods, Vic discovered a sticky black substance on

one of the shelves. Further searching revealed that it had spread to

two other shelves below. As I’ve mentioned before, my lack of

housekeeping skill is legendary.

“What’s this [expletive deleted]?” he shouted in horror.

“A can of mandarin oranges leaked back there,” I replied

sheepishly. “I got the worst of it up, but there’s still some left.”

What an understatement.

I had been meaning to finish cleaning it up, really I had, but

there were always more important things to be done: articles to

write, gardens to plant, wetlands and nature centers to save.

“How long has this been here?” he asked.

“Since the Clinton era?” I ventured. “It was already black and

sticky by the time I noticed it.”

Like that made it OK.

So our birthday-Mother’s Day celebration turned out to be an

exercise in cabinet cleaning. We took turns working on the cabinet

and watching an old James Bond movie. Vic pulled everything out,

working on one shelf at a time. We actually had a good time as we

sorted through stuff that hadn’t seen light in eons.

“What’s this stuff?” Vic asked.

“The label says catsup,” I replied helpfully. “I knew I had a

spare bottle back there somewhere, but I haven’t been able to find

it.”

“Is catsup supposed to be brown?” he asked.

“It might be a bit old,” I suggested.

We tossed it along with a lot of other things. It turns out that

we’ve been better about turning over the canned goods in our

earthquake kit than in the main household cabinet. After creating a

pile of presumably outdated foodstuffs to be tossed, we vowed to date

the cans and jars with a Sharpie permanent marker in the future.

We’re conscious of solid waste management in both our buying and

living habits. We normally create very little trash. But we were on a

roll. We both have a tendency to save things because we think we

might need them some day in the distant future, so the lower

cupboards were filled with empty glass jars and bottles of all sizes.

Some were jars that I thought I could reuse to can tomatoes. Some

were containers that Vic thought would make good specimen containers.

We decided to face reality. I haven’t canned tomatoes in 10 years and

Vic doesn’t catch all that many bugs to show his biology classes. Out

the empty jars went.

Normally, we would feel guilty about contributing so much material

to the landfill, but we knew that these clean empties would get

recycled. After trash in Huntington Beach is picked up, it goes to a

Materials Recycling Facility, popularly called the MURF. There trash

is sorted by hand. Glass and other materials are saved for recycling.

The city profits from the sale of these recycled materials. We took

the caps off the empty jars to make it easier for the sorters, bagged

the jars separately from the rest of the household trash, and with

only a slight pang of loss, tossed them out. By mid-afternoon, the

cabinets were clean and reorganized.

Pleased with our progress, we stopped work for the day. We bought

a beautifully decorated little cake from Great Dane Bakery and took

it over to my 92-year-old mother’s house. We laughed as we told her

about how we had celebrated our special day. Are we people who know

how to party, or what?

* VIC LEIPZIG and LOU MURRAY are Huntington Beach residents and

environmentalists. They can be reached at [email protected].