In order of their appearance: can opener, electric can opener, curtain rods, Styrofoam cooler, cardboard box of pine cones toaster oven, stereo speakers, bath mat, tricycle, potbellied stove, rake, iron, badminton racket, barbecue, colander, garden hose, wheelbarrow, lawn mower, chicken wire, inner tubes, orange juice squeezer, tennis balls, basketballs, football, lobster pot, folding chairs, cinder blocks, saws, clothes hangers, pillows, walker, wading pool, bread box, seed spreader, chain saw, stroller, chess set, sled, TV antenna, baby cari9age, steamer trunk, crutches, tire iron, chafing dish, vegetable steamer, hair dryer, tires, wheel rim, electric fondue dish, blender, typewriter, box of eyeglasses, box of greeting cards, bassinet, box of shoelaces, two boxes of buttons, beach towels, frying pan, Magnavox TV, RCA TV Phillips radio, RCA radio, lawn sprinkler, curling irons, bread basket, safe, tree trimmer, hatchet, walking stick, and a toilet seat.

   "Every family has these problems," I said. I was working my way toward the back wall of the basement. I wanted very much to see it. I wanted to know that there was some boundary that defined the limits of this crap.
   My sister and I were cleaning out our home in Nanticoke. The realtor had told us that she wouldn't take the listing until the basement was empty. As she put it, a buyer was going to want to make sure the house had a foundation. It was a bit of an exaggeration, but I understood her point. My father had been a pack rat, my mother too mousy to tell him so. Everything that had touched his hands ended up in the basement. That too is an exaggeration, but not much of one.
    "No! A normal family hold on to an electric Crock-Pot in the off chance that Crock-Pot cooking will make a comeback. A dysfunctional family holds onto a cracked Crock-Pot." Emily's whining came from somewhere else in the basement. She too was looking for the back wall, but had taken a different route. "This crap you couldn't give away."
    I had my foot in an aquarium. It was the only way to get around the exercise bicycle. "The aquarium looks okay."
    "It leaks. It ruined Mother's china cabinet. We had to get rid of it."
    "The cabinet's right here. I'm about to climb over it." I could feel its warped veneer under my fingers. "Oh, my god! I'd forgotten about the parrot!"
    Its wrought iron cage was the next obstacle I had to overcome. It was bigger than a refrigerator. Inside, an armless doll hung from a string. There was still food in the bowl--fruit and vegetables so dry and dead that they had no color. And a yellowed newspaper, thick with droppings. I changed directions, wanting another path to the back wall. The cage's sheet metal grabbed my pant leg.
    I tried to get and eye on my leg but was in such a tight spot I couldn't get my head down. I touched at the skin and brought a little blood up into the light. It wasn't serious. Just another reason to be angry. Another reason to curse.
    Emily ignored my cries. "How did they get the damned thing down here?"
    I tried not looking back at "the damned thing."

 Also starring: a 1964 calendar featuring Norman Rockwell prints, stroller, phonograph, plastic reindeer, umbrella, pogo stick, storm windows, screens, dumbbells, newspapers, high chair, magazines, books, shoes, linens, more curtain rods, seat cushions, plastic pumpkin, paint cans, popcorn maker, chairs, couch, telephone, hose, filing cabinet, crib, print of Jesus with eyes that are both opened and closed, Christmas ornaments, desk, still more curtain rods, toy fire engine, toy steam truck, stuffed raccoon, toolbox, sledge hammer, model sailboat, Sheetrock, iron bed, coat rack, vise, assorted storm windows, assorted screens, assorted screen doors, assorted doors, four lawn chairs, catcher's mask, chaise lounge, weather vane, Christmas trees, artificial Christmas tree, cradle, cornstalks, exterior Christmas lights, interior Christmas lights, and a croquet set.

    Dinner that night was at a fluorescent-flooded fast-food outlet. We were unwrapping the paper from our hamburgers, squeezing ketchup form little foil packets onto cold fries,.
    "You've got a rip in your pants," Emily took her first bite.
    "Yeah. The birdcage. Its corners are like razors."
    She studied the tear in my jeans. She must have been wondering if I cut myself but didn't ask, and as she munched fries, her eyes drifted to the pattern of linoleum that surrounded us. They finally landed on the wall-sized menu from which we had selected the "papa Burgers." I watched as she read. For a lifetime, I'd wondered how we could be so different. That evening I wondered when she'd stared wearing so much makeup.
    "Funny, I was sure it was round." She suddenly was looking at me. I remembered that look from our childhood. It was a hard, still stare that defied you to turn away.
    I looked at the menu, pretending to consider our dessert choices. "Yeah, but it's got lots of rough edges."
    "It's just that you said 'corners.'" she was pressing her finger into her french fry bag and licking the crumbs.
    Now I was staring. It was my angry stare. The one I'd learned from Dad. The one he used on her.
    "You know, it all stared with that damned parrot," she said.
    I had no idea what Emily thought had started with "that damned parrot" and didn't ask. She was going to tell me without prompting. There was something on her mind that was going to come out whether I wanted to hear or not. "Mother's problems began after Dad brought home that damned bird." She finished her burger while munching on memories.
    I hadn't been eating. I was no longer hungry. I thought of why I lived in California, she lived in New York, and neither of us lived in Pennsylvania.
    "We'd better get back to the house." I rolled my burger, fries, straw, napkins, ketchup, salt, and pepper into the paper place mat. "We're going to divide everything up tonight, right?"
    She was on her feet, threw what was left of her burger, fries, straw, napkins, ketchup, salt, and pepper into the trash can that said "PLEASE" on its lid. I did too--had to retrieve my plastic tray, had to put it on top of her tray, had to follow her outside into the cool of a November night, outside where 15 minutes earlier greasy fries and hamburgers smelled good.
    "You do know that was the summer Mother first went to the hospital." She was pointing her keys in the direction of the big, black Mercedes.
    An alarm system. She pushed a button, and the car beeped. When she unlocked her door, it unlocked mine. Magic. Her big, black Mercedes had everything. I couldn't take it all in. We had arrived at dusk. Now it was dark, and the car's interior came alive like a carnival at night--lights that flickered and pulsated above us, around us. Knobs and buttons were everywhere. Everything I touched was leather or wood. She and I were so very different.
    "Mother threw a fit when he brought that bird in the house. The cage was huge. The bird was noisy. And he didn't even ask--just decided that the family needed a pet. When she complained, he laughed."
    "That was so long ago." It wasn't the way I remembered things, but I didn't wan to remember and didn't want to reminisce. "I don't know how they got it down in the basement. I'm trying to figure out what we do with the damned thing."
    "It's not our problem. We take what we want. The junk people do the rest. Let them figure it out. Just make sure, that's part of the deal. They take everything." Her hands were tight on the wheel. She was squeezing its laced leather so hard that her fingers went white. "I was about to start junior high. That wasn't any easy time for me, you know." Then it all came apart. First he buys the bird. One thing after another. then there was that damned tree."
    Yes, I remembered "the damned tree."
    "Then he put in that damned porch--not a porch. What did he call it? He was talking about it nonstop. 'Lorraine, it will do you good. We can sit out there on the--' I can't remember what the hell he called it. 'You can sit out there, and I'll serve you daiquiris.' Daiquiris! The last thing she needed."
    "Breezeway," I said.
    "Breezeway. That was it. The damned breezeway. Another place to squirrel his junk." She was pushing a button that was changing a digital readout on the dashboard. The heater? The air conditioner? Climate control. Fahrenheit. Centigrade. "I mean, he was my father. I loved him. but you have to admit, he could drive people crazy."
     We were home--a little ranch-style house like all of the others on the block, except we had a breezeway with as much junk squirreled in it as the basement and a Sequoia growing in our front yard. He could drive a person crazy.

With supporting performances by: a burlap bag of walnuts, ironing board, plaster Venus d Milo, wig on Styrofoam head, turntable, plaster bust of Chopin, blender, chopping block, chopping board, reading lamp, the 38-volumnt Britannica Junior Encyclopedia, a fringed lamp shade, four hula hoops, board games, Polaroid Land camera, tennis table, workbench, sawhorses, train set, ice skate, baby scale, baseball bat, ladder, hubcap, framed print of the Gettysburg Address, andirons, pitchfork, hockey stick, crucifix, flaying saucer, badminton net, ice cream maker, wagon wheel, boat paddle, fishnet, dresser, two garbage cans, armless mannequin, skillet, model airplane, and stacks of phonograph records (33 1/3, 45, and 78 rpm).

     Emily was rocking a clothes hamper back and forth on its three legs in the direction of the front door. "These are just things from my bedroom. I'm taking them out to the car. Where you going?"
     I pretended not to hear. I was on the way to the basement with a tape measure. And I measured, avoiding the layers of yellowed, lumpy paper in the bottom of the cage. The doll swung back and forth. HOw long had she been hanging there? When had our parrot chomped off her arms? The parrot's flight through our lives was a blue and gold blur. he'd been with us for only a few days. As fast as he'd come and gone, in my mind I could still walk slow circles around the first dinner with our new pet.
     "What does that thing eat, anyway? Emily had asked form her seat at the dinner table.
     "Asked" is too generous. In our parrot days, Emily was 12 and thinking herself 18. She had to be nasty, teenage nasty--like the bullet-bra, tight-skirt girls who smoked Marlboros behind the parked school buses. She had to be even nastier because the bird had dashed her not-quite-ready-to-cuddle-a-boy hopes of a kitten. She was pointing a fork in the direction of the kitchen, toward the source of the relentless, piercing screech of our new pet. There was a swinging door between the dining room and kitchen. It was the only barrier between us and him, and it wasn't good enough.
     "It's not a 'thing'!" My father scowled from across the dinner table. He chopped at the frozen butter with a knife, then chiseled with a fork. At last,a slab broke loose,a nd he wedged it between the steamy folds of a Pillsbury roll. he'd struggled so hard he was out of breath.
     Emily read his puffing as a complaint. She was wrong but worked under the false assumption that she knew more about everything than an adult could ever hope to learn. "The butter's supposed to be hard. It stays fresher that way. Mom puts it in the freezer compartment purpose."
     "Lorraine, are you out there?" He said it again, trying to squeeze his questions between the parrot's screams. Dad wasn't yelling. He never yelled. His words melted with the butter, soft at the edges, warmth rising from them. "Try not to let it drip on the tablecloth, son." He held the buttered bun out for me.
     Sometimes he called me his doughboy when he did that. Sometimes he stuffed my mouth with it and poked a finger into my tummy. I would giggle as my mouth shot butter across the table. I was seven or eight, too old to be babied, but I suspect that Dad was happy to still have a kid around, and I wasn't anxious to grow up.
     Mom always served the rolls first. Everything else came from plastic bags in the freezer. She only bought frozen foods because "they're dirt cheap and things in cans remind me of the war." Chicken breasts, hamburgers, and chops (pork on weekdays, lamb on Sundays) were the regular rotation. She served them after the buns, holding them long enough in the kitchen so that they paid their respects to the frying pan. they made a quick visit to the serving platter for a sprig of parsley and a pat of frozen butter. The meat always had a raw, cold streak across the bone.
     The vegetable dishes were like that, too. They gave off a showy amount of steam but not enough heat to melt the pat of butter plopped at the center. Corn, green beans, lima beans. (Never waxed beans because, Mom explained, "Wax comes out of ears and ends up on floors.") Sometimes we had "mixed vegetables" (corn with green and lima beans). With eh same fork or finger that had found the cold core in the meat, we would poke at the vegetable mound until we found the frozen lump where the boiling water had not penetrated. Dad would take out that chunk and let it melt on his plate.
     So that evening of the bird's arrival, we were eating our steaming hot buns while the rest of the meal warmed to room temperature. Dad wasn't testing his doughboy or the green beans with the chunk of ice at their center. the bird had everyone on edge. I don't think I ever heard a harsh word between my parents, but I was ready for one that evening. I was expecting one of Mom's I-can't-take-it-another-minute speakers--the kind she used on Emily and me, the kind she delivered on discovering Emily's pink nail polish and matching lipstick.
     "Lorraine, come out and sit down before everything gets cold!" Dad shouted.
     "I'm serious, will someone please tell me what it eats?" Emily asked.
     "It's not an 'it.' It's a 'he.'" Dad was angry.
     They were always like that, my father and sister. It was as if they held a rubber band between them. Each pulled in his direction, determined not to be the first to let go. But the band never broke, and it was always Dad who let go. That day he held on longer. He was ignoring her question.
     "Maybe we can give him, emphasis on the 'him,' a little boy to eat, emphasis on the 'little.' She was glaring at me.
     I had no idea what had gotten me into trouble with her. She probably wanted to play the rubber band game with someone who wouldn't let go. "It--he eats fruits and vegetables, seeds and nuts." There was a pretend excitement in my voice as if I'd always wanted a parrot and had spend the afternoon reading about them in the junior encyclopedia. "Daddy says they can eat just about everything, but we should start him out on his regular foods. Isn't that right, Dad?"
     "Emily, knock it off!" He held up the serving fork like a teacher's pointer. he rarely allowed himself that much anger. Then he looked toward the door and spoke as if to one of his better students. "Son, hand me your plate."
     "I was being facetious!" She said "facetious" a lot. "And I know what he eats. All you have to do is look at the floor out there. More comes out of his mouth than goes in. Geez!" She said "geez" even more than she said "facetious."
     "What's his name going to be Daddy?" I asked.
     We waited. My father served us each a spoonful of beans, then a fish stick. Oh, yes, Fridays we had frozen fish sticks.
     "Jaguar," he announced. "His name is Jaguar."
     "Geez!"
     We always had our dessert by the TV. Our "oven-ready" frozen dessert. That night it was Pepperidge Farm cherry turnovers. They oozed sticky, red syrup onto my fingers and face, the couch, and carpet. But they were like the Pillsbury rolls--they turned out right.
     That night Daddy said that he'd always wanted a blue and gold macaw. None of us cold remember him ever mentioning a parrot, and we'd heard the word "macaw" for the first time that morning. When the red ooze from my dad's turnover landed in his lap, he left for the kitchen. Mom said that she thought he was afraid of birds. She looked to the kitchen door as if she was about to tell us a dark secret, "He wouldn't go to that Hitchcock movie, and he doesn't like when I feed the pigeons in the Square."
     Jaguar. We didn't like the name. Mother said that it was a good name because both macaws and jaguars came from the Amazon jungle.
     "That was the idea." Dad was on his way back from the kitchen.
     There were four turnovers in the freezer pack. Mom didn't like them. Dad always got the fourth one. He was munching on it as he flopped into his chair.
     "Geez. A jaguar is a jaguar--a cat. This is a bird, a noisy bird." Emily was stretching the rubber band again. "Why don't we call it 'Screech.'"
     "His name is Jaguar. That's that, okay? Treat him like family because he is."
     A soccer goal, soccer ball, a make-it-yourself typewriter kit, Ouija board, ukulele, flower pots, potting soil, waffle iron, paper towel holder, music box, laundry hamper, soap dish, picnic basket, stapler, tape dispenser, framed Declaration of Independence (a copy), flashlight, planters, ceiling fan, floor lamp, sconce, mailbox, box springs, mattress. six matching seashell coasters, bottle opener, wine rack, throw rug, shower curtain, tea kettle, pot rack, cutting board, Tupperware salad bowl, coffee grinder, pepper mill, ice cream scoop, swing set, coffee maker, microwave, mixer, and toaster.

     We had not treated him like family.  I think that was the problem.  Years later I was back in the living room, heading for the same chair from which Dad had announced our pet’s name.  Emily sat in her corner, in the wingback chair from which, as a teenager, she could mock both children and adults without acknowledging their presence.
     The middle-aged Emily was only her voice.  “Okay, I think the way we do this is to each take a turn.  You say something you want.  Then I say what I want.  The first person to call it gets it.  Whatever’s left is left.”
     “There’s no way they got that cage through the door to the basement.”
All I could see of my sister was the pen in her hand and a pad of paper in her lap.  She was ready to divide up our parent’s things, trying to put the last nail in this coffin of memories.
     “It’s spooky looking in that cage.  I kept thinking that he might be lying there under all of those papers.”
“I hardly think so.”  She was making notes.  “You do remember that it flew away?”
     No.  I didn’t remember that.  I didn’t think it was true, but I didn’t want to go back there again.  I tried to keep myself in the present.  I wondered what Emily was writing.  What words could this exchange between us be generating?
     “We were all afraid of the thing.  Dad used to say, ‘Treat it like family and it will be nice to you.’  We stayed away from our baby brother.  It would throw its beak into flesh like a gaffing hook.  Dad was afraid of it too.  So, he hadn’t figured how to get it to the vet to get its wings clipped.  It flew away a few weeks after we got it.”
     “I remember that cage being in the kitchen forever.”
     “The cage was there.  Not the bird.  No one knew how to take the cage apart.”  She grabbed the arms of the chair and turned it an inch in my direction.  I could just see her face.  She was giving me that look.  “Are we going to do this tonight or not?”
     “Tomorrow.  Can we do it first thing tomorrow?”
     That must have been okay with her.  Emily went quietly to the kitchen, came back carrying a jug of white wine.  She went into her room.  I heard her on the phone.  We had been on the phone lots.  She talked to her family in Rye.  I talked to mine in San Francisco.  Luke was a year old.  It was hearing about his days that helped me get through mine.  That night Emily cried into the receiver.  I knew that it would be awhile before I got to make my call.
     I thought of my brother Jaguar as having been around for awhile.  I vaguely remembered family fights that had Jaguar as their source or at least their excuse.  There was something new going on in our family.  Mom was yelling at Dad, complaining about his craziness.  That had never happened before.  She was his fondest supporter.  Like the tractor.  She loved to tell the tractor story.  How they had met in Oakland before Dad “shipped out.”   That was war talk, she explained.  How he wrote back that “they” were “letting go” machinery, particularly “farm implements” at “sacrifice prices.”  He wanted her to buy a tractor.  After the war, after “they” had “put the Japs back in Japan,” then my parents would drive the tractor back east, back to Pennsylvania, can you imagine?  Mom loved that story.  She laughed and laughed telling it.  I think it’s my best memory of her – her slight frame rocking back and forth, her hand of lean fingers and red nails slapping a knee.
     On the other hand, Dad never mentioned the tractor to us kids.  He never talked about Oakland.  And the only thing he brought back from the war was a bugle.  Almost everything in the basement had a life upstairs.  Not the bugle.  It had lived in the basement for all of my childhood.  “Don’t put your lips to that, for christsake,” he’d say.  “You never know whose mouth has been on that damned thing.”  But we did know.  Emily and I knew.  We knew he had taken it off a dead “Jap” because it didn’t smell right and there was a stain on the tassel that we took for blood.
     Well, anyway, my mother was my dad’s big supporter.  As I say, she never put him down for his craziness.  Like the time he bought that Bell and Howell at a garage sale.  We didn’t have much use for a film projector, because we didn’t have a movie camera.  Dad said there were all kinds of movies that we could show.  “People borrow them from the library like books, for christsake.”  It came with 127 rolls of developed film.  Little yellow and black boxes of some other families’ picnics and Christmas trees.  It was the only film he ever put in the projector.  “Ticks like a Swiss watch, for christsake.”  He spent a lot of time polishing it.
     Memories can make you crazy.  I was in Emily’s chair, trying not to hear her loud telephone conversation, trying to remember if we had come across the projector or the bugle in the basement.   I think I have the tractor, projector, and bugle stories right.  Maybe Emily has it right about the bird.  Maybe it was with the bird’s arrival that our family problems started.  I do remember Mom used to say that the bird was driving her crazy.  Sometimes, she said that the bird was driving her to drink.  It was one of the few things that drove a wedge between my parents.  Maybe he did fly away.
     I sort of associate Aunt Connie with Jaguar.  She came from California to help while Mom was in the hospital.  She may have helped with the cage.  I kind of remember that she made me move things out of the kitchen while she swept, then scrubbed.  “Just to make sure.”  Of something.  After that, didn’t she hand me the can of Lysol and tell me to spray in the corners good and long “to make extra sure”?  That cleaning may have had something to do with Jaguar.
     I remember our first dinner with Aunt Connie.  She’d just arrived.  As we were learning, everything was fresh with Aunt Connie.  Fresh spinach, fresh eggs, even fresh butter.  It was a lifestyle choice of great importance to her, and she had lectured us about it on the trip from the airport.
     “Eat that meat loaf while it’s good and hot.”  We could hear her from the kitchen, working at whatever was to be our next course.
     “She’s going to have us cutting the lawn and eating grass,” Emily said it the way only a teenager could.  “Do we have to have that thing on the table, Dad?”
     She was looking at the green tin can at the center of the dinner table.
     “Thing?” Dad grunted.
     “The bush.  Do we have to eat with a bush?”
     “It’s not a bush.  It’s a tree.”  He turned it so that we could admire it from every side.  “I got them to ship it what they call airfreight.  That way it don’t miss a day of sunshine.”
     “Who knows maybe it was on the plane with Aunt Connie.”  I was trying to help Dad.
     Emily wasn’t.  “How long is it staying?”
     “Joe, get that thing off the table!”  It was Aunt Connie at the door with a huge bowl of salad between her arms.
     My father put the can on the floor.
     “Not there!  You’ll stain the carpet.  I want everything to be perfect when Lorry comes back from . . . when Lorry gets back.  Out on the driveway!”
     None of us spoke.  We listened.  Aunt Connie was like that even with her brother-in-law.  If she told you boiling water could freeze, you didn’t question her.  You might even believe it.
     She waited until she heard the screen door again.  “It’s not going to survive in this . . . whatdoyoucallit?”
     “Climate,” Emily helped Aunt Connie, jumping on a second opinion that validated hers.  “California trees can’t survive our winters.  People can hardly survive our winters.”
     “You can’t grow a tree out of its natural . . . whatdoyoucallit?”
     “Habitat.”  Emily was right there for her aunt.
     “Well, we’ll just have to see.”  My father was chuckling.  He always laughed his way through family problems.  “We’ll just have to see.”
     Aunt Connie was back in the kitchen, working on dessert.  Fresh strawberries, no doubt.
     Dad was at the window looking out at his purchase. “Stranger things have happened.”  He offered his opinion in a voice that could not be heard beyond the four corners of the room.  “Are we going to plant it in the front yard, son?”
     “Looks like asparagus that’s gone to seed.”  Emily was on her way out of the room.  That was her way of excusing herself from the table.  “Maybe Aunt Connie can serve it for dinner tomorrow.”
     “These trees grow taller than skyscrapers, taller than the Washington Monument.  Sequoias.  They call it a Sequoia.”
     Now whether Jaguar and/or his cage were in the next room at the time of this dinner, I can’t say.  I can’t say for sure whether Jaguar died in his cage or flew away.  All I know is that the Sequoia does indeed stand in the front yard of the family home, the house Emily and I were cleaning out after my dad’s death.  It was there, watching over things the next morning when we divided things up.  It was there that afternoon when Emily’s big, black Mercedes backed out of the drive and the moving trucks backed in.  It watched as I hollered over the fence at Billy Olshewski, my high school buddy and next-door neighbor, wanting to borrow a hacksaw.  (There was no hacksaw in our cluttered basement and no way to the get the birdcage out without one.)
     This was a few years ago now.  My dad died in 1996.  It was the following spring that Emily and I cleaned out the house.  The Sequoia presently stands 48 feet tall, the tallest tree in Wyoming Valley.