The Winnowing Year, Pre-Winnow

by Jim Washburn

How to fix a melon crate

I like floors.

Did I just write that? I’m becoming Andy Rooney on weed. I’m even getting ear hair.

But it’s true. When moving recently after 32 years in the same house I discovered that, under all my stuff, there was this floor. Not much of one: matted light blue carpet from the Reagan years over mud pie linoleum from 1955, over, I’ve since heard, asbestos. But, even so, it was a floor.

Nice, even, and right there, a floor is. I mean you can fall, splap! on your face onto the floor, and there’s a reassuring finality to it. Mission accomplished. You needn’t ever worry about falling one bit farther once you’ve hit the floor. It’s got your back, and you can sprawl at your leisure, marshaling consciousness and counting teeth before alighting anew to joust with the day.

Our new house has luminous wooden floors. They spring just a little when you step on them. Unlike the ungiving concrete foundation of our previous house, they have rises and troughs like a gentle sea. Put a box up against a wall, and there’s a V-shaped gap between box and wall, because the floor sags ever so slightly toward the center of the room. Wooden floors feel more alive, like there’s a ship underfoot.

I would like to see more of these floors, so I need less junk sitting atop them. More junk gives you less opportunity to enjoy your other junk. More junk leaves less room for friends to come over. So I resolved to upload 40 percent of my junk in the year ahead, actually less than a year now, since I made this decision back in August.

How am I doing? Well, I bought 165 pounds worth of dining table today: Danish, beautifully figured, book-matched wood. We don’t need it, don’t know where to put it, yet it was too damn cool and cheap to leave at the alley yard sale two blocks up. Friends with trucks know to dread my call, yet soon the table was back here, under a tarp on the patio. It’d make a fine TV table, as soon as we find one that’s 72" wide by 40" deep. I can’t tell you how pleased my wife is with my purchase.

On the other hand, I could’ve bought a 1930s Deco dentist’s cabinet and a pair of German hi-fi speakers just like the ones I haven’t ever used in 18 years, but I didn’t. That’s progress of a sort. I haven’t done much actual winnowing yet.

I have been doing a lot of winnow prep, starting with finally unpacking from the move. I’m sorting things to sell, having a bit of room to do that by carting other things to storage, where I discovered there’d been a minor avalanche in the unit. The lid of a plastic box caved in under the weight of the boxes atop it, sending everything sideways, pushing the antique headboard to topple another row of boxes, smashing into a row of framed art, cracking the glass on at least one large piece. I restacked the boxes, but otherwise found the situation too depressing to warrant further investigation.

Next, off with three Trader Joe bags stuffed with salable books and CDs to Book Off, the used book, CD and DVD outlet. I hadn’t been before. It’s a Japanese chain, and over half the store is Japanese publications, Manja, DVDs and games, the rest American product, with many good books and CDs in the $3 range. How do they do it? Easy, they pay you 20 cents for yours. They’re charming Japanese women without much English, so it would be a pointless breach of manners to mention how usurious a 1500% markup seems.

At Home Depot I bought 8'x12"x1" planks of lumber, one of today’s remaining bargains at about $6 per plank, or 30 CDs in Book Off money. “Ha ha, round-eyes! You book off now!”

Back home, I sawed the 96" lengths down to 74 ¾", equal to a row of three wooden melon crates. You can get about 150 record albums in a melon crate, and if you stack them well with planks between them, you can make a fairly avalanche-proof six-story wood and vinyl hi-rise of them.

I have a long acquaintance with melon crates, since back in the macramé days, when they were common household furniture. I used to schlep used and bootleg records in them to swap meets, record conventions, and Beatlefests. You know the Pacific islanders who used huge stone wheels for money, and how stupid you thought they were when you read about them in school? Well, as a monetary instrument, huge stones have a considerable advantage over melon crates in that they are round and can be rolled.

A loaded crate weighs 96 pounds, give or take. I can barely lift one now, and I have over 70 of them. I don’t even know if they’re still made, or, like the colorfully labeled citrus crates of old, if they’ve been replaced with paperboard or plastic.

They tend to get wobbly over time, though all but the most melancholy melon crates can be shored up by pounding their nails in tight, or replacing the nails, or, if you’re an overachiever, using countersunk wood screws. That simple process is like a boob job for melon crates, giving them years of added stability.

I’ve spent enough time doing this with my crates to get a bit of a feel for the different companies that made them. With some, you could tell people took pride in making a good product, even though it was an ancillary item made for brute transport that the public would never see. Some others used shoddy materials but were well constructed; others used good materials, but the workmanship is poor: One nail will secure a slat where there should be three, or half the nails will be bent and sticking out.

Were they drinking on the job? Apparently liquor and other alterants weren’t unknown in the classic American workplace. For example, guitarists and collectors have speculated for years over why some 1950s Fender guitar necks have a more pronounced V-shape than others of the same period. One of Leo Fender’s old cohorts—don’t recall if it was George Fullerton or Forrest White—suggested those necks must have been made on Mondays, because the employees were most hung over then and tended to lean into their lathes. Similarly, the late great Gretsch VP Duke Kramer probably wasn’t being entirely facetious when he explained why the quality of vintage Gretsch guitars was so wildly inconsistent, saying something to the effect of, “Well, when we had good drugs we made good guitars, when we had bad drugs we made bad guitars, and when we had no drugs we made no guitars.”

But I digress. The melon crates are coming along. During our move the records were installed out of order and many upside-down, so I’m going through them, and hopefully pruning out about 5,000 to get rid of. At this point in life, I really don’t care if the mono mix of Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs’ second album differs much from the stereo one, though I’m for sure keeping both mixes of The Who Sell Out.

That’s what’s up at my house. On the bigger stage, Barack Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, further proof to conservatives of what an abject failure he is. Can’t he do anything right?

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