It started the last time I was home.

Actually, the truth is that it probably started with the dawn of man, but for our purposes let’s back up a tiny bit and restrict events to those taking place this season.

The last time I was home, my brother and I used a shopping list compiled by our father to pick up a few provisions at Stop and Shop: milk, cran-raspberry juice, a bottle of Windex.  No problem there. Once we got home, it wasn’t until I was moving stuff around that I noticed the following dusty item sitting patient and neglected at the cellar landing:

Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you the natural order of life in my house on the Cape. If you ever read the entry in my  Africa blog about the Armageddon Cellar, then you are already familiar with this situation. For everyone else, I invite you to read on.

I’ve been home for about 24 hours, and last night my brother and I stayed up until midnight doing various bits of household demolition and reconstruction tasks. Somewhere within the conversation, he mentioned that there were two bottles of ranch dressing sitting in the fridge- dad had purchased a second without first checking to see if we already had any on hand. I made a vague mental note of this as we cleaned up for the night and I passed out in bed.

This morning I woke up and went to said fridge to find something for breakfast. Food never caught my attention, but what did catch my eye was not one, not two- but four bottles of the same style taking up space on the shelves. Each was opened and in various stages of consumption:

You know how you can pick at a piece of flaking paint from a single shingle, and suddenly you find that you have ripped down the entire siding of your house in the name of a passing fancy at aesthetic improvement? Well this was how my morning went.  I started to paw around the depths of the fridge, suddenly in full CSI mode. I gathered the bottles of mustard into my arms and walked into the living room where my father was going through a stack of bills.

“Dad,” I said, “you know I love you…”

“Uh oh,” he said, not looking up as he filled out his check book. “Something’s coming.”

I stood there and waited for him to finish writing. He finally glanced up in expectation for whatever I had coming.

“I found all of these in the fridge.”  I shrugged my arms and shook the now-sweating bottles at him.

 

“Is that all?” he said before returning to his electric bill. Apparently a number that is far greater than four is only worthy of his notification.

I returned to the kitchen, satisfied with the conduct of our mustard standoff.

 

I never did eat breakfast this morning. Instead I completed a full-scale refrigerator autopsy as Chopin’s “Nocturn No. 2 in E Flat, Op.9 No. 2” played on the kitchen radio. I pitched out containers of mostly-empty salsa and inspected the disintegrating items forgotten at the bottom of the produce drawer. I counted up other multiples that had inexplicably found their way into our kitchen from the supermarket:

Dad knows this game just as well as I do. He also knows that I really do love him, but will continue to give him a hard time about buying before looking. “Trust, but verify”- isn’t that what President Reagan said? I think that Dad could use this approach whenever his reflex is to build cockamamie shopping lists that don’t include a preliminary consult with our personal storehouse.

Around here, there’s a constant battle between “We already have that” and “Well, I don’t want you to run out.”  I think the latter is a Depression era mentality. Or maybe it’s the American way. Or maybe we just like to be lazy and not take stock of what we have on hand. Whatever the case, coming home is always an experience in mild bewilderment as I routinely discover things that have been defying the limits of respectable expiration dates.  I won’t talk to you about the tub of sour cream (expiration 2012) that I found in the above fridge the last time I was home. That was in July.

Now before I exhaust my supply of stones and reduce this wonderful place to a pile of glass, I will tell you that the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. In many respects, I am guilty of this same kind of irrational stockpiling back in my own apartment. To give you an idea, before coming home on leave I counted 44 bottles of nail polish in my bathroom. Each shade is fantastic in its own way.

To wrap up, I will refer you back to the mustard photo at the top of this post. A few hours following the kitchen clean-out,  I found dad outside in the shed poking around.

“What are you looking for?” I asked.

“My screwgun.” he said as he continued moving the garden implements aside.

My card catalog of current kitchen accoutrements flipped through my head until it stopped at the correct answer. His drill was sitting in plain sight on the kitchen counter. Camouflaged, as it were, between the warming prime rib and two sticks of room temperature butter– an obvious location in our house.

“I know where it is.” I said before walking into the house and rescuing the tool from the kitchen’s black hole.

As much as I love that particular drill, I don’t want him to abandon his quest and go buy a quickie replacement. That little Makita is more expensive than a bottle of mustard.

But then again, this might not be such a bad idea. After all, you can never have too many impact drivers on hand, can you?