Alas poor cabinet door, I knew him well

Sometimes I think animism is hard-coded into our psyche.

My new kitchen--vain, arrogant, and self-superior--is nearly finished.

Today I hauled the tattered remnants of my old kitchen cabinets to the dump (the Shady Grove Solid Transfer Station).

I backed the pickup truck up to a large concrete well. At the bottom was a dumpster the size and depth of a boxcar. I began throwing in the scraps of solid wood framing, and doors of plywood and veneer.

I paused for a moment as I held a cabinet door, and considered keeping it as a memento of the kitchen I had for nearly ten years. I felt disloyal tossing this wood into the mass grave. The clunky solid-wood square door handle, so familiar--yet being discarded and replaced with particleboard, melamine foil, and polypropylene. Why? To please the presumptive shallow tastes of an unknown home buyer; someone whom, at that moment, I knew I would dislike. Yet, for this person, nay for this person's money, I would betray a reliable friend of ten years.

Before that sentimentality could take hold, I devised a way to use one of the larger panels to more quickly scoop the smaller pieces out of the pickup bed.

Functional to the end.

I also had a box to take to the electronic recycling area. Inside the box were more old friends: The shortwave radio that kept me connected to the larger world while I was in the Peace Corps. My first CD player, which, after Peace Corps, accompanied me on a 3-month-long motorcycle trip around America. That was when my one and only CD was Elvis Costello's Brutal Youth.

The box also contained a broken cordless phone of no sentimental value. I salvaged it. It will be a useless prop in my "upgraded" kitchen. Take that, home shopping sucker.