Whatever Works

Any catalog that arrives in our mailbox is hurled directly to the recycling bin, unless I pause to call the company, recite its serial numbers with the cold precision of an executioner, and send it to oblivion with a please-allow-six-to-eight-weeks-to-be-removed-from-our-mailing-list. To my way of thinking, a catalog — and especially a novelty catalog — is a tree that was needlessly felled, pulped and flattened in order to be made into a glossy book of useless plastic gizmos that are bought by people who can’t think of anything better to give Uncle Jim this year. I want Dubsie to walk through a world of cathedral forests, not a suburban plastic hell where people throw away $29.95 plus shipping on a pair of Pawz dog boots or a garden gnome or one of those baseball helmets with cupholders glued to the sides so some idiot can suck from two Pabst Blue Ribbons at the same time.

One of the more difficult catalog items to explain to Dubsie.

But at Christmas a crush of catalogs arrives no matter what. One evening in mid-December, when Dubsie was fussing and wouldn’t have another bite of chicken and rice, I pulled one catalog off the top of the pile and plopped it onto her tray.

It was Wireless, one of the most frivolous of the novelty catalogs, and it fell open to a spread that had, on one side, a tape dispenser in the shape of an otter frolicking on its back, and on the other, a cast-iron pig chime. Exactly the kind of useless crap that I hate. Dubsie, though, glanced down at the preposterous merchandise and got that look she gets on her face sometimes. It was an expression of total absorption, with her chin tucked and the mouth slack. Just the sort of mouth one can fill with spoonful of chicken.

So I swallowed my distaste for the time being and told Dubsie, well, this here is a tape dispenser, but I had to stop there because I remembered that she had never experienced tape. So I went and got a roll of Scotch tape and put a piece on her finger, and that was fun. She moved it from hand to hand and I enjoyed her enjoyment so much that I forgot about the chicken. And I resumed telling Dubsie, so, this is a tape dispenser that is in the shape of an otter, which is…wait, how do you explain an otter? It’s kind of like a squirrel, I told her, but without the bushy tail, and it lives in the ocean and eats oysters. Dubsie made a reverent examination of this tape-dispensing squirrel-otter. I went on to say, and an oyster is … but how do you describe an oyster?

Then Dubsie sneezed and sprayed bits of chicken and rice all over the squirrel-otter and his friend the pig-chime. If we had been reading Dr. Seuss I would have hurried to wipe it off, but who cares, it’s a catalog. I just turned the page. There’s, like, 47 more pages of random stuff. Let’s see what we’ve got here….

I quickly learned that the fashion catalogs, like Nordstrom or Macy’s, aren’t much use to a toddler.  Seen one page of Coach bags, seen ’em all. But the novelty catalogs gives a father a great deal to talk about as he stuffs food into a distracted face. Look, Dubsie, it’s a double-decker London bus AND a wine rack! And here’s a lava lamp … I used to have one of those in college … and a bansai tree, which is a miniature tree, from Japan…have I not told you about Japan?

The holidays are over and the catalogs have disappeared, since of course I cancelled them all. In January one managed to struggle through. It is called Whatever Works (tagline: Garden – Home- Pest Control). We’ve been working our way through it for the last month, but we’ve kind of memorized it by now, and she’s grown accustomed to my enthusiastic musings on the solar-powered garden turtle, the New York Yankees rubber doormat, and the poison-free insect magnet.  Now we’re working on identifying all the parts in the 105-piece ladies tool kit, and are struggling to identify the colors of all five models of the LED mini flashlight (to Dubsie, every color is called “geeen”).

The catalog is getting a little ratty, but maybe they’ll send us another one soon.