Goodbye Melvin Dean, I hardly knew ye!

I'm still in spring cleaning mode although summer has arrived. Now that I no longer do any coaching or administration because my running club and I are no longer an item, I've got lots of time on my hands on weekends.

After ordering cable TV over the winter and having the novelty of channel-surfing 500 vacuous channels wear off, I looked around my house and noticed all the neglected tasks. In the basement are about a dozen boxes I packed a few years ago, labeled with the initials of my three sons.

Since none of my now-adult children has responded to any of my entreaties for years, on trash day this week I brought one of the boxes, labeled "JBL-bed buddies," to the curb and left it for the garbage truck to haul away to the dump. First, I looked inside and said goodbye to the box's contents of the Hulk Hogan wrestling buddy, the Cabbage Patch kid Melvin Dean clutching his "birth certificate," the Wild Thing that made my oldest child shiver when he opened it one Christmas, and the Daffy Duck doll which my mother sent him two decades ago.

The box was gone when I came home from work. I'm moving on, and will throw out another box each week until they're all cleared out.