It seems to be a weekly Washington Post custom: an inane, meandering first-person sob-narrative that only a woman could–or would want to–write, I’m embarrassed to say. What’s with our sex? Last week it was jobless poet Susan Yuzna blaming George W. Bush was for her failure to get a position as a college English professor in San Francisco. Now it’s Post Magazine writer Annie Groer on the heartbreak and the agony of–having to move to a smaller home and get rid of the rec-room full of useless junk that you bought at yard sales. I quit reading a few sentences after this one:
“The two-headed chicken, a marvel of the taxidermist’s art, was nonnegotiable.”
No, I didn’t really care about the chicken’s fate in this article that struck me as another kind of stuffed fowl. Instead, my sympathies went with Groer’s poor spouse, who had to endure all the soul-searching:
“For six weeks before our Big Move, my husband and I walked through every room and closet of the quirky three-level house in Chevy Chase we had owned for a dozen years, the one with near-mythic storage capacity, discussing the fate of virtually every object therein.”
Here’s how the husband’s end of the discussion probably went: “Dump it.”
And that’s when I stopped. At least Groer didn’t seem to be blaming the Bush adminsitration for forcing middle-aged couples to downsize their homes when the kids move out. But you can bet that someone will propose a government program to deal with that soon enough.