I am about as fine a specimen of the North American Pack-rat as you could ever hope to find. I have strategic caches of personal excrement up and down the East coast from New York to Virginia. When confronted by the threat to our nests posed by seasonal global warming (aka “SPRING CLEANING”), rattus maximus instinctually moves laterally away from the threat, passive-aggressively taking refuge in time-consuming “higher priority” behaviors such as work, income tax preparation and March Madness. The female of the species characteristically retaliates with deadlines and ultimatums aimed at the male’s genitals, i.e., If you don’t throw out that ugly chair / Penthouse Magazine collection / Budweiser Beer lamp / etc., by this weekend, you can forget about ever having sex again!
Such was the uncompromising position in which I found myself one fine spring day. A partial list of items that my wife, Rose, felt simply had to go included the following:
• Item: one (1) sheet of corrugated fiberglass.
Left over from some home project. Perfectly good, no sense in throwing it out. Might be useful, you never know. Rose knew. Out it went.
• Item: one (1) super-8 film projector and screen (broken).
These had been passed on by Rose’s great-uncle Abe. He told me he didn’t need the projector because he had had all the home movies he shot after “the” war (WW2), transferred to video. When I asked if we could watch them, he told me that the box with the tapes had been lost but this didn’t seem to distress him. He had the memories, he said. At eighty-five he still has the proverbial mind like a steel trap. I have a mind like one of those wind up egg-beater thingies you still see at garage sales sometimes — kind of fun to play with and good for stirring things up now and again, but it retains next to nothing. Without some very specific prompt, like a photograph or a significant souvenir, I can forget days, weeks, even whole years it seems. I think this is why I am such a pack rat — if I throw away something, I am throwing away all the memories associated with it as well, chucking whole pieces of my life.
• Item: three (3) sets of dishes (clear glass dinner setting for four, a “hand-painted” floral coffee service and a “contemporary style” salad set), all in the original packaging.
The above were given to my wife and I three years ago as gifts at a combined housewarming/our son Sam’s second birthday party. In drawing up the invite list for this affair, my wife and I decided it would be poor form not to invite Sam’s Panda Class caregivers from his day care center. How could we overlook them when we were inviting all of the Panda parents and their young? When we did not receive RSVPs from Mesdames Yolanda, Inez and D’Shauna we inquired in person at the day care center — would they be able to join us for the housewarming/birthday festivities? They looked at each other. Miss D’Shauna, the appointed spokeswoman, finally replied:
“How much you pay?”
General consternation.
It took several minutes to convince them that yes, we were “for real” asking them to come to the event as our honored guests, not as “the help,” and no, this wasn’t “some kind of joke or something.” Reflecting on the moment now, I can think of nothing sadder than the wide smiles that then graced their faces; that a simple act of what we considered common decency could be so unexpected to them, so dear.
They arrived early for the party dressed in their Sunday best while the rest of our friends trickled in fashionably late in their fashionable shabby-chic clothes. Miss Yolanda, Miss Inez and the formidable Miss D’Shauna each brought one of the aforementioned dish sets as a present, all wrapped in the same paper, as if they had pooled their resources, gone to the same sale at Macy’s to find inexpensive gifts that would not appear cheap, shared the same wrapping paper to pinch pennies. We received many more impressive gifts that day, but none that were more generous. I wanted them to feel welcome in our home, to feel comfortable, but they ended up spending the entire party back in a corner of our son’s room, seated carefully on his bed so as not to wrinkle their good clothes. It was like they were all Cinderella but none of them got to dance.
I’m sad to say, we never used the dishes. As moving as the gesture was, we really had no use for the kind of dishes you buy people who actually need dishes. The boxed dish sets, never opened, lived out the rest of their days at the bottom of our hall closet, a sort of compost heap of memory. Over time, any keepsake that goes in there gets slowly broken down, first into mere “stuff” and then, inexorably, to plain junk. The lucky ones are re-gifted to friends or donated to the Salvation Army like the dish sets eventually were; all too often things end up just fertilizing the local land-fill.
• Item: one (1) off-white country-cute bedroom set, comprised of the following:
A “distressed” antique farm furniture dresser for which Rose had paid a distressing amount of money at a chic store in Manhattan back when distressed furniture was still chic; one antique sideboard used to house our TV that was purchased at an antique store in upstate New York that is no longer in business, carried home in a Volkswagen Van that we no longer own, to a house in which we no longer live; two faux antique bedside tables ordered from Crate & Barrel and one white faux antique king-sized bed frame purchased at IKEA to match the antique dresser, sideboard-cum-media cabinet, et. al., and complete the bedroom set.
Of all things, it was the cheap Ikea bed with which I couldn’t bear to part. Ikea breaks my heart, every time. It’s those cute little Swedish names for everything, that’s how they get you. You go in looking for something cheap to hold your crap and end up bringing homeVestby or Pax. It’s like adopting a puppy. Rose and I got Tromsnes – just about the cutest little faux antique metal bed frame you ever did see — six years ago during that nowhere week between Christmas and New Year’s. We were down in Virginia at my folks’ house for the holidays and stepped out to the local Ikea during a three-day lull in conversation. I’ve given up trying to explain to Rose that my family isn’t rude, just Midwestern. Every meal in my parents’ house starts with my father calling for “a moment of silence” and one time Rose just rolled her eyes and blurted out, “How about a moment of conversation?!” Anyway, after picking out a Tromsnes for our very own, we waited like expectant parents for her to show up at the customer service desk and then carefully shepherded her past the long lines of those dangerous Ikea carts that never, ever, roll straight and then, with tender loving care, tied her to the roof of our car.
After braving a snowstorm on our way back up to New York and a shit-storm of profanity while I wrestled with the useless little Ikea wrench-thingy during Tromsnes’ awkward assembly stage, the bed became a vital part of our household; the place we retired to read our books, eat our meals, watch our TV, have our fights, make our love and, occasionally, sleep. Our eldest son was conceived on that bed. I was sure of this. But Rose wasn’t, not a hundred percent, and this inch of doubt gave her the necessary emotional wiggle-room to kick Tromsnes to the curb. There was this Jonathan Adler bedroom set Rose just had to have for the new apartment. I don’t care much for sleep in general and, no offense to Jonathan Adler, even less about sleeping stylishly, but I do enjoy sleeping with my wife which is why, over the years, I have learned to delegate the responsibility of winning arguments to her. So, my dear Tromsnes, fare thee well. Play nice with the other stuff in the landfill.
It strikes me now that the more stuff we have, the harder it is to possess things of real value. I find myself longing for what it must have been like back when my parents grew up, when people still “paid good money” for things, still “shopped for necessities” instead of just “running to the store to pick up some stuff;” back when “getting a good value” still meant getting something valuable instead of something cheap.
Even though, by the time I came along, my parents were enjoying a certain garden-variety level of suburban affluence, my mother always retained something of the little girl who grew up poor in Indianola, Iowa. She could say things like “brand new” and “store bought” without irony. She had the most elegant fingers, my mother — long and tapering, with the fingernails always “just so.” And yet, they were still hands that knew work. Mom could fold shirts with alacrity, with charm even; make them look better than new.
She took tremendous pride in her jewelry collection. The jewelry itself was nothing special but the collection of it was inspired. Each bauble, mainly inexpensive silver rings picked up at the mall or by my father on some business trip, had it’s own discreet zip-lock bag in which it resided along with a brief note cataloguing its provenance in my mother’s distinctive and, to the end of her days, perfect script.
“Sterling silver and turquoise necklace purchased summer 1983 on trip to Solveng.”
“Silver ring set with Azurite Stone…gift of John, Christmas 1999.”
Mom brought the same curatorial eye the preparation of care-packages. No grease-stained boxes of busted peanut butter cookies for her. My mother’s care-packages inspired a shock and awe from the other kids at camp and, later, from my college roommates; almost as if they were artifacts of some alien intelligence.
I will always remember the magnificent teacup. It had strong, simple lines and was the color of buttermilk with a blue stripe lining its rim. What made the cup unique was a sort of kangaroo pouch on its side for holding your spent tea bag once you had brewed your cup to the desired strength. In the same care-package as the magnificent teacup was a sparkling tin filled with assorted tea bags in a zip-lock bag for freshness. Also a barn-red electric teapot that was just the right size for my dorm room. Because I never throw anything out, I can rest easy in the assurance that I still have it somewhere. The reason we packrats need to save absolutely everything is because there’s no way to predict what will become invaluable; the only way to identify a precious keepsake is by looking in the rear view mirror.
Just as I was finishing up my wife-mandated spring-cleaning community service, I came across a large iron key with a leather shoelace fob. The key was the color of dirt, heavy, impressive in the way of all very old things. I remembered vaguely that once upon a time my mother had given me this key, told me its story. But now, because of my eggbeater brain, the story was gone and, because of a heart attack, Mom was too. There was no way I would ever know what door the key had opened, what lock it had turned. Maybe it was the key to the city. Maybe just to some old barn. There was no point in keeping it, none. What could possibly be more pointless than a piece of memorabilia without the original memory attached? All I knew about the key was that it was something handed down; the memory of a memory of a memory that, thanks to me, had now been forgotten. I wanted to throw it out, just chuck it, but found that I couldn’t. I didn’t feel like I had the right.
I did not possess this key; it, and all the other keepsakes with which I could not part, possessed me. Through the fickle alchemy of memory and regret this old key, this strangely heavy piece of cold pig iron, had become a part of me. Not the part that missed my mother now that she was gone but, instead, the part of me that regretted missing her while she was still here, that was too busy being a young man to listen to an old woman; to really hear my mother when she told me the story of the key.
I kept it. Or it kept me. At least for another year; at least until the next time my wife forced me to do some spring-cleaning. I returned the key to its place on the shelf in the hall closet and turned off the light.
See you next spring.