Stuff and Things

 I read an article recently that started with the line: "Your kids don't want your shit." and it got me thinking about stuff and things.  It's been eight years since we did the clean out of my childhood home and that experience was at times heartbreaking, hilarious and bittersweet.  We picked through 43 years of memories there and while our hearts were breaking, it is a memory I cherish as it brought back so many things, people and events I had forgotten.  We found mementoes, keepsakes, oddities and treasures; we discovered long forgotten items and some things we had never seen and would never know how they came to be in my parents' possession.

My father's top dresser drawer was a spot we never rummaged through, even as nosy kids. That clean out felt like a violation of his privacy, even after his death.  Aside from the expected items like socks and hankies, was a small wooden box that none of us had ever seen.  Inside this rather unremarkable box was a small treasure trove of his life, and ours.  Some of the items included:

• A Flash Gordon pin from a gumball machine (my dad's childhood bedroom closet was painted to look like Flash's ship).
• A button from a St Thomas Academy uniform (his high school).
• A dance card from a winter formal (my mother's card with dad's name filled in for every dance) represented the youthful beginning of their lifelong romance.  
• The tiny hospital bracelet from April of 1964 that said Girl-Summers signaled their transition from couple to family with the birth of my eldest sister Jenny.  
• A folded third grade report card from Nativity School showed how proud he was of Melissa's scholastic achievements.  
• An embroidered oval patch with the name Henry on it from the stuffed dog I was given when I had my tonsils removed that I had thought lost forever when it fell off.
• A small red shoe that I recognized as coming from Emily's Strawberry Shortcake doll.
• A heavy metal dog made from assorted computer components from the 1970s represented his work life in the early days of computer programming.
• A large caliber bullet from his father's days as a crime reporter for the newspaper.
• A matchbook from the Lexington, my parents' favorite fancy restaurant, representing the many celebrations, birthdays and gatherings that called for a fancy meal.
• A card signed by him that proved his unrivaled prowess at family games of Trivial Pursuit.
• The remembrance cards from the funerals of his father, brother and mother represented his grief at the loss of his original family.
• A photo of him holding Fiona, his first grandchild, showed how much he loved the legacy of grandchildren and the family that surrounded him.

This small box showed us what my father kept close to his heart throughout his life. The fact that it was not dusty and forgotten, but in a drawer he opened every day meant that this box, filled with small and seemingly inconsequential items remained important and relevant to him until the day he died.  That box had left the family home with him and moved to the small, assisted living apartment that he only spent a few nights in before entering the hospital for the final time. 

While the rest of the clean out involved furniture and collectibles, the good china and the liquor cabinet, these were the items that were the most important.  The tiny and insignificant were elevated to high importance and relevance simply because he saw them that way. 

I have a couple of dear friends on that same awful and wonderful journey with their own parents and I both sympathize and, in a weird way, envy them a little.  The ritual of sorting through a lifetime of things is a huge pain in the ass, time consuming and can feel like a burden, because it is.  At the same time, it is a last chance to wander through their life and your own.  Once you've weeded through the big stuff, the obvious and the heavy, you get to the small and random things that made the most memories. 

I have been slowly going through my own house and I'm getting rid of stuff I simply don't need anymore, mainly because I hate moving them around in an effort to find space for other stuff that I do use.  The kitchen is the main culprit here, the plethora of single use gadgets in a kitchen borders on the criminal or the insane. When you add in the stuff acquired in a burst of culinary optimism, you have a storage catastrophe on your hands.  In tackling my kitchen in recent weeks, I have unearthed a number of head-scratchers:

• Baking pans (I don't bake that much, it's too precise and doesn't leave room for improvisation without involving math and math is terrible)
• 4 - 9x13 (I don't have teenagers at home anymore and I need to accept it)
• 3- 8x11 (am I baking multiple cakes at a time?)
• 1 - of a size I don't understand
• 2- 8x8 (again, one?)
• at least 8 loaf pans (because sure, I bake that much bread)
• 4 bundt cake pans (I love them and I'm keeping them)
• 3 glass pie pans (these came from mom's kitchen, which is REALLY weird because that woman did not bake a single pie that I can remember)
• A hot dog cooker and bun toaster (a gift from one Christmas, this is a seriously specific item with no workable alternative uses)
• Three, yes THREE gadgets that promised to easily and quickly remove the kernels from a corn cob (because why use a knife, that's for peasants)
• Four sets of those poke in the end corn cob holders
• Five can openers (three the bottle opener/can punch and two of the other kind)
• 2 elaborately complicated corkscrews (we are not wine drinkers and if we do, there's a good chance that it has a screw top...shut up)
• A camping oven (bought in a moment of delusion that I was going to camp...I did not)
• So. Many. Food. Containers. (to my credit, I had weeded out the bowls with no lids and lids with no bowls a while ago)
• An alarming number of flashlights (I blame my beloved for this one, he's weird about them)
• More bamboo cutting boards than a rational person needs.
• Two sets of steak knives (because I'm serving steak to a football team on the reg?)
• Meat shredder claws (they actually work, but so does throwing the cooked meat into your stand mixer for a bit)
• Two egg poaching cup sets (neither one made a proper poached egg and I had to find other methods)
• A chip bag heat sealer (trust me, buy of box of binder clips from the office supply store)
• A truly baffling number of water bottles and travel mugs (STOP giving me drinkware, I'm not even kidding)

Having tackled the kitchen and freeing up an impressive amount of storage space, I tried to pass these culinary treasures to my children.  Both declined as they are not newly out of the nest and setting up their households, they are both well on the way to acquiring their own shit that will vex and annoy them in the coming years.  The next step was to make the offer of my kitchen finds to my friends and the rest of the family (a little tricky because most of my family lives well away from me) and got rid of a few, but not many, of the culinary treasures.  Lastly, the local Buy Nothing Facebook page (that I started for EXACTLY this mission), and within a day nearly everything was taken.  This is the secret, just offer up the stuff and the universe will take care of it.  I tried doing a garage sale once...never again.  I do not have the patience, the money is marginal and I just want stuff gone.

I don't collect anything, thank goodness.  We had to figure out what to do with my mother's collection of teacups with saucers, her Dickens Village Christmas decorations and dad's massive collection of historical newspapers (think every major headline from the 1930s to the 2000s).  These were all items we knew were important to them but none of us wanted.  What to do?  That's the really hard question because anything short of saving them as a kind of memorial seemed disrespectful.  Therin lies the rub, we didn't want it, didn't want to throw it away and we couldn't find a lot of takers within the family.  We invited friends and family to come and say goodbye to the parents' house, the site of so many gatherings for so many years and to take things with them.  It may seem macabre, but it ended up as a really beautiful way for the people who loved them to have a physical reminder of the people they loved.  Something they can walk into a room, look at or pick up and remember a specific moment in time, an event or just a slice of the past that makes them smile.

I will continue on my personal quest to thin out my belongings, fortunately I (think) I have time.  I don't want my kids to have a huge amount of stuff to go through, but I actually DO want them to sit together, turning odd items over in their hands and talking about a specific event, a funny story or just a random memory that the object brings to mind.  I plan to leave a box like my dad's for them to find, I have the beginnings of my own small treasure box and didn't even realize it until recently.  Clearing out a lifetime of physical items and all those memories is painful, wonderful, happy and sad. It's a fine line, I guess, but one we all will walk eventually.