My brother is moving to Thailand. Last time this happened I stored some things for him. “It’s not much,” he said. “Not much” came with an inventory list: boxes and their contents, antique book presses, bookbinding supplies, crates of leather, some complicated looking tools, a very old camera, a satchel. I could go on and on. Most of this stash still dots my house. People say, “What is that?” and I tell the story for my brother.
This time around, he calls me and asks if it is okay to sell Nanna’s crystal wine glasses at a garage sale – “I use two of them regularly, but there at 14 in a zippered box,” he says. “No,” I suggest. They’re a set. I’d keep them.”I don’t mention that my mother would spike a fever if he sold them.
He agrees to keep them and sighs. “I have the disease,” he says. “…the keeping disease. Dad has it. So did Nanno.Anything with a motor, anything with grease on it, I keep. All this stuff is like an anchor around my neck.”
He also keeps anything remotely old made of leather, gadgets that tell the temperature of molten metal (he and my boys huddle over the stove and do things with boiling water when he visits), a hardware store-sized collection of colored alligator clips, a multitude of timers and buzzers and magnets, wire, batteries, fuses, inexplicible digital instruments, old spoons and bee-bops that shock you when you touch them. He’s a dream of an uncle and less scary than this list would imply – the last few years, he has taught physics to high school students.
“It’s a thin line Robert,” I tell him. “Maybe some of it is an anchor that holds us to our roots.” I’m trying to make him feel better – or trying to make myself feel better.
I too have the keeping disease. I used to adhere to some semblance of sifting and discarding, but the last five years even that has given away to the pure folly of “put it in the basement”.Someday, I convince myself, I know I’m going to make something out of “it”. Someday I may need “it”. Someday I will fix “it”, refurbish “it”, or find the perfect spot for “it.” Someday my kids may want “it”. My excuses stretch on and on.
My brother wasn't the only one contemplating the hard sorting, the keep-toss-keep-toss game that, for many, is fraught with indecision and angst. Perhaps I over speak, but then again, should you have the keeping disease, you know just what I mean. And, if you have not been afflicted with it, you know someone who is and you are picturing odd shelves of “treasure” as you read.
Yes, I had sympathetic-organizing pangs because of the monumental task facing my brother, but I also knew I had to face my own pile of boxes and history-almost-alive, tackle the toys that aren’t used, my grandmother’s broken chair with the “broken” sign hanging on it, the empty computer cases, the really ugly incomplete chess set, the Lego pieces that multiply in the night.
So, when some bug that bites every few years finally does, I decide to dig in.
I am ruthless. I gather 14 bags, the entire time fighting two bone-deep anxieties. What if someone needs this someday? And, what if I forget the memories? But, ruthless I remain.Soon I have the upstairs hall lined with green bags to give away, recycle, donate and trash. They are gone by nightfall.
Later that evening I am silent. In my head I try to sift through the bags and piles wondering what mistakes I made, what I gave away, what important milestones or images I’ve deleted for lack of a memory-jog object.
I forget that I can’t stop time, not even by hoarding artifacts to remind me of the each important past minute. “What have I lost? What have I lost?” I think, forgetting I have lost nothing substantial at all.
Things are replaceable. Things don’t breathe or beat blood.
What is essential we hold in a spot that is more secure than any basement: we store the ones we love in our guts, our hearts, and our souls. The rest is extra, decoration, accumulation. What is essential we carry with us; it can’t ever be thrown away.
