I have two
boxes in the back of my bedroom closet. That is all that remains of my parents’
lives.
Things they bought. Things they cherished.
Things they saved. Things they probably thought they needed are all in two
boxes in their son’s closet.
I was thinking about those boxes recently
while looking around my own place. Where in the hell is all my stuff
going to end up?
I am sixty years old. Maybe instead of
figuring out better ways to organize everything I own, I ought to start
figuring out why I own it in the first place.
I have a shot glass collection. Why?
I don’t collect shot glasses anymore. I am
not opening a shot glass museum in Riverside. Nobody is going to come through
the front door and say, “Jesus Christ, Jumbo, thank God you kept the shot
glass from Milwaukee.”
I have about fifteen coffee mugs. There
is one person in my apartment who drinks coffee, Me. I could go three weeks
without washing a coffee mug.
Then there are my AAL speakers that I
bought at MusicCraft in 1989. These goddamn things are enormous. They are
bigger than the speakers Lynyrd Skynyrd used at stadium concerts. I have
dragged them through more than three decades of my life because somewhere along
the way they stopped being speakers and became my speakers.
There is the difference, but it is 2026 and I could buy two bookshelf speakers
the size of toaster ovens that sound better.
So why do I still have them?
Because getting rid of stuff is harder
than acquiring stuff.
We spend the first half of our lives
accumulating. Then one day we look around and realize we have become the
curator of a museum nobody asked us to build.
My generation may be particularly good at
this. Our parents and grandparents saved things because they remembered when
things were hard to replace. You didn't throw something away just because a
newer version came along. You fixed it and you put it in the basement. Because
you might need it someday.
Then we came along and spent our lives
living in an America that became fucking good at selling us shit. Bigger
televisions, better stereos, another coffee mug, another jacket, another
kitchen gadget, and box after box delivered to the front porch.
When we ran out of room, somebody sold us
plastic containers so we could organize all the shit we had already
bought. Maybe that is where we got it backward.
Owning less is better than organizing more
and I don't think this is
only about possessions.
We accumulate other things too. Grudges,
obligations, expectations, old disappointments and even relationships
maintained out of habit.
Ideas about ourselves that might have been
true twenty years ago but are now ancient Chinese secrets.
We organize those things too. We put them
into their proper little boxes and carry them from one year into the next.
Maybe some of those boxes can go to Goodwill this coming weekend.
Eventually somebody else is going to have
to decide what to do with everything we couldn't bring ourselves to get rid of.
I already know how this story ends for me.
Someday I will be laying stiff at Zimmerman-Harnett Funeral Home. Kevin Harnett
will wrap a rosary around my hand, everybody will say their goodbyes, and they
will send me upstairs to see my family and friends in heaven.
And I won't be taking anything with me.
Not my White Sox coffee mug. Not my Old-Style pitcher with the matching tavern
glasses. Not the shot glasses from Vegas, New Orleans, and the Cotswold’s.
I sure as hell won’t be getting those AAL speakers
through the Pearly Gates. Although I wouldn't mind seeing St. Peter's face when
I tried. I could play that Led Zeppelin song about the stairway.
What I leave behind that matters won't fit
into a box anyway. It will be whatever the ShepKids remember.
Something I wrote. A story somebody still
tells. A lesson I managed to get right. Maybe a laugh. Maybe somebody
remembering sitting on my balcony drinking coffee out of one of those fifteen
damn mugs.
That is the best part of the whole deal. The
mug doesn't matter, but that morning sure did.
My parents taught me that lesson without
planning to. Two entire lives have been reduced into two boxes in the back of my
bedroom closet, but my parents aren't in those boxes. They are everywhere
around me.
Maybe at sixty the job isn't finding a
better place for everything. Maybe it is deciding what deserves a place at all.
Keep the things that serves you. Keep the
things that tell the story. Give away what somebody else can use. Throw away
the bullshit and make damn sure that when your life eventually gets reduced to
a couple of boxes, the best parts of you aren't in them.
Okay Chalkheads, it is Wednesday and you
won’t find gusto and astonishment packed away….
Tits Up….
