I must admit I feel like I am cheating when I simply go digging in my old computer files for things I can use on the Blog. It feels a little disingenous because I think I should be "creating" somethng new each day for the big countdown posting. Yet, I have always had a problem in that I write and write and write, but never RE-write. It is like sex for me, when it is over, it is over. I cannot revisit the moment because I need an entirely new moment. But perhaps if I started digging in the archives and simply "polish" some old pieces I might find a gem or two worth sharing. I promise not to pick anything that is obviously dated like my piece on "Desperate House Wives". Is that show still on the air? But if writing is any good, isn't it suppose to be timeless? You tell me. Here is a story from a long time ago when I was only 45 year old, and 20 pounds lighter.
HOARDING? WHY OF COURSE!
Over 5 years ago I took on the daunting task of moving my elderly mother out of the building she had lived in for over 40 years. I now consider hoarding a genetic defect, and I obviously got the “hoarding” gene from my mother. After all, my father, a European immigrant packed all his belongs in one small leather suitcase, which of course I still have. He understood the minimalist approach to life. My mother on the other hand would qualify for the Gold Medal of hoarding. Was it a mutation that occurred in the genes when the poor woman lived through the Great Depression and had gone without so much? What I found particularly interesting was her choice of things to which she needed to amass a huge quantity. What did I find? It would be less time consuming to talk about what I did not find. However, it would not be nearly as interesting.
First, I found her collection of wishbones sitting in a kitchen drawer. All that chicken she ate could not go to complete waste. This bag of wishbones kept her and I busy for about 20 minutes as we took them one by one and pulled them apart while making our silent wishes. Do people still believe in “wish bones”? When I was growing up my mother made fried chicken every Friday. When one of us found the wishbone we would jump for joy. As a child I was always wishing for things like albums and jewelry. I suspect my mom was wishing for a safe journey through life for all three of her kids. That day in the same kitchen more than 3 decades later, we sat pulling apart the wish bones and silently making out wishes. While I gazed at her crooked wrinkled hands wrapped around the tiny bony my wishes were always for her to have a happy and really really long life.
Each afternoon played out like another scene in our own “Moving My Mother” movie. My mother also loved collecting entire sets of dishes from every relative who ever died in our family. One afternoon I found a total of 6 full sets of dishes in large boxes. Each dish, cup, saucer and serving piece was individually wrapped in old newspaper for safe keeping. I opened each box and unwrapped a sample dish to examine the pattern.
My mother would quickly ask me
“Now whose dishes were those?”
“I have no idea. How would I know?” Then I examined the newspaper it had been wrapped in “Wait a minute. I know how we can solve this mystery” I exclaimed! “Who in our family died in 1968?”
“Aunt Ruth” she shouted like a happy contestant on Family Feud.
As my mother’s face lit up with memories of her beloved sister I cracked open the next box and begun unwrapping one of the coffee cups.
“Who died in 1983?” I asked.
“Oh that was Aunt Minnette.” She says wistfully while taking the cup into her hand. Her brother Mikey’s wife was one of her best friends.
A box of black and white photographs found in brown paper bags provided endless trips down memory lane and my mother easily recalled endless details including old addresses, phone numbers, and names of friends from factories where she worked during World War II. She never forgets anything. There is no irony that she also collects figurines of elephants. They are her favorite animal, and one that is known for having an excellent memory. There are elephant figurines on every window sill in the house and on all the coffee tables. A herd of elephants that could populate a small country managed to find room in my mother’s apartment.
But of all the collections, the one that belongs in the Guinness Book of Records is the dreaded Bag Collection. They were everywhere, drawers, cabinets, sheds, closets, under stairwells, behind appliances, inside other bags. There were bags made of plastic, and paper (with and without handles), and canvas and nylon with names from companies that had gone out of business long ago like Lyttons and Woolworths and Pint Size. There were too many bags to count. There wasn’t enough time. We had to be out in a year.
Our biggest fights were over the bags. “NO don’t throw that one out, it is strong and has handles.” She would scream. The inherent value of these bags was astronomical to my poor old mother. I offered to sell them on EBAY but she did not get the joke. I had to explain to her what EBAY was and after I did she became distraught. “You want my bags to go to strangers?” “Don’t worry I told her I will do back ground checks to make sure they find a good home.” “Don’t’ be so funny, we can use those bags” she always responded. It made no sense. She had not used them in 40 years. What was she waiting for? In her mind the potential for “use” far outweighed all other possibilities, especially disposal.
Thus, I got wise. While my poor mom who could barely walk, would sit from a chair giving me orders every afternoon I devised a plan to distract her. One day I went into her bedroom and opened a dresser drawer and found bags of necklaces from all those dead aunts who were kind enough to leave us their dinnerware. The plastic colorful beads were exactly as I had left them from days of playing dress up with my dolls. They were all tangled. I gave my mother a project! Now even she would be useful and she could do it while sitting. I asked her to untangle the necklaces. If they were untangled I could give them to my daughter to play with just as I had.
“Useful” it hit me like a thunderbolt. My mother hoarded, but was willing to give away anything to anybody if the thing would be “used”. My mother needed to feel useful and more importantly she needed all those things she had saved over the many years, the things she could never have had enough money for or the room to store them in during her impoverished childhood, to be “used”.
So on one of my many moving dates with my mom I watched her sitting at our kitchen table untangling the 50 or so necklaces she had accumulated while she mumbled about how much my daughter was going to love having the multi colored plastic beads that were the height of fashion in the 50’s. “You know your Aunt Ruth loved jewelry. She had to put a different necklace on for each outfit.” My mother lovingly talked to me about my many dead Aunts as if the necklaces she was untangling had brought them back to life in her mind. She never lifted her eyes from the task at hand. And while she stayed focus with her new found purpose, I secretly went back and forth throwing out all those bags in the dumpster sitting in the alley.
Towards the end of our packing odyssey, I found treasures only my family could appreciate like the collection of coin purses my grandmother had always used. Moving my mom was a lot of work, but finding space in my house for all those things I made fun of her for saving was even harder.
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