Most people in the world have the problem of getting enough on which to live.
Many in the United States have the opposite problem: how to get rid of too much. Weight Watchers, Ebay, flea markets, and rummage sales are designed to help us reduce our excess. As soon as I read about a neighborhood rummage sale this summer, I decided to unload my guilty burden. Better to do it now than leave it for the kids to sort out after I’m in the old-age home watching reruns of “Star Trek.”
I took care of the easy part first. I dropped off my sign-up slip with the rummage sale coordinator. I was committed; I couldn’t back out. Now came the dilemma: what to keep and what to toss?
One of the joys of my life has been watching movies. When I was 7, my dad took me to see “Forbidden Planet,” the MGM cinemascope sci-fi extravaganza that catapulted the quality of space operas into the major leagues. Then he took me to “Earth vs. the Flying Saucers,” with special effects, created by stop-motion animation genius Ray Harryhausen, of flying saucers colliding with Washington monuments. Awesome! From then on I was hooked on cinema.
When VCR technology made it possible to own the movies I loved, I made the fatal mistake of trying to collect the films that gave me the initial thrill. Now, as I looked at tape-filled shelves and boxes, I asked the key question that collectors everywhere need to confront: When was the last time I watched that tape of “Mutiny on the Bounty” or “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea”? Time to unload.
Whether my decision sparked something in the collective unconscious of our family I cannot say, but our two sons, home from college for the summer, initiated their own clean-out mission. Incidentally, this was without prodding from either parent. Really.
Day after day after their summer jobs, they kept up the momentum of sorting out memorabilia from grade school and high school, including such treasures as their first Communion workbooks, sheet music from “Jurassic Park,” the menu from the dinner my wife and I enjoyed at Columbia Hospital after our second son was born, and stacks of drawings that make Picasso look like an underachiever — in my completely unbiased opinion, of course.
I deliberately absented myself from their sorting. I did this because I knew that I would want to keep all their drawings, report cards, and even the notes from their teachers. So, like an addict not yet strong enough to resist temptation, I stayed out of it.
It wasn’t really “the stuff” I wanted to hold onto. After all, stuff is bulky and devours more and more space. It’s the memory associated with “the stuff.” Human beings are built of memories. A string of memories over a lifetime, combined with a core of ethical, spiritual convictions, builds an identity. When we get together with family and friends, we share memories and beliefs. That’s how we rediscover who we are. When Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia erase memories, we feel ill at ease that our loved ones are no longer the same people we once knew. Who are they now? We do our best to love them just the same, because we believe that their essence, their worth, is eternal.
The second reason we hang onto stuff is the emotion connected to the memories. Emotions anchor memories. Events unconnected to emotion sink into the river of oblivion. When sports fans watch a series like “Baseball” on PBS, they are reliving the emotion and shared experience of those ninth-inning, come-from-behind victories.
Attachment to memories and emotion proves that we are capable of attaching to the people associated with those memories. The trick is not to allow attachment to stuff to become a safe substitute for the real attachment to others. The second trick is not to allow the past to rob us from living in the present. It will always be easier to control and organize stuff than to cope with the challenges of keeping alive relationships with moody, unpredictable, and complex human beings.
Memories we can idealize. Human beings are real. They can be idealized only in memory.
So how well did our little rummage sale do? The push-mower went for $2 and a bunch of tapes went for $28. Best of all, I gave away an armful of movies to a friendly acquaintance from our parish when she spontaneously stopped and chatted for awhile on our front porch on that bright, beautiful Saturday morning. Stuff in exchange for a conversation. Now that’s real value.
(Pankratz is a marriage and family therapist for Catholic Charities Milwaukee regional office.)
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