Too Much Stuff

Aside from the trip itself, the thing we’ve been looking forward to the most is emptying the house.

Neither of us is particularly good at avoiding clutter, and over the last few years I’ve felt increasingly oppressed by the resulting coverage of every horizontal surface with accumulated souvenirs and promises of ‘this will be useful someday.’

My dream is a house where every cabinet and appliance has a domed lid, to prevent me from piling anything on it.  And embedded with shards of broken glass, like they put on the tops of walls to keep the pigeons off.  Suzie’s dream is to get a snow shovel, a wheelbarrow, and a dumpster.

Last week we finally started chasing our dreams.    And learned that it’s worse than I thought.

I knew that we had too much furniture – entire extra bedroom sets, dressers, shelves, couches.  I knew there were cabinets full of kitchen tools I’ll never use – most of which are broken.  And then there are all the inherited boxes, glanced at only briefly before being stashed away years ago.

Somewhere, in the back of my mind, I’m sure I also knew that I had filed away old phone bills.  I just never realized what it all adds up to, or how good I am at efficient storage.  My recurring thought was “WHY?!”  Why would I do this to myself?  In what universe could any of this crap ever be useful to anyone?  And why did I buy 4 huge filing cabinets to put it all in?  Viz:

• Electric bills from ’92 ($26 for a whole month of gas and electric!)
• Report cards from 1976 (apparently I had potential, if I could overcome my chronic lateness)
• Every pay stub from the early 90’s on (for half of them, the cost of storage was more than the amount I was paid in the first place)
• Every parking and speeding ticket, oil change receipt, brochure from every car we considered buying, dossiers on every fender bender
• Thousands of cancelled checks. And empty check books.  And check registers.  And the check pads, empty except for the deposit slips at the back.  A nine inch thick stack of cards from old wallets – credit cards, appointment reminders, membership cards documenting the entire history of the video rental industry.  And the empty wallets themselves.

I showed Aaron a cancelled check, from my electric bill in 1994.  “Is it a report card?” he finally guessed.  A friend saw it, and thought it must have been a check I never sent in – forgetting that we used to get our old paper checks mailed back to us each month.  This particular check, written to PG&E in California and drawn on my bank in New Jersey, had to have been flown back and forth across the country at least 5 times.

Halfway through emptying the filing cabinets, I have now filled 14 grocery bags with recycled paper.  After piling it all on the floor, of course – at which point Ethan came in.  “I thought you were trying to clean out the house, not turn it into a disaster.”

And we haven’t even gotten near Suzie’s several trunks of archives.

The drinks of our elders

And then the old liquor… At the bottom of one tower, acting as a table, was a box that I assumed was more paper.  Turns out it was the bottles from my grandfather’s liquor cabinet.  He died in the early 80’s.  One of the tax stamps had the year of sale: 1969 – making the scotch in that bottle 62 years old.  Another was a sealed, but flat bottle of Cold Duck.  A bottle of Armagnac was half encrusted in a termite mound, from sitting at the back of the wooden cabinet one unfortunate year decades ago.  (The liquid inside seems to have aged well, at least.  (After the Chinese snake wine in Kyrgyzstan, apparently I’ll drink anything.))  About a third of what we found was in good enough shape to add to the pile of “bottles to finish drinking before we leave,” though I think the maid was adding water to the Tanqueray.

Our trip itself is in some way a manifestation of mid-life.   So discarding (or consuming) the documentation of my history is an acknowledgement that there will be no biographer poring over my nursery school grades.  It was momentarily amusing to revisit the past, but in truth, nobody cares.  My best years may not be behind me, but my future is more focused on personal fulfillment than on documented accomplishments.  And my kids do not need the added burden of sorting through all this crap when the time comes for them to clean out our house someday (in a hundred years, of course).

But our gift to them is not just releasing them from that depressingly familiar experience, but hopefully showing them that it’s not necessary to keep so much stuff themselves.  (They are, after all, our kids.)  We love our reminiscences, but the purpose of our memories is inspiring the next new thing.  We’ll keep the pictures, the books, and the maps, but slip the anchor of the personal archives.