SIFTING THROUGH THE STUFF

In 2022, we sold the home and farm where we had lived for 20 years. Before this move, I spent many months sorting through a lifetime of belongings. Now, almost two years after moving into our new home, I have spent countless additional hours going through boxes of business files, personal treasures, clippings, birthday cards, photographic prints, letters written to me, and copies of those I wrote to others, my children’s drawings and so much more. And I am still not done!

My adult daughter asked me if it was worth devoting so much of my life and energy to such a non-productive task. “Absolutely,” I tell her because I have been reliving my life, thinking about people I’d forgotten, places I’d been, and adventures that transformed me.

I’m in my 83rd year, and many friends and acquaintances are gone, dead, and passed away. I learned about some of them from Google. About others from Facebook, where the faces I had known have been replaced by ancient grandparents who faintly resemble my companions from earlier decades. I’m tempted to call up some of them. But I don't.

It's all so poignant, a powerful meditation, and I am just one of a handful of living souls who can attach any memories to the scraps of paper I have rummaged from those boxes. I found a magazine cover for an old issue of the Dairy Goat Journal. What a plethora of memories: The woman, M, I was dating in Manhattan; her upstairs neighbor, G, who was going nuts teaching elementary school and hammered nails into lumber to release her frustration and tension; G moved to a small farm in a teeny, remote town of 50 in Oregon and raised goats; M and I visited G one summer and discovered her free and healthy communal family, picked unbelievably tasty vegetables from the garden, and savored homemade goat yogurt that was fermented in the stable warmth of a sleeping bag; we all went skinny dipping in the river; I wrote an article about G’s goats and sold it to Dairy Goat Journal for $42.53; a few years after M and I broke up, she intentionally overdosed…and was gone.

When I die, this cover will be tossed with a question: “What’d he save this for?” I have hundreds of pages and images bursting with recollections like these. They have been overwhelming me.

I’m reminded of the classic 1941 movie Citizen Kane, which is often regarded as “the greatest film ever made.” The movie is about a famous, super-wealthy publishing tycoon, Charles Foster Kane, who mutters one word on his deathbed that no one can understand: “Rosebud.” The movie follows a journalist who examines Kane’s life, searching for the meaning of this word, but he never solves the mystery. In the last frames, as the belongings and detritus of the magnate’s life are tossed into the fire, the camera zooms in to reveal what the word represents to Kane—a happy memory from his childhood.

Like Citizen Kane, my memories are mysteries to most people who know me now. I value these thoughts passionately, and I assume others feel the same about their past moments. That is why I am obsessed with returning to my children and a few friends the letters and cards they sent me long ago. Some recipients are delighted to recall who they were back then, what they were doing and thinking. Others couldn’t care less and were puzzled why I saved their items. What’s your take? Would you have any interest in reading letters you wrote to loved ones when you were 25 to 50 years younger?

I remember when my father and stepmother were in nursing homes or had died, and we four sons all gathered in their house to sort through their stuff. We had a huge cardboard box in the living room. We dumped in hundreds of papers, files, folders, and photos of people our parents loved, knew, and enjoyed but who were strangers to us, meaningless and disposable, silent to our indifference. It was sad, but we were in a hurry, all racing to be done with this emptying before selling their home.I’m sure that after I die, most of what’s left from my sifting will get chucked by my survivors. If my kids take some of it, it will be stored in their closets for their idle retirement hours. The other day, I found all the letters I had written to my mother from the moment I moved away for college. She also had hundreds of birthday and holiday cards her friends and family sent to her. She died in 2008 after some years in a nursing home. So I probably salvaged her stuff between 15 and 18 years ago, put it in a closet or attic, and forgot about it. I looked at them all recently and found a postcard I’d sent her in 1987 when I took my wife, Jacqueline Dedell, to lunch the first time we met. It was a business meeting at the Union Square Café in Manhattan. There were postcards on the table, and we both signed the few words I wrote. How special is that!

I suspect most people have treasures and mementos stored in boxes in closets, basements, and attics. Don’t you? Do we hang onto these relics of our past lives to keep us connected to earlier years, happy times, and youthful moments? I’m a great believer in focusing on the present, minimizing regrets about the past, and daydreaming moderately about possible futures. Nevertheless, losing myself in my history—when I could travel effortlessly, socialize more energetically, and create the future phases that are now my pasts—is clearly where I am.

I always imagined having lots of time after I retired to organize my thousands of slides and photographs. Then, I never retired. I did pull back. Reduced my workload. I discovered that more physical limitations slowed me down and tired me sooner. I noticed that if I used to manage over 50 phone calls daily, I now had enough interaction after ten conversations. I have no idea how to deal with all those boxes of slides of my life’s highlights or the 8 mm videotapes that recorded so many birthdays, vacations, and other special moments.

I even have scores of answering machine tapes. I didn’t reuse the same single tape as most people. I wanted to preserve all the voices to enjoy them again when I became old and feeble. So I have them—my daughters when they were under 10 (they are over 50 now), parents, friends, women I dated. Yet I have never replayed any of those tapes, though I kept the machines that made them.

These days, we all have cell phone cameras documenting millions of bits of our lives: a child’s first steps, food or a pretty table setting, the clothes we wore to a special event, etc. We don’t need to save the paper, the letter, the card. We can simply photograph it. Yet, in the end, there will be too many images to review and select for posterity. The phones will be kept, and hopefully, loved ones will know the password that allows access to these ginormous image collections, and a few hours will be spent by our progeny reviewing our years of being alive. At least no one will need barns and outbuildings to store boxes filled with these reminders. A few flash drives will do nicely.