The weight of things and people past

Contrary to all the advice to leave most of our belongings behind when we moved to Mexico, a semi-trailer nearly full of furniture, books, kitchen utensils and china, garden tools, pictures and unidentified "stuff" followed us down here. It wasn't even an act of conscious hoarding: Stew and I became so frustrated and enraged trying to pick through thirty-five years' worth of accumulated things that we finally told the movers to just pack and ship whatever was left.

We outta here. We skedaddled out of Chicago in our 2003 VW Passat station wagon with junk packed everywhere including a roof carrier, and with an old dog and two meowing cats, to start a new phase of our lives in Mexico. One of the cats, Paco, is still with us and occasionally lets out disconsolate howls at night as if he's never quite recovered from the experience.

Seven years after that, just as we'd been warned, a good eighty percent of the stuff we brought down is gone, given away, sold, tossed. Yet some awaits final disposition in sealed boxes.

Svend Hammer, a furniture-maker of some renown
 in Stavanger, Norway,
who was Stew's
 great-grandfather. Stew's middle name is Svend.
So during the past couple of weeks we've launched a final offensive to pare down what we have left. Some of the decommissioning has been easy, especially books we never read and some that we did but shouldn't have bothered with. The only exempt genres were gardening and photography. A number of books about Jesus and spirituality—forgive me Jesus—didn't make the cut though family Bibles and paperbacks about Buddhism and meditation stayed. Novels we thought were particularly enjoyable, by Graham Greene, Jhumpa Lahiri and others, are still on our bookshelf.

But just like when we attempted to pick through our belongings in Chicago, the selection process accelerated and became less discriminating as we realized how much junk still chokes our lives. Impatience peppered with a bit of anger reappeared.

Then we waded into boxes of family pictures and memorabilia and the noisy tossing of junk suddenly slowed to a solemn pace, mired in a swamp of sentimentality, memories and frequent pauses. We reverently caressed the ancient family pictures and newspaper clippings, some featuring Stew's great-grandparents in Norway in the late 1800s, as if they were priceless icons.

There are shots of relatives with patriarchal beards or waxed handlebar mustaches. Or bulky women so corseted into shape they look as if they're about to asphyxiate. Most of these people we never met, or have long since died. And entre nous, some of those we knew we didn't particularly like even when they were around.

So why is it so difficult to toss that family stuff and instead we continue to burrow through it, talk about it and re-stuff it in envelopes to postpone a final reckoning? Why and for whom are we saving all this stuff? At which point does one let go of the past?

Indeed, so far none of this family memorabilia has made that fateful leap from our hands into the trash can.

We thought we had a computer-age solution and started to scan all the pictures and place the digitized facsimiles in e-books. That would facilitate review—and maybe some oohing and aahing by remaining family members and a few curious strangers—but that idea is really too facile, a cop-out.

A book of souvenir postcards of Stavanger. Photos by Jakob Dreyer.


Postcard showing Stavanger's Boknafjord

How can an ancient book of postcards from Stavanger, Norway, where Stew's paternal relatives came from—a memento so fragile and frayed that we had placed it in a plastic bag—be replaced by a digitized image on a computer screen?

Or the corny, handwritten poems my paternal granddad Emilio used to give me on my birthday? Their value is not in reading the words on a monitor—he was no Robert Frost—but in my being able to hold the yellowing, blue-lined pages and almost feel the sentiments expressed through his meticulous, fountain-pen calligraphy, with no cross-outs or erasures. He must have loved me a lot to go through all that work every year, yet I remember very little about him or even what he looked like. (I saw a picture, though, and I recognize his jowls in the mirror as I get older.)

Scanning and digitizing in fact has compounded the problem: Reducing all these images to an e-book is a lot of work that so far has not reduced the amount of physical stuff cramming one of our closets.

The dilemma continues. These are not objets d'art of any intrinsic artistic, decorative or pecuniary value. We're talking photos of unremarkable people in goofy bathing suits by the shore of a Midwestern lake, not Impressionist masterpieces of Parisian picnickers one would hang on the wall to wait for their resale value to multiply.

There are no heirs to whom we could bequeath these supposed heirlooms, assuming they would even be interested in accepting them. We remember the final garage sale at the home of Stew's father in Marshfield, Wisc. before that gentle old man, who had lost his marbles and could no longer be trusted to live alone, was moved to a nursing home. It was not a scene awash in sentiment, but of folks foraging through the modest remains of the Hammer household, haggling over the price of one tchotchke or another. No one expressed any interest in the boxes of family pictures, which is how they ended up in Stew's hands and eventually in our house in Mexico.

Perhaps all this memento-gathering is just one more attempt to beat the rap of one's own mortality by pretending that someone, years from now, will care or take interest in our own passage just as we respectfully preserved the images of predecessors we didn't even know. Hey, we're important, we say. Lookee here, we didn't really die. We still live, albeit in shoe-boxes filled with photographs in or in a fancy e-book of digitized images buried in a shelf.

But the enterprise of preserving memories need not be that gloomy or cynical. During the forty-two years Stew and I have been together we have kept taking pictures, of each other, of places we visited, of the homes we laboriously remodeled, of our endless parade of cats and dogs. Even before our relationship received legal recognition last year, or explicit recognition from our relatives along the way, the photos kept coming, recording the highlights of our life. If we didn't record our own relationship, who would?

There are hundreds, probably thousands of photos. That's what happens when someone in a family pretends to be a photographer but is incapable of tossing any of his work.

Just yesterday Stew discovered a box of color slides which was as much of a surprise as finding a mummy under the bed. The slide projector, a Bell & Howell relic that weighs about five pounds is a sure candidate for the trash.

But the pictures are definitely worth sorting through, curating in some way and preserving in a collection of e-books. They will mean a lot to us as we celebrate our life together. I'm sure we'll go back and review them time and again as more years go by.

If anyone who comes after us wants to look through them and giggle at our bell-bottom pants, our aboriginal haircuts and hubcap-size eyeglasses, good for them. We will have done them the favor of neatly placing the images in e-books. At least they won't be burdened by boxes of otherwise meaningless photographs.

Still pending is the question of what we will do with the photos and relics left by our forebears. For now, they remain in bulging envelopes awaiting the completion of the tedious process of editing, scanning and placing them carefully and respectfully in the e-book taking shape inside my computer.

We'll see.

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Comments

  1. Hmmm, I've helped a friend hold two estate sales recently. It is sobering to see possessions that were cherished sold for 10 pesos or more. The latest was all kinds of personal jewelry. It made me want to go home and get rid of EVERYTHING so no stranger could ever paw through my stuff.
    My journals and anything I didn't want a stranger to see have been shredded and will never be available for posterity to ever see.
    However, I do have boxes and boxes and boxes of photos labeled and peoples names on the backs of each photo. Indeed, it is POSSIBLE whoever sees them won't know who Aunt Peggy or Cousin Nancy is when the time comes. Oy vey. I understand the dilemma..........

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    1. Babs: Maybe you, Stew and I can open up our own library, like the GWBush Library and put our crap there, including our ugly paintings (like his)

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  2. Hi guys. I often read your blog but am one who never comments. Sorry about that. Today, though, I was distressed to think you would discard your family history. are there no nieces or nephews? If not, perhaps a local history library in Marshfield, Wisc where your grandpa lived. there are lots of county history collections in the US that would love to help preserve history. Maybe some google sleuthing would help you find them a home. Carol

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    1. Come to think of it, there is a Norwegian American Museum in Chicago which would take at least the old book of postcards from Stavanger!

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  3. I inherited my Grandmother's photos, they were the only thing I wanted from her estate/ She said once that if her photos ended up in a flea market, she would haunt us all...

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    1. Take care of those pictures. You don't want to be haunted by your grandmother. That doesn't sound good.

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    2. She was orphaned by age six, those photos were her roots. I like the ones with men sporting enough firearms to sink a whale boat. A fun thing about digging into the family history, so much of what was the family history as handed down by word of mouth is just not true. Buffing up the story is nothing new.

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  4. Still pending is the question of what we will do with the photos and relics left by our forebears.

    Of course, there is not really a question when you already know the answer. An answer unstated is still an answer. What will happen with your unsorted memorabilia is the same thing that happens to any gene pool that ends in the puddle of being The Last of the Line. Someone will bag it up and toss it. The only question is whether we or some stranger does the tossing.

    I adored my father. He did a lot of things for me to shield me from loss -- including taking my pets to the vet on their final journey. He did that even when I was an adult.

    Well, he is gone. And I need to take my own pets on that trip. There may be a lesson there for boxes filled with yellowing memories.

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    1. There's a comforting thought: "A gene pool ending in the puddle of being the Last of the Line". Try not to think too much about that. LOL

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  5. Like you and Stew, all of my worldly good accompanied me to Mexico. And that included the family memorabilia.

    Let me propose a solution. If homes can be found for Mexican mutts, finding homes for family memorabilia should be an even easier matter. Those photographs don’t require food and house-breaking. Surely, there are souls out there who have no family and who might just appreciate instant heritage. Give your family memorabilia to them. Bang, they’ve got instant heritage.

    Oh, so now you’re telling me that those people are perfectly happy leading memorabilia-free lives.

    On to a second solution. There are plenty of people out there who’re faced with the same problem you and Stew have. Enter into an agreement with a single or a pair of those folks to trade family memorabilia straight across. The swap completed, each party is free guiltlessly to dispose of those postcards, letters, photos and other souvenirs of lifetimes.
    So, you just can’t face burdening a friend or acquaintance with that shit?

    Here’s the final solution. Put them all in a box, addressed to a random person at a random address, no return address, and send them off. Sort of like a Viking funeral by post.

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    1. The Viking Funeral... Hadn't thought of that. Thanks.

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  6. It's an interesting problem. I've got a lot of family photos and memorabilia, mostly stored up north. None of the younger generation of the family seem terribly interested in having the stuff, and I have no kids. I've thought of digitizing it all for the younger set, because in that form some day they may be glad to have the images...but what to do with the stuff certainly remains a dilemma.

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    1. Marc: You understand my problem perfectly...

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  7. Hey Al ~~

    Loved your take on taking all your earthly possessions with you. I have experienced the same thing and know how you and Stewie must feel. I sort daily through the treasure trove of trash and try to eject some of it. What a weight our possesions carry! We become owned by stuff we thought we needed. I've tried to cram some of the old photos into my PC but nobody's ever going to find it (not even me). What's more I don't even know who many of the people are in the photos I've collected.

    Curiously so, my sister, Sr. Mary, DC, who now resides in the Daughters of Charity's retirement home in Evansville, Indiana, has somehow become caretaker of the belongings of those who have died there. She saves and sorts; some stuff to their archives or library, other stuff for the relatives to take away and the rest to the dumpster. A job I'd never want, even though my father was an undertaker and had to dispose of the last remains.

    What we really need to retain is memories. And I'm pleased that you and Stew have parented so many cats and dogs (people, too). That's what's really valuable in this lifetime. At least, that is, in my mind.

    I love your blog posts and am always happy to find them in my inbox. Keep up the good work~~your writing is always graceful and full of wit. Muchas gracias!

    Vince Quinn

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    1. I can see how maintaining the records of the nuns who live there would be a terrifically worthwhile thing and a testament to all the good work those nuns did. Plus there is certainly the potential interest of people in the future, particularly since many of these orders are literally disappearing.

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  8. Gee, Al. My comments always go to your spam filter, notl to be released until they're staler than a 1967 Girl Scout cookie. I'm just not gonna comment any more.

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    1. NO! The only comments I've spammed were from some weird guy who was trying to sell stuff and made ridiculous comments....So keep writing.

      al

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    2. Al, just blog is just too good to quit commenting on. Since Blogspot doesn't have pre-approval of comments like WodPress does, you could install Disqus like Steve did. Or shut off moderation and turn on the Captcha. That would let everything go through that can't complete the Captcha.

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  9. Al, you do have your own Port Aransas problem. I can see several books here. And a lot of time to get them organized. I see at least 3 books. Stew's family, your family, and your lives together. It is emotional isn't it. I wish you good luck with the project(s). Now do you understand why my PortA projects drags along and progresses in sudden bursts of work from time to time. Billie

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  10. Billie: Your book is going to come a hell of a lot closer to art than mine... Wait until you see the photos!

    al

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  11. Occasionally I am inspired by a curiosity or need to forage through the couple of deep 9X12 boxes that hold my array of photos accumulated through my increasingly lengthy adult life. Most originated by me, but many historic transfers from a previous generation. Each time, I think I should be sorting and thinning, to better prepare for the day when I too will need to cross the border with stuff in tow. Scanning seems like a good isea - but discarding the originals? I shudder to imagine the difficulty...

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