The urge to write strikes me about every two weeks.
If you’re a writer, you get it. It is spontaneous, it comes from both outside and inside. The story brings itself to life, and drifts into the light. The shadowy thing that it is and was goes away and loses importance, so you write about it before you lose it.
There are always topics. There are always people in the news. There are always arguments to engage. Then, there are the occasional health stories, financial situations, the ongoing wars, the natural disasters that grab our attention.
I don’t subscribe to Tik Tok. I’m not on Instagram. I’m beginning my exodus away from a long-standing relationship with Facebook. It is no longer a way to reach anyone that used to be part of my circle. The echo chamber is not valuable.
I’m interested in the mechanics of that cloud of blue butterflies Brendan Gill describes in the sentence above.
I’m interested in both the physical drought that a nation is enduring and the intellectual drought that comes from an algorithmic schism, keeping conversations stuck in separate wheelhouses and having no interaction between them.
I’m interested in how people tell stories, either their own or that of something they are observing or involved with.
Right now, I have two projects drawing my attention, and I’ll write about one of those.
There’s a storage room, it has been part of my life for twenty-four years. It contains residue of two families’ belongings. It is a common story. Many people cannot part with their “stuff” and the many items that belonged to parents, siblings, children and of course, their once-young, former selves. We gather it all together and put it in a locker, because making decisions right away is simply too much, too hard and too overwhelming in the immediacy of passages. We shun the idea of “Downsizing.”
Downsizing.
For me, what that word means in the context of this attempt to “cram these paragraphs” is economic, spatial, forensic and emotional dieting. Explanation to follow.
Storage units cost money.
Some companies have affordable units. Mine has from time to time let me know that either they saw a need to move me on into a different size unit, or they were greedy and couldn’t resist raising the rent. If you use a storage unit, you might be experiencing something like this.
There’s a budget. When someone raises their prices, they change the value of the product. Economy of scale becomes the driver. You figure out how to make better use of the product at a lower cost, or decrease your need for the item.
Space isn’t infinite. Your rooms will not change in dimension, and as my late mother once offered, “the walls are not made of rubber.” Yes. I am learning that important lesson as I juggle between our home and the unit, looking for ways to make things fit better in less and more affordable space. It is a work in progress.
Forensics is all about gathering relevant facts and employing evidence-based thinking. That means looking at real things, intact or broken, examining, considering the story behind what you see, and assembling instead of a fluffed-up fantasy, a real, sensible, compassionate rendition of the past. Sometimes that body of evidence becomes a trail that has gone cold. There were items that had to be retained. The need to keep them no longer exists, but I had forgotten them and left them in storage.
Unfortunately, it is death that has driven the relief. It is long past time to let go, except for the emotional residue.
Emotions come. Touching the old stuff brings up memories, some with sharp jagged edges, others have warmth and softness. Reality tells the story that some of the items have to be let go of, because physical reality, deterioration, dust, mold and reclamation have made it unwise or unsafe to keep storing it. Paper, cloth, wood all undergo chemical and biological changes with time. Emotions, however, are held in our being. Until we cease to be, those emotions are still real, undecayed, with independent capacity of showing up in ways we never expected.
So I jumped into the drudgery of sifting through old items, figuring out a cost analysis, finding a home for them and asking that question, “Who else cares enough to come and knock on my door about this thing that was so terribly important once upon a time?” Dealing with the happiness, the sadness, the fear and anger that got tied to the items, all of that is before me in these horrid, run-on sentences describing a life of respecting what real people left behind. It is less an archeological dig, and more an emotional swamp. The swamp can never be drained. The best I can do is find certain emotional reeds, mallows, wildflowers that can nourish my own life, and leave all the rest for someone else to figure out.
When I touch the things that my mother touched, there’s a spidey-sense transition. There is a feeling like that flight of butterflies. She’s been dead for twenty-seven years, but there isn’t a day that goes by I do not seek her wisdom and skill. Her artwork, her restorations, her crafts, her organization is both here at home and in that storage unit. Bringing it all together in an omnibus move is an impossibility. I still do not comprehend how she did everything she did with her life, and how she held up under the weight of all that she took on. Guarding her keepsakes is still my last instruction received.
Some of the items are mine, and those items are only a little more easily dealt with. I’m certainly not the boy I once was, and I no longer am the man I used to be. I can learn to stop expecting myself to hold on forever.
A desk that once was my father’s, in his little study at the front end of our library room in a Chicago bungalow-style home, graced my office for a while before passing it along to my daughter who kept it as hers until time and tides swept her happy life out to sea, and she had to abandon it back to our safe harbor. My father told me that the desk had also belonged to his father before him. Unfortunately, old roll-top desks, while interesting pieces of furniture, don’t adapt well as workstations where a digital screen and a keyboard are the primary features. So it sits in storage, gathering dust.
There’s a dining room drop-leaf table, suitable for a dinner service for eight, and it is about ninety years old. It was ours at home before I set out into the world. When my late sister needed a small table for her house, mother offered it and purchased a new table and chairs. When that home and marriage came apart, the table came back. It had haunting stories of children being neglected by a father who discovered the bottle and other women. The legs were scratched, the ebony finish was destroyed by everything children do to furniture. I spent many long hours in my early adulthood restoring that table, giving it a new look, a new opportunity to have happier moments under our roof. It was here with us, until it was time for my daughter to strike out on her own. As I offered earlier, the wreck washed that table back to us. It tells many more stories now. It is a tale of survival.
Legacy isn’t something you just walk away from.
It follows and finds you, in the most unlikely of ways and in the most unusual of places. If like me, you have a gift and curse that is intact long-term memory, the bits and pieces are reminders of the foundation you were given so that you could become yourself. Managing it, keeping it right-sized, keeping it important but not overbearing and obnoxious, that’s a serious full-time job!
Every so often, someone asks, “Do you still have that memento, that article I left with you, that keepsake, whatever became of it?”
My fortunate answer most times is, “It’s probably around here, somewhere, do you need me to look for it?”
It is a good thing, to be able to give reassurance to old friends and new that I still think they are important enough to keep their memory with me.
Many friends have simply dumped the dross of their history and rewritten a curious version of self that reads like a J.D. Vance profiteering effort. This is not a story about a hillbilly but it might be an elegy. It is a flight of butterflies with blue and silver wings, and those little creatures seem to keep fluttering back to me, telling me that they’re quite comfortable being around.
This morning, I completed the migration from one room in the facility to another, including all the electronic paperwork. Serendipity smiled with a room right across the corridor. The juggling of items can rest for now, the urgency to make space for a story that is moving from my hands to my daughter’s is abated. We will get a bit of time.
I think that is all anyone can ask, please, let me have a little more time.
This adventure called life, all of its baggage, all of the memories, is very much that cloud of blue butterflies. Writing about it, telling people what I know, when I know it, offering a place to stop, hear a story, leave their own, share a distant cup of coffee while reading one another’s efforts, is to appreciate the gift of a little more time.
Sometimes, writing it down, is the only thing left to do.
