The Urge To Purge

Don’t look back, you can never look back…

Don Henley/The Boys Of Summer

I’m in the middle of a major geographic move which I will write about in detail in coming posts. However, the first step in an exodus is to start clearing the underbrush of life so that your final freight situation is not only manageable but of a narrowed breadth and depth that is compatible with, wait for it, a fresh start.

And at 71, I am making such an effort to turn the page. So what to do? What is the tipping point on memory inducing mementos and souvenirs? When is too long ago and what is the value of reminiscing when your time has never been more valuable? And what’s the point when most of it leaves you in tears?

In my personal case I have accumulated not only my own detritus but that of my deceased sister, father and, unbelievably, my mother who passed some 50 plus years ago.  Having been through a few ‘clutter consultants’ I wasn’t ready to have those emotionally charged discussions. Several times I argued over the value of Marjorie’s G.I Joe collection which I ultimately decided to sell a couple of years ago along with a talking Pee Wee Herman doll. Time proved the deforestation expert right. I’m no worse off without them. On the plus side, my sister’s collectible set of Beatle figurines ended up in my daughter’s condo and it looks great.  But this effort barely made a dent

This year I stepped it up because there was a scenario where a friend was going to sublet my place. Sadly, he crapped out. But I was encouraged enough because, as per the last installment, I now have the time and the purpose.

So I started small this go round, with the drawer in my night stand. Seriously. When I dumped the contents on my bed, I was amazed as to what was in there: a cheesy Mickey Mouse pocket watch I bought at Disneyland in 1972 on the last trip my sister and I took with our mother. How did that thing survive for all these years? It hasn’t worked in decades and I have moved at least ten times in that period, maybe more. What about the Red Cross Senior Life Saving patch I got at camp in 1969? A Penn State photo ID with me in full afro? A lone turquoise stud from a long gone set for a tuxedo shirt I had made by a Navajo woman in Santa Fe forty some years ago? A ski patrol pin from I don’t know when, a grad pin from Vaughan Road Collegiate, tie tacks and cufflinks that go back to my Bar Mitzvah. You hold them, you linger, you wonder if things could have been different rather than a string of seemingly unconscious random life events. And then you toss.

If had I showed them to my kids they would shake their heads and look into booking me a timeshare at a Home For Aged Ranger Fans. Truthfully my daughter has enough artifacts from our little family to support a documentary, perhaps titled Capturing The Grosses and shares the bittersweet archive with me on a regular basis.  However it’s in a storage unit that I pay for, or at least the business did until I sold it because we held on to some financials. Now it’s on my dime which causes me to question why I can’t just toss it all. This is the problem with technology. We now print photos that don’t fade, record home movies on discs, keep our toddlers’ artwork in archival frames because…I don’t know. That goes for kids clothes, participation trophies, souvenir programs, models of cars we used to own and much more. I never saw my grandparents looking through photo albums because in the twenties, you had a photographer take one good shot at your wedding, another singlet of each kid, another on graduation, another in a service uniform and one more when your kids got married. Nobody kept stubs from concerts like we did. Now there are no more stubs which is probably a good thing. I have no interest in looking back at what I paid to get into this past summer’s Oasis concert, however good. The price was humiliating. And it rained.

Then there’s the clothes. In my closet there are shirts older than my son and shoes that might have a place in the Bata Shoe Museum. I gave my son some things that wouldn’t cause him embarrassment to wear and pulled together a couple of green garbage bags full of stuff and put them in the proper charity bins. No dent.

Since I am slowly transitioning to my new locale I have already relocated some key art like the signed cocktail napkin from the Eden Roc some sixty years ago when my mother met one Bob Kane and he sketched one caped crusader and his trusty sidekick for my sister and I with a personal greeting. There’s a few more things of this quality in my possession including a real live Fusilli Jerry from my lone credit on Seinfeld. That is not going anywhere. Neither is the little acknowledgement from the Emmy people on my participation in one of the greatest 100 shows of all time, if not the greatest. There’s more but it’s easy to find wall space.

But what of the goofy little figurines in the photo accompanying this screed? The Skipper, Maryanne and Gilligan? The robot from Lost In Space? The Marx Brothers? These were my sister’s and I brought them back from Los Angeles, complete with her antique display case after she passed. If you want ’em let me know. What also came with it were some of my mother’s childhood keepsakes from the Great Depression like a Shirley Temple creamer. What do I do with this stuff? My kids never knew my mother let alone Temple, the biggest childhood star ever back when my mother was a child. It all might have to go before I finally close up the Toronto digs. And some of it might have to go in the garbage. I have already given most of my sister’s remaining Beatle archive away to friends who are collectors.  When she first passed she left me with two shirts owned by John Lennon. Somebody called me unsolicited and offered me $20k. I have yet to decide what to do with her Barbie makeup box filled with correspondence from her life, which wasn’t quite significant enough to donate anywhere. Worse, her best friends in LA have passed so I have no outlet pass. The few times I have opened it have not been pleasant. Reading the letters is an invasion of her privacy. It all might have to go down the chute. Maybe I have to finally be unburdened to move forward. Or at least lurch into the daylight.

Several dozen books from our respective collections have been left by the mailboxes in my building and most have been snapped up. Many belonged to Marjorie and I saw that she made up for her lack of a college education by devouring tomes on the French Revolution and the fiction of Mailer and Updike. Thanks to her I read Updike’s Rabbit trilogy several years ago. I am starting in on her copy of Mailer’s The Naked And The Dead. Almost thirty years later my sister is pointing me in another direction. 

On the larger side I have an old Schwinn with a banana seat and the tall handlebars that has followed me around. It was given to her by Jerry and, well, it’s an artifact from my own youth and I might just hang it up on the wall of my new place.  I might know someone from the old neighborhood who will take her old unicycle

My son cleared out my vinyl records with a pretty good return. I have kept the albums with my name on them and I have some DVDs I want to keep. There’s a banker’s box of clippings from my days as a rock critic. Sometimes I reach in and grab one, always with the same reaction, shaking my head and saying to myself, “Geez, I was a pompous asshole.” Rock criticism in newspapers is a long lost profession and should be part of the displays at Pioneer Village. Or Illegal Colonization Settlement. Let’s not start.

I have some neat sports memorabilia including a 1954-55 Topps hockey card set that was my second pass at that checklist after my first set, started from the effects of my good friend Mitch Stambler’s brother George, who drowned tragically over fifty years ago, was built to completion and gifted to another friend decades ago on the occasion of hi brithday and subsequently ‘misplaced’. Thanks Mikey. The set in my posession was started over thirty years ago in LA with my sister and completed about fifteen years ago after several trips to the card shows in Toronto. That’s not going anywhere.

But the bulk of it has to go because, incredibly, nostalgia is for the young. Or at least those a couple of decades younger than me. It’s best enjoyed when you have lived a good life with mementos that speak to happiness and joy that one hopes to experience more of in a future, if lucky, can extend a few more decades. Not for us in our eighth decade. Especially when a lot of it just reminds me of difficult times, much of which I have spoken of in the last blog and I am loath to back the truck over one more time.

Dumping the furniture and the kitchenware will be easy. There are people out there who need it and I will find them.

Back on point, Facebook has become the Boomers living scrapbook, rife with tributes to parents that died decades ago, ticket stubs from concerts featuring bands whose members are now six feet under, reunion snapshots of duffers at a table recreating a pose from several decades ago complete with the original shot. Aging isn’t pretty. I saw a post the other day with a current picture of the former sexy actress Valerie Perrine, now ravaged by Parkinson’s and bed bound at 82. Did not need to see that.

One thing that has been revealed to me in all this was that most of my good times and even my career at the newspaper was all because of the love my father had for me. I couldn’t have asked for a better childhood even if that childhood lasted until I was 30. And, to a lesser extent, my mother and sister didn’t do me any harm. The Seinfeld stuff was solely because my sister pitched my idea to Jerry and Larry. I even smile a little when I see old pictures of Lisa. Although it’s too late to fix what wasn’t right, I was lucky to have her. A true character. So its okay to smile through a few tears.

I will tell you when I hit the dumpster if you want to bear witness to some old stories as the souvenir stand that was my life gets sent back into the universe. Not today however. Not today.

In the next installment – A Month In Italy, My Champagne Bucket List Trip.