Stuff

My mother got out of brain surgery and after a couple weeks in rehab she went home. One sister traveled five hundred miles north to take care of her and both were up during the night many times. A night nurse was hired for six hours so my sister could get some sleep but that didn't seem like enough so I said I'd pay for two more hours. Both sisters were going to do some tag-teaming for the weekend to save money and sleep during the day, but I said I'd pay for the weekend nights also.

She was under twenty-four hour care with my sisters making all the meals and helping in all other ways of which I probably wouldn't have been capable. After a couple days she finally realized how hard it was for us, my sisters anyway as I was living my dream of summer in Mexico, and she agreed to go into assisted living. (Poor old people. Poor us. We are heading there.)

She was wheeled out of her apartment one Saturday morning through the delicious food booths of the crowded farmers market happening just outside her door as she metaphorically said goodbye to having a home of her own. 

She has no assets except one painting by a famous artist, it will be sent to New York in December for auction, and if it sells for the estimate of a hundred fifty grand it will pay for a few years at her new residence, a facility called Brookdale. 

My third sister arrived, cleared out the apartment, and everything was either thrown away, given away, or stored. Like me my mom is a packrat and saved everything—I'm sure she still has drawings I did when I was six. Once again I was missing the heavy lifting although I did pay my sisters for their volunteer work over this stressful two-month period.

My sorting sister asked me if I wanted to keep an old reel-to-reel recorder and a big box of tapes and I said yes. But why? On them might be recordings of me and my older sister when we were very young. No one has tried to listen to them for decades, if ever, yet I am attached: What might be on them? Why would it matter? I could throw the whole mess away, and probably will, and our lives would be no different, right?  I told my sister to put them in storage and when I arrived in a few weeks I'd spend five minutes looking them over and thinking about it. My response seemed inadequate to her.

I am such a packrat I have saved phone messages over the last twenty years, my favorites and also angry ones from women telling me off—they were so irrational I had to save them as some kind of proof. I saved a message from a friend telling me in tears that her boyfriend had left her. I saved a message from a woman singing her rendition of “You Say Its Your Birthday” on my birthday. I have a message from a woman agreeing to go on a date with me twenty years ago: she said she would be there “with bells on.” I saved a message from a distressed woman who worked for me threatening me and telling me to never contact her again. (We're friends again and I look forward to playing her evil message to her some day.)

Why do I save so much? This is my life and I have evidence. When I have an experience I write it up, type it up, and then go back at random moments and read about it again. During my summer here in Mexico I have written thousands of words about life in the Mendo hills twenty, thirty, and forty years ago, as well as two years ago and last year. I have lived and have a record of it. Maybe I'll never do anything with it, like turn it into a book, but the brain activity is probably healthy.

Last year I put all my home movies from the eighties on DVD. I was dismayed to see myself because I looked fat and ugly and sometimes seemed stupid and obnoxious. Other friends took one look at themselves and didn't want to watch anymore. One friend enjoyed, with some tears, watching the wedding of her parents, her father having died last year. My niece refused to watch herself as Peter Pan when she was a kid.

We live, we accumulate stuff, we get rid of stuff, and our survivors have no interest in our stuff. What value could there be in that old reel-to-reel? I'll probably toss it in the dump and doubtless I'll get another “story” out of that. The stories may live on or become more stuff that no one wants.

I'm reminded what I told my aspiring writer friend: “No one gives a shit about our stories. We love our stories. And sex sells.”