_____________________________
A
Crack in The Teacup
“When you’re old
and gray and full of sleep
and nodding by
the fire take down this book... and gaze
at the soft look
your eyes had once and of their shadows deep...”
~ William Butler
Yates
One
of these days, I’ve promised my son Aaron, I’ll reduce the length of my life
to the equivalent of a single breath; I’ll collect all of my data (once
quaintly referred to as “records”, “experiences” or “memories”), and compress
them onto a single chip. I’ll scan all my photos and documents, my medical
records, and my grocery lists, I’ll digitize my rolodex, my books, my cassettes
and CDs, audio file all my thoughts and remembrances, and of course ensure that
everything is sync’d, searchable, and geo-tagged. And then in an oxymoronic
gesture of our time, and much to Aaron’s chagrin, I’ll drop it into a cardboard
box and stuff it in the attic next to all the other boxes of my life that I
don’t know what to do with, but cannot bear to be without.
It is
these boxes that have recently been the focus of our lives as we rummage
through the accumulation of memories, hopes, and dreams from the past 40 years
in anticipation of our move to Mexico, vainly struggling with what to keep and
what to throw away. Aaron of course views these things as the quaint but
useless artifacts of an era whose time has past and, fearful perhaps that all
this may get left on his doorstep, continues his exhaustive efforts to prod and
poke me into the digital world of the twenty first century; a place where
efficiency triumphs over sentimentality, economics over excessive accumulation,
and your entire life takes up no more space than that tiny photograph of your
high school sweetheart that lies safely tucked away somewhere in one of these
many boxes.
I
will at some point keep my promise to Aaron to digitize my life, but I will
never bring myself to part with the birthday card he gave to me when he turned
five, the now cracked teacup from my mother’s china collection, the tie clip
that my grandfather wore but I don’t, the campaign buttons from a latent
political awakening in Clarksdale, Mississippi... the list, and the boxes, goes
on and on. All these things mark a place in time in my life and the thought of
parting with them evokes a visceral fear of somehow becoming untethered from
this world and floating away along with my past. It is all this that I will
some day bequeath to Aaron and, along with my ashes, will become my everlasting
burden to him. Look for a bewildered e-mail from him at some point in the
future; “What am I to do with my father’s life?”
I realize that I cannot continue to stagger
through life burdened by the weight of all these things. This has been the
luxury of having a storage unit; for a monthly fee memories are maintained and
momentarily revived at will, hopes and dreams are kept on life support until
we’re ready to pull the plug and face the inevitable reality, and yet I can’t
seem to let go.
As we
rummage through the appalling number of boxes it is surprisingly difficult to
look at some of these things and realize that much of it does in fact belong to
a world whose time has past. The photographs of Cathy at 18,000 ft. in the
Cordillera Blanca in Peru, or on the Haute Route through the French Alps
capture the essence of youth and exuberance, stamina and strength, but the
boxes of climbing ropes, ice axes and snow anchors will not be used again. When
we put them away the last time of course, we didn’t realize it would be for the
last time.
The
‘good to 20 below’ down-filled sleeping bags once so essential in Tibet, and
seemingly incongruous with Mexico, we’ve now convinced ourselves will be
indispensable in the off-chance that we decide to attempt the Paine Circuit at
the southernmost tip of Argentina as part of our much fantasized journey
through South America, even though for the last 5 years we’ve never even
considered getting closer to the ground than the 16” high, down-filled, pillow
top mattresses on the 25th floor of the Chicago Marriott. The ensuing decisions
seem to follow this pattern, each rationalization more outrageous than the
last. It seems I cannot let go of my past.
Despite
their prominent and easily accessible perch on the living room bookshelves for
nearly half a century the still half-read, leather bound volumes of Boccachio,
Descartes, and Francis Bacon are confidently repacked in the certainty that one
rainy day they will be dutifully devoured and our lives will be the richer for
it.
The
piano, dragged 3,000 miles and man-handled for 40 years up and down 2 and 3
story walk ups from Washington DC, through St Louis, and on to Seattle will,
with the luxury of time afforded us by retirement, surely now fill our lives
with Chopin and Rachmaninov rather than the current limits of Chopsticks. The
list goes on and the carefully re-wrapped objects of our affection are a
reminder of how much is yet to be accomplished.
When
I attempt to assure my own immortality by presenting my most cherished
possessions to Aaron I’m sure he’ll look at me as if I’m just another one of
the many homeless people on the streets tethered to enormous caravans of
shopping carts filled with black plastic bags bursting with stuff they do not
need and cannot use. He’ll look at me sadly, shake his head, then turn and walk
away. Much as I would like to think otherwise, immortality is apparently not
measured by the trails of cardboard boxes we leave in our wake.
However,
despite family protests to the contrary, I’m convinced that these things are
the thread that guides us back thru the labyrinth. They reconcile past and
present, loss and continuity, or perhaps they are simply an attempt to keep the
past a part of the present. These things are all cherished pieces of our lives,
but at this point we can neither embrace them all, nor throw them out. Lives
and families; promises made, dreams imagined, burdens carried, love embraced
and sadness endured, its all here. 40 years worth.
Why
the attachment? There is not a danger of forgetting, although I suspect that
will reverse itself in the coming years. The difficulty, as with most things we
love of course, is in letting go. There is a good deal here of what Joan Dideon
describes in her astonishingly insightful book ‘The Year of Magical Thinking’
where she relates the process of coming to terms with the sudden and unexpected
death of her husband, John Gregory Dunne. The things he left behind create a
connection to him and to their life together. These things seem to be imbued
with a kind of magical quality; as long as they are safely kept, the connection
to him remains. She describes not being able to bring herself to throw away his
shoes because if she does she somehow also casts out the spell, and with it her
husband, and this is something that she cannot bear to do. There is a finality
to it. A past that cannot be retrieved. A life that cannot be put back
together.
At
once utterly priceless and completely worthless, does the fact that Mom’s
teacup is now cracked make it less valuable, more valuable, or simply a more
poignant reminder of what our relationship was or perhaps might have been?
Attachments
are a good thing, but as we move through life sometimes letting go, whether it
be of your mother’s hand, the handlebars, the side of the pool, or the side of
an airplane, - free fall - is much more exhilarating. In the end I guess this
is why we chose Mexico; one more adventure, one more time, but now with a
trailer load of cardboard boxes many times the size of what we had anticipated.
Reminiscing
while cuddled up next to the fireplace, jabbing my finger irritatedly at my
cold, aluminum-shelled iPad in an attempt to retrieve our digitized family
photos is not the sentimental journey I had once envisioned for some distant
winter’s evening.... still, as I insist on telling Aaron, there’s the
possibility that all this new electronics stuff will turn out to have been just
a passing phase, and my thought of living out William Butler Yate’s poem while
slowly turning the worn and dog-eared pages of our family photo album splayed
open across my blanket-covered lap, may yet come to pass.
