THINGS and THE POWER OF THINGS...

There is nothing like packing or unpacking to make you focus on the grip that things have on your life. My wife has taken to saying that all the things are more important to me than to her, and in its own way it is true, much as it rankles to have her say so. But it is not the things per se that are important, but the fact that each one of them is imbued with the aura of the people and events that surround it. Ensouled, as C.S. Lewis said of animals that are brought into a human household.

I wound up taking much more out of the kitchen than I had planned to do. Partly this is the inevitable gap between what I say I am going to do [“I will try to leave the house as much as possible as it is for everyone else, and take as little as possible for myself”] and what I wind up doing [“OK, if you say it’s unimportant to preserve the house as it is for the children, I’ll take it all”]. I took less than half of everything, I am pretty sure, but I suddenly found myself quite sure that I wanted almost everything I had had before she arrived on the scene. Now, that is not the noble, self-sacrificing Troll you have all grown so used to following in these pages, but there it is.

She almost gave away a frying pan which to her is just a lump of cast iron. I happen to know that over fifty years ago, when my mother was living in a basement apartment in Boston, and sunning my eldest brother on a blanket in the postage stamp “yard,” this frying pan came sailing out the window of an upstairs apartment where a major marital conflict was going on, narrowly missing my brother. [And no, even with all that has gone on recently, I do not wish it had not missed him.] My mother, with an acute sense of justice, refused to return the frying pan. So I refuse to part with it as well. The story makes the object more than it appears...

Likewise, I cannot bear to part with things that I remember from my grandparents’ kitchen, where I essentially grew up: the colander with the hook that latches onto the side of a bowl, the brown towels that finally gave up the ghost after years of service out in the studio, and the little aluminum pan one of my NY roommates took away with him because it looked the same as the one he had brought with him [well, it looked the same to him…]. So each of the remaining things that can revive those memories also had to go with me...

Even the things that I had taken on board from my birth father’s little cabin in the woods, hallowed by the memory of his second wife, one of my closest friends and a woman who would, I am sure, appreciate my sentimental dilemmas far as they would be from her own heart. She had lost everything several times in life, not least through the suicide of her first husband, and had acquired a wisdom I can only aspire to. So anything with her fingerprints on it is “mine”. The glass bowls, the Towle tray with nearly all the paint scuffed off...

And the things that I have from my German families, all of which have their tales of sorrow and suffering as well as delight – how could I bear to leave them in a house where no one really knows their stories? And gifts given to me, how could I leave them? Well, I could if I could see past the end of my nose. But the continual losses and ended connections of the last months have left me with a near panic reaction to the idea of being parted from anything else. Of course, only the people really count. But the things keep elbowing in with their reminders of the living and the dead, and clouding the issue.

None of this makes sense, and none of this is fair. After all, all these people [well, aside from my grandparents] are people I took enormous pleasure in making part of our life, and if I were a better person, not such a bitter person, I would make more of a point of leaving something to remind her of all these people, whose disappearance from her life I know she mourns. Maybe I can do it once I settle down and, well, settle down.

There were things that I was going to take but then decided that it would be better to negotiate for them: the blue-and-white teapot from Poland, large enough to serve a small regiment, which I had bought in an East German flea-market, the matching pitchers of various sizes... I did take the blue bowls from the same pottery, though.

And I did leave some things where they belonged – just not as much as I should have. My come-uppance will come, I am sure, once I come up against the reality of a Very Small House, and have to truck a bunch of it back down…

And we haven’t even begun to deal with the books. I am told that I should just give most of them away. Easy for her to say. She doesn’t live in them, with them, because of them. She has always had her feet in the real world, no matter how far in the clouds her head may have been. But those of us whose veins carry as much paper as blood are just in a bad situation when it comes to cutting down and winnowing out and giving away. I know that for the rest of my life this will be the likely connection to the books I have amassed over the decades, but the thought of dismembering the collection that took so long to put together is almost as hard to contemplate as dismembering a living thing. Well, knowing that it awaits me around the next corner or the next is bad enough.

Or, as I have said many times before, sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.
And yes, there is sufficient evil to go around already, these days.
By a country mile.

Pray for me.
Stay with me.