{"id":148,"date":"2009-06-17T15:15:41","date_gmt":"2009-06-17T22:15:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/basweeney.com\/writings\/?p=148"},"modified":"2009-06-17T17:06:45","modified_gmt":"2009-06-18T00:06:45","slug":"stuff","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/basweeney.com\/writings\/?p=148","title":{"rendered":"Stuff"},"content":{"rendered":"

STUFF<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/span>I’ve waited too long. <\/span>It’s nine in the morning, but the heat is already climbing. <\/span>It’s too late now for my usual walk in Eaton Canyon. <\/span>On a day like this, the snakes will be out, weaving their sinuous paths on top of the silty trails. My daily exercise will need to take another form. <\/span>I decide to ride my bike the one mile to Jean’s house to pick up her Silver Anvil.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

<\/span>The Silver Anvil is an award given annually for outstanding performance by the Public Relations Society of America. <\/span>Jean was awarded hers in the 1960’s. The award itself is about ten inches tall, shaped like an anvil and weighs upwards of eight pounds. <\/span>Why I feel this must be shipped to Syracuse University where Jean’s life and papers are archived, is beyond me. <\/span>An over-scrupulous sense of duty has always weighed on me. <\/span>And now it is in my backpack.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

<\/span>The last time I rode my bike to Jean’s was the day she died, four months ago. <\/span>Peggy had called to say the hospice doctor had told her Jean was going fast, though at ninety-three and bedridden for a decade, it had hardly been a rush. <\/span>But I rushed to see her one more time. <\/span>I listened to her rasping, rattling breath. <\/span>I told her I loved her. <\/span>My car had been acting up so I left after a while and took my ailing Volkswagen in for a new battery. <\/span>The dealership had brought me home. <\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

<\/span>My phone was ringing when I walked through the door. <\/span>Jean had died. <\/span>I hopped on my only available transportation and rode my bike to her house. <\/span>Peggy, Jean’s caregivers and I waited quietly for the mortuary people and then the hospice worker, who flushed all of Jean’s drugs down the toilet. <\/span>I mourned the morphine. <\/span>As the attendants<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

wheeled Jean’s body out on a gurney, Peggy noted that Jean always said she’d have to be taken from her charming cottage, her home of forty-four years, “feet first.” <\/span>She left with one possession: a small plush skunk she’d named Percy, that never left her side. <\/span>He had even been x-rayed with her once in the hospital. <\/span>When it came time for us all to leave, my bike had a flat and I walked it home.<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/span>I’ve now spent four months pouring through Jean’s “stuff”. <\/span>As Peggy and I break down the house, I find myself accumulating things I’d never thought about before. <\/span>What was I doing? <\/span>Did I need<\/em> eight more water glasses? <\/span>Five red candles? <\/span>A brass bottle opener shaped like a squirrel?<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

<\/span>Things we keep out of remembrance we often forget. <\/span>They molder in our attics and garages. <\/span>The crocheted linen table runners, the jade cats, the twisted strands of costume pearls, the dove gray three-quarter length gloves, the scarab rings, the silk shawls, the coasters from the Dordogne. <\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

<\/span>And the paper. <\/span>An ego-driven imperative pushes some of us to write it all down to save. <\/span>“Because the flesh can’t stay, we pass the words along,” Eric Jong said her Poem to Keats. <\/span>As Jean’s literary executor, I’d spent four months marinating in paper.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

<\/span>I began with her office drawers and file cabinets. <\/span>As a poet, essayist, columnist, editor, teacher and lecturer, Jean had a prodigious amount of paper. <\/span>She maintained a voluminous correspondence and kept carbon copies of her letters. <\/span>Pages scotch-taped together half a century ago fell apart in my hands. <\/span>The yellowed tape was crystallized like mica and crumbled in shards through my fingers.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

<\/span>For weeks I worked alone in the quiet of her house. <\/span>“This house feeds me,” she’d said many times. <\/span>Her peaceful haven, surrounded by trees and a shaded garden, nourished me as well. <\/span>The redwood house with its wide front porch was filled with things that pleased the eye and touch. <\/span>Stones collected from the river in Big Sur, art, calligraphy, jade figurines of cats, brass bells and candlesticks, silver and turquoise combs that pinned up her waist-length hair. <\/span>There was jewelry of all kinds, handkerchiefs, gloves, silk slips, classic shoes, a mink stole. <\/span>Paintings, many of them very old, were lorded over by a large oil portrait of her father at four. <\/span>There were mirrors and mahogany bureaus. A mezuzah graced her front door. <\/span>Jean sipped from all religions “as needed” and drank in any parts that quenched her spiritual fires. <\/span>Cartoons, many of Snoopy, adorned her walls along with photos clipped from magazines and newspapers of animals, especially cats. <\/span>A large poster of Koko with her kitten hung on the bedroom door. <\/span>The ashes of Jean’s last cat, Mrs. Pennington, rested in a small “cremains” box at the top of a bookcase. <\/span>Photos of poets, writers, statesmen, lovers, philosophers, ministers and mystics were thumb tacked in her study next to family photos. <\/span>A picture of Jean at three playing with blocks showed her apparently spelling out the word “Zen.” <\/span>There were cupboards of LP’s of symphonic music along with poets such as Dylan Thomas and Auden reading their work. <\/span>There were walls, and walls, and walls of books. <\/span>You could look through her house for weeks and keep unraveling the story of her life, as if following an eternal skein.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

<\/span>Our interest in buried treasure, stockpiling the past, keeping mementos, and establishing value for art, all seems rooted in our longing for safety. <\/span>Hoarding<\/em> stuff, as a <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

homeless person pushing a shopping cart loaded with things that could be useful someday, seems more like the basis of success for storage companies and eBay. <\/span>Even things that help us understand who we are bore us eventually, and we look to someone else’s objets<\/em>, something new to fill that hungry place inside that is forever emptying itself. <\/span>We appropriate patina and wear it as our own.<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/span>After Jean’s death, Peggy made a trip up the coast to Cambria with a friend. <\/span>She marveled at the antique shops they perused. <\/span>Most were full of the same stuff we had been crating up at Jean’s.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Stuff acquires and looses meaning. <\/span>After we look at the same painting, statue, nut dish or vase for thirty years, we often no longer see it. <\/span>We’re lucky when we see it differently, or better. <\/span>If the way light falls on a painting of a four-year-old boy from long ago continues to refresh us, we’re glad. His golden curls devour and surpass time. <\/span>We become sojourners, and not merely trespassers to the past.<\/span><\/p>\n

Jean’s last name was Burden. <\/span>I strapped the weighted backpack across my shoulders and headed home.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

STUFF I’ve waited too long. It’s nine in the morning, but the heat is already climbing. It’s too late now for my usual walk in Eaton Canyon. On a day like this, the snakes will be out, weaving their sinuous paths on top of the silty trails. My daily exercise will need to take another […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,49],"tags":[48],"class_list":["post-148","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-essays","category-stuff-essays","tag-stuff"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/basweeney.com\/writings\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/148"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/basweeney.com\/writings\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/basweeney.com\/writings\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/basweeney.com\/writings\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/basweeney.com\/writings\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=148"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"http:\/\/basweeney.com\/writings\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/148\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":150,"href":"http:\/\/basweeney.com\/writings\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/148\/revisions\/150"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/basweeney.com\/writings\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=148"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/basweeney.com\/writings\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=148"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/basweeney.com\/writings\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=148"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}