Monday, May 16, 2011

Worth is in the Mind of the Beholder 1001:15


Mom is like my lighthouse, alerting me to the shoals of old age. Sometimes I look at her, and see practical advice on ageing, deeply held values, and survivorship. Other times, I mourn the fact that I’m just like her. Who hasn’t heard the line, “You’re just like your Mother” with mixed feelings? On at least one notable point, however, we differ:  she keeps stuff, I don't.
When my parents moved from the farmhouse they had lived in for over 60 years, to a senior duplex in town, many things had to be sorted and disposed of. It was a big down-sizing move. My dad was never a sorter, nor one to run a tight ship. He regularly lost things, lent them out permanently, or let them transform into outdoor sculpture in the odd places around the farm.  Packing was not a problem for him, because most of the tools and equipment he had were left behind or sold for the move. He did pack all of his Marine stuff, which was a sizeable box. To somewhat balance his style, Mom was always the one who liked things tidy. So for their first and last move, from a house full of their life together, Mom took charge of packing household items. This meant that no one could pack anything without her approval.

Anything.

Obviously, this arrangement of having Mom approve every item that was picked up and put in a box to keep or a box to toss became tedious, not to mention really slow. So when possible, I made my own decisions--erring, I thought, on the side of “maybe she might want to keep this” more often than not. But Mom can not be underestimated. She is, possibly, omnipresent. She has an “in” with God, we have all accepted over the years, and maybe the “in” extends to some of His powers. At any rate, I had to unpack more than one box which she hadn’t directly supervised the packing of. If she wasn’t omnipresent all the time, she made up for it by backtracking her presence.

I think that the obsessive supervision of packing was, partly, her way of controlling a big change. It might also have been a way of controlling her kids. Mom has never been one to be walked over or taken advantage of lightly. It’s not that she can’t easily be taken advantage of, so much as that she will make a lot of noise and stink once she actually does get taken advantage of. No one was out to take advantage of her in this case, however. I was under the illusion I was going to make things easier for her. Wrong. I just made it harder on myself. But we wrestled with the Packing Devil together, at least.

The thing which, to me, most symbolized Mom’s need to control the disposition of her worldly goods was The Envelope. I was seated on the floor of the office room, with boxes and papers everywhere. Mom was being omnipresent right then, and was carefully watching every item I moved from drawer to box. It wasn’t like I was going to throw away the mortgage papers or anything—the house was paid off years ago. I became, I hope understandably, irritable after about a half hour of this, and decided to take a break. Maybe go pack towels, an area where I hoped couldn’t go wrong.

I stood and, on the way up, snagged an empty envelope lying on a pile of papers. The envelope was the brittle yellow that very old, cheap paper turns over decades of non-use. It was a non-standard size. It was all alone in the world, and it was not in great shape. I threw it in a toss box. Before the envelope hit the bottom of the box, Mom was on it. She picked it up, turned it over a few times in her hands thoughtfully, and said “I might need this.” She managed to do this in a way that made me feel as though I’d snatched food from the mouths of starving children in Ethiopia. This is one of her powers. Fortunately, God was present then, because I simply nodded in deep agreement with her decision, and walked away. I didn’t argue the envelope’s worth, nor plead for some freedom of decision in throwing away scrap papers.

I thought about discussing it with her. Trying to point out that she had to let SOMEthings go, be brutal and toss empty envelopes. But it was, after all, her envelope.

The basement provided weightier issues: the old black pot, copper lined, which Mom had made lots of apple butter in; the huge crock she had made lots of sauerkraut in. The interesting old items which are today collector’s items upped the ante in the whole packing decision-making scenario. It upped the life-lesson aspect of packing, too: sometimes tt's hard to sort out how much you love and appreciate someone from how much they can really get on your nerves. At least, this has been my experience.

So when Mom got to packing the basement, there were a lot of items which she wanted to take to a local second-hand store, because “these things are old and they’re worth something.” This was true of some things. Other things, though, had seen a lot of wear and were no longer functional, but Mom still saw value in them. When clearing out houses, I will bet you that the ratio of awful junk is higher than that of valuable stuff. I believe that second-hand shop owners who accept estate items must be good at dealing with human nature, in order to succeed in their business. Everybody thinks that their junk is valuable; other people's junk, however, usually isn't. In the end, a lot of Mom’s stuff got carted off to the second-hand shop, where the dealer gave a fair bid on the items. In my opinion. Not in Mom’s.

Last time I was visiting Mom, I stopped in at the second-hand store. It’s just down the street from Mom’s duplex in the Senior Housing Site. The owner is not getting rich, but she gets by; and she seems to know what she’s doing. I know I would get anxiety attacks dealing with so many items from other people’s lives surrounding me like that. A couple years after her move, some of Mom’s items were still there. Some had sold. None made anybody rich.  The question of value lingers.

Making good use of Mom as a role model, I try to make careful purchase decisions. If it’s choices about buying things like knick-knacks for the house, I’m pretty safe—I live like Walden, frugally. If its clothes, or shoes, or a trip to Whole Foods exotic food wonderland, I have no willpower. When tempted to buy anything at all, though, I can pull up the image of the second-hand store full of people’s once-valued possessions. Old things are worth something, but only if they are found by someone who wants them. Safer to just accumulate worldly goods as slowly and scarcely as possible. Then my kids won’t have to sort through them one of these days.

I’ll start with my shoes.

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