Junk

I saw the giant blue and red monster truck rumble down my street and slowly back into my driveway.  The Just Junksters were here and they lowered the massive pod onto the black surface where our car was usually parked.  Hours seemed to go by before two burly young men, men whose muscles had muscles, exited the cab and introduced themselves.  Polite as can be.

“Yes, sir.  So where is the stuff?”

The stuff was in the basement…unknowing…innocent….comfortable. 

My children had chipped in and arranged for Just Junksters to haul away the forty years of toys and games and old computers and ping pong table and play kitchens that had entertained them for years.  My son had driven up from Maryland to help his mother sort and bag many of the items that the Just Junkster guys would carry up out of their home in the basement and into the dumpster.  My children had committed acts of kindness, thoughtfulness, and charity since they obviously cared about our health (the basement had developed a serious mold problem).  They wanted us to enjoy the paneled basement as our recreation area. 

So why was I having such a hard time with this?  I have this sentimental attachment to things. I always have, and it is a colossal weakness.  Growing up I cherished my two groups of toys—-plastic army men and my Lionel train set.

 They were my prime instruments of my youthful fancy.  When the real world of my Bronx elementary school became too much for me, I found comfort in the psychic bubble created by using my toy men to re-enact battles of the French and Indian War or losing myself in developing a transportation system in the town of Plasticvillle. 

Animism is the belief that all objects, places, creatures possess a “spiritual essence.”  Many cultures throughout time have addressed mountains, streams, trees, and even rocks as items inhabited by spirits.  I believe that if many modern policy makers shared this concept, they would be less likely to tear those mountains apart, pollute those streams, and chop down all those oxygen giving trees.

As a Zen Buddhist koan postulates, “water does not know it is water.”  We assign qualities to water from our provincial perspective as human beings.  We see what we can see, hear what we can hear, sense only what our five senses can determine.  On another planet in another part of the galaxy, water might be a living thing.    Another way to mentally juggle this concept of things as having spirit is to consider string theory.  All material things are forms of energy, and energy can be interchangeable.  The same atoms that make up our bodies were the same atoms at the beginning of the universe.  .  Rearrange those atoms and you have another life form, or even an “inanimate” object.

During my teaching career I remember a debate in class on what marriage means.  As one young man argued, “So what does putting on a ring, a piece of metal mean?  Why do two people who love each other have to get married?”

A young lady stood and rebutted, “the ring has no meaning unless you put meaning into it.  It’s like all symbols.”

That was my problem.  I invested too much meaning in things, made too many associations with items that had lost their function.  I saw the Just Junkster guys carry out the toy kitchen, a multi-colored plastic amalgam of stove, fridge and microwave upon which my children had cooked plastic pancakes for me.  Up the stairs and into the dumpster went the rocking chair that our first child rocked to and fro, Madame Alexander doll lovingly caressed in her small arms as she watched Sesame Street.

The basement gave up the cardboard boxes of games that occupied the minds of Christie, Becky, Meredith and Jim during their childhood summers:  Life, Masterpiece, Monopoly, Scattergories, Operation.   On the way out the front door, a blue token from Risk tried to make its escape by leaping from the bag.

The board games were followed by the toy cameras and the electronic games, the joysticks and controllers and switches for Nintendo.  Up out of the basement and into the junk pile in the driveway went thousands of plastic pieces, plastic tokens, plastic doughnuts, plastic fried eggs, plastic spatulas, plastic medical kits, plastic pumpkins, trophies earned for achievement and trophies earned for participation…Up out of the basement and into the junk pile went thousands of memories.

I remember a moment when the truth associated with a thing destroyed a far bigger and more important belief.  One day when I was about fifteen or so, I was working in my father’s basement helping him with installing some outlets on his workbench.  He pointed to a square item he had suspended by a string from a wooden beam.

“See that hanging from the beam?”

I nodded.

“Take it down and look at it.”

I obeyed.  It was a piece of hammered copper art.  I recognized it.  The image was of a deer standing sideways to the viewer.

My father stripped another piece of wire.  “See the name hammered at the bottom?  That is my brother’s name.  He made that.”

My dad’s brother had died way before I was born, the uncle whom I had never met and for whom I was named. 

My dad continued.  “I don’t have many things from him.  Just a couple of pictures.  So I am glad I found that.”

I looked up.  “Dad.  I made this…in shop class.”

I will never forget the look of disappointment on his face, and I regret, will forever regret, telling him the truth.  I had destroyed my dad’s association with that thing.

The dumpster was almost full.  I went outside just in time to see one of the Just Junkster guys toss a small wooden cradle that a relative, now deceased, had constructed for my second oldest onto the junk pile.  That one item was one of my Rosebuds.  There were many Rosebuds in that discard pile that day.  Things evoke memories, and memories recall stories, and, as the protagonist says in the movie, Memorial Day, “things inspire stories, and stories last forever, but only if you tell them.”  Up into the Junk Junkster went things, memories and stories, all into the eternity of oblivion.

I stood in the doorway in the front of my home, hands braced on the frame and watched as the two men plugged themselves in the cab of the truck, watched the red brake lights come on, watched as the Just Junksters truck pulled out of my driveway.  I exhaled, sighed, and whispered, “Goodbye, stuff.”

One of the more painful parts of growing old is losing.  Losing things, losing physical abilities, losing memories, losing people. 

My wife asked me, “You want to see the basement now?”

I didn’t want to see the basement.  There was nothing in the basement for me.  The basement was empty…..so was I…..well, emptier.

Disposing of all that stuff was the right thing to do, but doing the right thing is often the hardest thing to do.  The junk had to go…..I guess it just depends on what one thinks junk is.