Stuff

For the past three weeks I’ve been dealing with my mother-in-law’s lifetime possessions, the story of her deliberate accumulation of things that become, to the successors, “stuff.” It was all acquired during the course of forty years in the same house in Buffalo, then ten in Santa Fe. I’ve tried to be respectful of what to her were treasures, not stuff, sending the china (I knew her for 34 years and I don’t remember ever eating off it), crystal, antique chairs and dresser off to the consignment store, gifts of art or pottery or jewelry back to those who gave them, especially cherished things to friends, books to the library, and much, much more to St. Vincent de Paul.

My mother-in-law, an immigrant from Poland whose family came to New York when she was six, grew up desperately poor in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. She told us stories of getting thrown out of her family’s apartment for unpaid rent, carrying their belongings down the street in a wheelbarrow. One of her siblings was killed in World War II; an older half brother became a successful businessman; her younger brother a professor at New York University; and she, after twenty years of secretarial work, went to college and earned a master’s degree in social work. She and my father-in-law, also a social worker who headed a United Fund agency in Buffalo, became solidly middle class and enjoyed a fully pensioned retirement—fueled by a booming stock market—of world travel and portfolio security.

They were also of the generation that bought Dalton china settings for twelve on a trip to England, Waterford crystal at the factory in Ireland, Tibetan thangkas in India, gold jewelry from around the world, pueblo pottery and turquoise jewelry in New Mexico, and art from a sophisticated group of Buffalo painters with whom they socialized.

But what really got me, going through the stuff, was the thought of my own children someday going through mine. What do I have that makes me so anxious? A set of red dishes my mother-in-law bought me for my fiftieth birthday? My clothes, mostly acquired at thrift stores? The art gives me pause, but they can give Terri’s paintings back to her, if she outlives me (or keep them, of course), and they took some of Mark’s work after he died. The John Wengers will probably find their way to those who knew him.

What seems to be upsetting me are the floor to ceiling shelves with books, that, just like the china, nobody wants. James Woods, in a recent New Yorker article, wrote about inventorying his father-in-law’s library in upstate New York and finding out that “nobody really wants hundreds or thousands of old books.” I may not have 400 books on the Byzantine Empire, but I have, due to Mark’s love of him, every book ever written by or about Jack Kerouac; every beat poet ever published; every 18th and 19th century English novel ever written (I know that’s an exaggeration: let’s arrogantly say every “important” English novel ever written); political philosophy from the Greeks through the Enlightenment to Karl Marx and the poststructuralists; and 20th century paperback novels that everyone else has, too. Mark already sold the first editions and collectors’ items to folks like Nicholas Potter (secondhand bookstore owner in Santa Fe) of whom there are fewer and fewer in business. My kids will want only a select few, just as I wanted only a select few of my mother-in-law’s. Even if the iPad and the Kindle don’t destroy the book business altogether, nobody is going to want my “old books.”

When I don’t have anything of interest borrowed from a friend or checked out from the library, I go to my shelves and find stuff, like this incredible passage from George Elliot’s Mill on the Floss, which I’ve owned for 20 years but never before read:
“I will not believe unproved evil of you: my lips shall not utter it; my ears shall be closed against it. I, too, am an erring mortal, liable to stumble, apt to come short of my most earnest efforts. Your lot has been harder than mine, your temptation greater. Let us help each other to stand and walk without more falling—to have done this would have demanded courage, deep pity, self-knowledge, generous trust—would have demanded a mind that tasted no piquancy in evil-speaking that felt no self-exaltation in condemning, that cheated itself with no large words into the belief that life can have any moral end, any high religion, which excludes the striving after perfect truth, justice, and love towards the individual men and women who come across our own path.”

How can you not stop and marvel at a passage like that. It speaks directly to my post-Marxist humanist pragmatic self (see eponymous blog post), which is tied directly to all these books on my shelf that no one but me wants. While I’m not quite ready to let them go, not ready to consign them to “stuff,” I think it’s time to start culling: slowly, carefully, selectively (based on some criteria I’ve yet to determine). That, instead of an estate, will be my gift to my children: one small shelf of books when it’s my time to go.