© Pierre Maré,
2004 - 2007
Offbeat 29
I have a collection of rather good comics that gather dust in one of the cupboards in my home. I reread them about every ten years. One day, I hope to explore them with my daughter. There are lessons that a father needs to pass on to a child: how to change a plug without frying yourself, how to throw a punch or where to kick when someone won’t take ‘no’ for an answer, and in our case, that Judge Dredd is seriously cool.
Along with ‘the precious collection’, her inheritance will include other little treasures that I have kept: about a million faded till slips, a bunch of bills (mostly paid), hundreds of CDs that I bought cheap and only listened to once, some of my own surviving childhood toys and a bunch of books so badly written and tatty that even the most desperate second hand bookshops will shy away from them.
I am a ‘pack rat’, a hoarder of possessions. Even if I had a designer home with Zen-like furnishings, long white walls and windows that looked out on forever, the effect would be totally ruined by the stack of old paperwork and a chipped soapstone hippo from which I can’t bear to be parted.
Love of possessions is nothing unusual. Middle-aged men who have not had dates since their last traumatic outing some thirty years ago can, with the right amount of alcohol, get misty eyed and maudlin over the memories of a car sold decades ago. Some middle-aged women who rely on their rejuvenator creams as much as their personal assistants no doubt still furtively haul out their Barbie dolls for a bit of quality time on quiet weekends.
We are taught to value our possessions while still knee-high to a grasshopper, for their worth and emotionally. It’s probably a survival trait, generic to the human species. Even the most ugly baby looks a whole lot cuter and far more lovable when clutching a soft toy.
From this point on, it all comes naturally. Everything is seen in terms of ‘mine, you can’t have it’, ‘not mine, but I want it anyway’ and ‘ok, you can keep that because mine is better’. Value becomes a matter of emotion, emotions are attached to objects and inevitably objects are kept well beyond their natural period of use.
Examined rationally, very few ‘treasures’ would survive the ‘trash test’. I still have a four-year-old bottle of curried lime pickles in my fridge. I tasted it earlier this year. It’s still safe, but do I still need it? It rarely gets opened and it takes up room that I could use.
Examined emotionally, these treasures are indispensable. My bottle of curried lime pickles reminds me of a distant time well before my daughter was conceived, when an exciting curry was still something in my culinary repertoire. Given the antibacterial properties of lime, vinegar, a cold fridge and curry, I will probably be able to introduce my daughter to the joys of the bottle in six or seven years though. That’s why I am going to keep it. Why I keep old till slips, I really can’t rationalize at this point.
Perhaps holding on is a way of marking milestones, but in the final analysis each of those milestones is a moment that has passed and that cannot be retrieved except in memory.
There are people who lead their lives without accumulating. They live in beautiful houses marked by perfection. They are the sort of people who are so together they file their electricity and phone bills in the right file, every month, probably after paying them on time.
These are people who buy Teflon coated pans, ultimately disposable, for oil-free transfer of heat to ingredients. I cannot relate to them or understand them. A trusty old frying pan is a place where memorable meals happen, even if they involve nothing more than oil, eggs, mushrooms and bacon. Even an old soapstone hippo with chipped ears may hold good memories.
The danger of keeping lies in holding on to too much and allowing the memories to pile up to the point where life is submerged in yesterdays, with no tomorrow in sight. Right now, there are a million till slips that I need to throw away.
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