Stuff

June 2 2014

A lifetime of things
in a small apartment,
faithfully kept, as time went on
for sentimental reasons.
A thoughtful gesture, honoured,
someone loved, and lost.
And sometimes just left
because we forgot.

The inertia of things
that accumulate.
The way sediment settles out
on the ocean floor
accretes into rock.
As unseen

as that murky bottom,
and almost as permanent.

They were dusted, once;
but now it accumulates
with the dull patina of age,
subduing colour, softening edges,
acidic particles
minutely etching
finely polished surfaces.

Long enough together
and people are unable to see
their knickknacks and whatnots,
as if ever-present
constant as geology.
And anyway, find comfort

in familiar things,

seek shelter there.

Which, in the fullness of time
will be left to their descendants,
who have an eye for expensive antiques
and tut-tut despairingly
at all the clutter and junk
collecting dust.
Who will order a big steel dumpster
to haul the stuff away,
to incinerate, or landfill
under tons of earth.

Or end up in some trendy shop
selling vintage treasures,
in which everything once belonged
to a small apartment
where someone else’s frail parents

insisted on staying. 

Where I can't help but see
dead people's old belongings.

We know how foolish it is
to attach ourselves to stuff,
to bric-a-brac, and kitsch
nostalgic tchotchkes.
But still, we cannot part.
Because unreliable as memory can be

secrets, and intimacies
are embedded in things.
Objects hold meaning
no one else can see.

Except when we're gone.
When our flimsy shelter’s bull-dozed down
to earth, and rock,

the small apartment stripped
closets clear-cut.
And our precious artifacts
incidentally lost.

Roz Chast is a New Yorker cartoonist. Her most recent graphic memoir is Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant? (her emphasis). I read an excerpt several months ago in the magazine, and found it deeply touching, bittersweet, funny. Today, she was interviewed on Q. The memoir is all about her elderly parents’ dwindling old age and eventual death. Part of it is about their attachment to their place and things, even though they were well past managing. And part is about how it fell to her, the only child, to deal with a well lived-in apartment crammed with stuff.

Coincidentally, I also just finished listening to the newest RadioLab podcast, which was on the subject of Things, and featured a story about a candy egg someone had carted around with him for over 40 years:  its sentimental value, and how he coped with its unexpectedly breaking.

Since, on top of all this, I just returned from my elderly parents’ place in Toronto, the subject seemed especially present. Their place isn’t especially cluttered. At least not the sort of clutter that involves piles of junk covered in dust. (My mother never liked anything out of place, and still doesn’t.) But cluttered in the sense of lots and lots of tchotchkes:  little decorative pieces my mother collects; tastefully displayed but filling every surface. And the usual piles of quickly leafed-through magazines. All her little treasures, that no one else would value. In the end, it will seem like a kind of a betrayal, disposing of it all.

I like leading a minimalist life, and have little interest in material things. Yet all this had me reflecting on how stuff has piled up, living in the same house for 30 years. It seems I’m travelling heavy, despite my best intentions.

So it was the intersection of all this that led me to reflect on all the stuff we accumulate, what it means to us, and its eventual fate. And led, inevitably, to a poem.