Posterity - Mar 2 2021

 

Posterity

March 2 2021

My mother saved everything, it seems.

I realized this

when I received a big shopping bag

brimming with ephemera

when the condo was cleaned out.

Old newspaper clippings

on brittle yellowed paper.

Unlabelled Kodachromes

and letters home from camp,

birth announcements

and mother's day cards

and kindergarten art.

We are not a family

who express affection easily.

So it's understandable

that a mother

who could be distant and stubborn

kept her motherly love to herself.

Or might her pack-rat tendencies

more simply explain

this archive of her son?

Trained as a librarian

I would have expected indices

and time-lines

and neatly labelled folders.

But it was all mixed up,

as if year after year

it had been squirrelled away

for posterity to sort out.

I am not a sentimental man.

So I have culled a few pieces

and plan to discard the rest.

Which feels disloyal, I admit;

to my mother's urge to protect

and to remembrance of my past.

But I'm a practical man

and know they're of no use,

while pretty 

even sure she herself

never riffled through the bag,

losing track of time

in happy reminiscence.

So this is how I imagine it.

It's the having, not the thing itself.

The talismanic power

of possession

is where the meaning lies.

As if simply to keep, keeps the past alive.

As if clinging to the evidence

validates a life.

But my style is minimalist,

all spare décor

and clean unornamented lines.

So stuff

left to moulder away

in a closet's dark stale air

is just collecting dust.

I prefer to let memory do the work

keep my eyes on what's to come.

And as to posterity,

I imagine some future archaeologist

sifting through a long abandoned landfill,

disinterring the past

from under mountains of soil.

Where a shopping bag of ephemera

will be found,

deprived of oxygen and sun

and perfectly preserved;

saved

not by my efforts to conserve

but my negligence.

Where he will jigsaw together

the scattered pieces of a life

to solve the puzzle of a lost world.

As if, as odd and eccentric as I am

I'd been an everyman

and not simply myself.

This story is true. And not just a clipping of a birth announcement, but 2 entire broadsheet newspapers that contain it! My mother is far from a hoarder. But she is a child of the Depression, and so has an aversion to waste as well as pack-rat tendencies: old pieces of string, odd buttons, broken shoelaces, and bits of aluminum foil that are “perfectly good”. And because she can't resist a bargain – getting a deal – she accumulates a lot of junkie stuff. The logic of “you can't afford the saving” never landed with her! (And, anyway, she could mostly afford it. . . . The past tense here because her shopping days are pretty much behind her now.)

I do feel disloyal, discarding this stuff so lovingly preserved for so many years. But I am not sentimental enough and too practical to want it collecting dust. Nor do I want it to burden whoever has to clean up after me when it's my turn to go. After all, it will all be discarded then, no matter what. My worldview tends toward nihilism. I see myself as an insignificant speck in a vast indifferent universe. I value personal humility over self-importance. So it's easy for me to not feel much attachment to all this ephemera. In fact, I'm almost embarrassed by the message of self-regard it sends.

I recall reading that one of the best preserved items in landfills was old phone books. And that they can be treasure troves of information for archaeologists of the recent past. Of course, there are no phone books anymore. But these thick compendiums of closely pressed pages, kept from oxygen, resist decomposition. They can emerge after decades underground looking almost pristine. So the thought occurs to me that discarding this stuff may, ironically, present its best chance at survival. And if so, will future archaeologists imagine this picture of my life – incomplete as it is – as typical of my era? What a terrible mistake that would be!