Can someone please tell my why I felt compelled to keep this
violin-shaped ashtray that belonged to my late grandfather?
It’s not the only memento I have of Pop,
not by a long shot. I don’t have any memories of him using it—he’d quit smoking
long before I came along. And I don’t smoke.
I suppose I kept it because Gram put a handwritten
label on it, explaining that it had been a birthday gift from my dad in 1959. (He’s
been gone even longer than Gram and Pop.) With the grief of Gram’s passing
still raw and fresh, I cried over the violin ashtray and stuck it in a box to
take to my new home.
That’s how I’ve accumulated too much
sentimental clutter.
In his book The Secret Life of Hoarders, Matt Paxton writes, “Hoarders aren’t
slobs who don’t care about being clean. They are people struggling with
overwhelming emotional issues. A pile in a hoarder house isn’t a pile of stuff;
it can be many things: a pile of sadness, a pile of quitting, or sometimes even
a pile of hope. It’s never really about the stuff, hoarders are just confusing
their possessions with their emotions.”
Sometimes, it’s a pile of loss.
Now, my house does not look like
anything you’d see on those reality TV shows about hoarders. And yet . . .
nearly five years after marrying Bill and moving into his house, there are
still big piles of my boxes in two rooms. (That’s in addition to all the boxes
on the garage shelving and in a shed.) Okay, so it’s not all sentimental clutter, but that’s a good portion of it.
On the mesmerizing (and now defunct) TV show
Clean Sweep, Peter Walsh sometimes
dealt with this issue. He’d stand, facing the offending pack rat, perhaps with
one hand on her shoulder, pin her with his eyes, and say, “Can you love your
grandmother . . . and cherish her memory . . . without keeping all of her stuff?”
Yes, Peter, I can.
Gram has been gone for five years now. It’s
become easier to let go of her everyday possessions, carrying them out of my
house in a trickle of cardboard boxes, donating them to various thrift stores
and garage sales.
That ashtray’s days in my house are
numbered.
Gram’s sticker also mentions another
gift Pop received: a pipe from his lifelong friend Ralph, given in 1948.
When I was a very little girl living
with Dad and Gram and Pop, Ralph used to visit. I’d wait until he was comfortably
seated in the living room and then snatch the foil tobacco pouch out of his
left shirt pocket. I’d retreat just out of reach, open the pouch, and inhale
deeply of the tangy scent. I loved it. Although Pop had a small rack of pipes
in the closet with the reel-to-reel tape recorder, there were no pouches of
tobacco, fragrant or otherwise, in our house.
Pop and Ralph had become friends as
young men working in a mine in eastern Oregon. The men worked in teams of two. One
day Pop told the boss he was quitting; his partner was too reckless. The job
was not worth his life.
“Well, is there anyone you think you could
work with?” the boss said.
“Well, yes,” Pop said. “I’d work with
Ralph Townsend.”
And work together they did—first in the
mine, then on the Jordan Valley Irrigation District, and eventually in
laundromats they owned together. Ralph even dated one of Pop’s sisters for a
while. Ralph named his son Stan after my grandfather. Stan became a mechanic and
eventually passed the business along to his son, Jason. I’ve been taking my car
to them for the past eleven years, ever since I moved back to town. Wes, my grease-monkey
stepson, even worked there for a while.
So in honor of a friendship that began
in the late 1920s and still has ripple effects today, I think I’ll keep the
pipe.
Brandon, my other stepson, thinks the
violin ashtray is pretty cool. He never knew Dad or Pop, so it wouldn't be a family keepsake for him. But if I decide to get
rid of the ashtray, he’ll take it. And he’d use it, too—he smokes.
I think I’ll give it to him . . . no
strings attached.
So tell
me . . . How do you decide what to let go of and what to treasure?
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