Day 258…
I spent yesterday trying not to crawl out of my own skin.
The day started out wet and cold and then cleared up, but aside from a visit to the post office, I stayed inside. I didn’t want to go out and I didn’t want to stay in. I don’t know what I wanted to do, but whatever it was, it wasn’t among the options I was presented with.
So, in desperation, I opened up our storage unit again.
I have countless boxes of things that my father passed down. I’ve been dragging them around for years. They’ve moved with me through the years from apartment to apartment without ever being opened. When I visited my sister this past summer, she gave me yet another box of stuff to add to it. A day like yesterday was the perfect time to continue to go through them all.
I’m the end of the line for the Hester branch of our family.
In recent generations, there has always been one boy and one girl born. My grandfather was a twin. His sister took her husband’s name when she married. My father has one sister who is still alive, but she never married. I have one sister but she, too, has taken her husband’s name. After me and my aunt and my mother who took the name when she married my dad, the Hester name will only live on as my nephew’s middle name.
The Hester stuff, however, will remain.
A lot of my father’s, grandparents’, great-grandparents’ and even great-great grandparents’, personal effects are sitting in these boxes. I have an endless array of eyeglasses, pocket watches, and military ribbons. I also have weird objects from fraternal organizations and a slew of desk accessories.
It’s not completely tedious going through it all. It is fun to try and figure out why something was kept. I have a pretty good idea of what interested my father. A lot of what interested him, honestly, also interests me.
Some objects that don’t seem personal I’ve decided to try and sell. Occasionally, though, something pops up that I think I should keep - at least for the moment.
There’s a whole box of lapel pins. John Kerry for President, Red Cross pins from World War II and American Legion pins from decades past. Almost all of those have been put up on eBay. All of them needed to be researched, photographed and listed. It took hours.
I remember my father telling me a story about when he and some of his fellow infantrymen came upon the bodies of some German soldiers during World War II. At the urging of their platoon leader, they all took some of the insignia pinned on the dead men’s uniforms as souvenirs - spoils of war, I guess.
I think that my father always felt guilty about doing that. In the box along with all of the others, I found the two pins that he kept. One has an eagle with a swastika on it and the other is an enameled red circular pin also with a swastika on it.
You can’t sell anything Nazi-related with a swastika on it on eBay. It isn’t allowed.
They are awful little things, but I am keeping them because of the emotional connection my father had to them. I can picture him taking them off of his fallen opponent, but I can also feel the years of guilt that followed. Him having taken them, I think it’s incumbent on me to keep them for him as a kind of penance. There’s an energy around them that just isn’t there with most of the other stuff.
I can just imagine some MAGA supporter in South Dakota buying them and wearing them to a rally. Even if I could sell them, I wouldn’t. The rest of the pins, I am happy to part with. Interesting but no reason to hang on to them.
My father also collected coins.
Up until 1964, US silver coins actually contained 90% silver. From 1965-1971, the amount of silver was reduced to 40%. Now, our quarters and dimes have no silver at all in them. They are 75% copper and 25% nickel. If you look at the side of a quarter, you can see the layer of copper in the middle.
My father kept a lot of silver half dollars, quarters and dimes with the idea that they would be valuable someday. He was right. Some of them have value because of their silver and then some of them even have added value due to the fact that they are designs that aren’t used any longer. He hoarded a whole pile of Benjamin Franklin half dollars and Mercury dimes. There are also a lot of much earlier designs in the pile.
On the other hand, he also kept a lot of Bicentennial coins that aren’t worth much more than their face value. They aren’t rare, there were just too many of them minted. He also kept coins from places he had lived or visited. Some of those have value and some don’t.
I’ve now gone through them all. I have archival tubes to store all of the silver which is going into a safety deposit box. Once everything is done, I’ll get half of it all to my sister.
The rest of the US coins have been rolled along with the random change that Michael and I have gathered and deposited in the bank. The foreign coins have been separated into two piles - currency that is still used which I have sent to the UNICEF Coins for Change program and that which isn’t which I have put up for sale on eBay. I’ve sold a couple of them so far.
The objects in the boxes are fairly easy to go through and sort out. What isn’t easy to go through is all of the paperwork.
I came upon an envelope with a pile of ancient receipts and empty envelopes in it. They all dated from 1918 to 1920 and seemed to belong to my grandfather.
Two of the receipts turned out to be from the company store at Camp Lee, Virginia. Camp Lee was a big training camp for soldiers during World War I. My grandfather, according to the receipt, was 2nd Lieutenant in the Infantry. He spent $27.50 on a new trench coat. I don’t think that he ever shipped overseas, but I’ll ask my Aunt.
The receipt is dated November 20, 1918 - which was the height of the Spanish flu pandemic on top of everything else.
I couldn’t figure out why all of the empty envelopes were kept until I saw that they all had the same series of stamps on them. Some of the stamps in that series are apparently, from what I can see online, quite valuable. I’ll have to take them to somebody to see if any of them are really worth anything.
I’ll keep the two Camp Lee receipts but the rest of them I am going to scan and then send to the Lexington, Virginia Historical Society. They all have engraved headings from local businesses there that I am sure are long gone.
That’s just one envelope worth of papers. There are boxes full of them. It is going to take me all winter to get through everything else. By the end of it, if I am lucky, everything in them will be photographed or scanned and put in chronological according to each family member.
16 days after the election, Emily Murphy, the General Services Administrator, has finally signed off on allowing the Biden transition team to move forward. Appointed to her position by the President, she went to great lengths to claim that the delay was not because of pressure from the GOP. In a letter to the President-elect she wrote, “Please know that I came to my decision independently, based on the law and available facts. I was never directly or indirectly pressured by any Executive Branch official—including those who work at the White House or GSA—with regard to the substance or timing of my decision,”
Moments later, however, the President tweeted, “We will keep up the good fight and I believe we will prevail! Nevertheless, in the best interest of our Country, I am recommending that Emily and her team do what needs to be done with regard to initial protocols, and have told my team to do the same.”
So, so much for that.
Emily Murphy’s moment in history has now passed and, hopefully, she will slip silently into the dim murky past and we will forget her name. Decades from now, one of her great-grandchildren may go through a box with some of her stuff in it and wonder what it all is and who she was. They will google their great-grandmother and this little moment in time will likely pop up.
Her partisan decision to impede the transition of power following this election will hopefully lead to some sort of legislative reform that will prevent other appointees in the future from doing the same kind of thing. She’s said as much, herself.
The President-elect is moving forward with actual governance. He has started to announce his cabinet choices. So far, they are diverse and, otherwise, blissfully unexciting.
They are people who are well versed in the departments that they are going to run. They are experienced and committed. These aren’t people who just donated money to the campaign who liked the title. These are people who are going to run their departments, repair the damage that has been done to them, and lead us into the next four years.
The more that the President-elect moves forward with his agenda, the less air the outgoing President is left with. Like the Burger Meister, Meister Burgers in the holiday TV special, the President’s portrait will hopefully just be tossed aside. He’ll move into the past. Oh, he’ll make a great deal more noise before he goes under for the last time, but it seems clear that actual power is slipping through his grasp.
It is customary for Presidents to create a Library that documents their legacy. All of the gifts given to the Administration by foreign powers and important documents created get housed in them. They become centers of learning and a repository for research material surrounding the person in office.
I cannot begin to imagine what a Library dedicated to our current President would look like. Perhaps it will contain some old red baseball caps and a bound copy of all of his tweets.
Even Richard Nixon who left the office in disgrace has a legacy of accomplishments that his library celebrates.
Not this guy.
I say just put all of his stuff into boxes, stick it somewhere and let someone else deal with it down the line. In another hundred years, maybe there will be another global pandemic, and somebody will be bored enough to find the time to go through it all.
I fear we are all heading towards having to stay inside much more in the coming days. Every single graph in regard to the virus looks exactly the same - everything is going up, up, up.
Even with that, I feel much more in my own skin today. Maybe because I can see the clear blue sky outside this morning.
While the President-elect’s team will not be able to truly start working for another two months, I take great comfort in watching them start. Their win is finally being certified in state after state.
The events of these past months have been “history in the making”. Really, that is true of every time, but these days have been so remarkable and so unlike anything most of us have ever experienced.
Hopefully, Joe Biden’s term in office will be boring.
The less interesting it is, the more that all of us will be able to lead interesting lives.
I’m ready.
💙💙💙💙Let’s bring on the interesting! ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️