Day 287…
Over the last few weeks I have been sorting through boxes of stuff that have been kept, in some cases, for decades, in storage. While most of it is stuff that various members of my family decided to keep, some of it is certainly stuff that I’ve accumulated, myself.
As a kid, I collected almost everything at one point or another - coins, stamps, rocks. If I happened to get more than one of anything, it would inspire a new collection. I was a bit obsessive.
When we started expanding Jersey Boys beyond New York, I thought it would be cool to get a Starbucks mug from every city we worked in. “Don’t do it,” said a friend of mine who was also working on the show. Some of the best advice I’ve ever gotten. She knew where it would lead.
Eventually, when we were putting the show up there, I did collect mugs from each of the major cities in the Netherlands. On each day off, I traveled to a different place to explore it, and I bought a mug.
There are seven of them and we still use them every day. The Groningen one has a chip on the lip. If I find another one from there, I might replace it, or I might just leave it as is and drink around the gap.
My mother has most of the mugs I have gotten as swag from various shows over the years. She must have five or six from Jersey Boys alone. For whatever reason, random mugs still seem to gather when we aren’t looking. Periodically, we drag bags of them off to Housing Works.
My Grandparent’s basement in Virginia was a veritable treasure trove. They kept all sorts of things - my Grandfather’s World War 1 uniform, a selection of my Grandmother’s dolls, old kitchen things from early in the last century.
While they lived there, I would go down and root around every time we visited. I’d discover some treasure and ask my Grandmother if I could keep it and she almost always said yes. I think she was happy that I was interested.
Sometimes, I’d see something in a museum and wonder if they’d saved one like it in the basement. Next time I was there, I’d ask. One time I thought that I might be able to find an old candlestick phone down there. When I couldn’t find one, I asked my grandmother why she hadn’t kept one.
You can’t save everything is what she told me. How was she to know fifty years before that fifty years later her grandson might want one?
When my grandparents passed away and my aunt finally moved into an assisted living facility, my father went through the basement and saved some things. He then hired a removal service to just clear out the rest of it and cart it off.
At the time I was somewhat agonized by this. Given what I am sorting through now, though, I am grateful that he had the wherewithal to do that.
My grandmother’s brother, who died before I was born, was a fairly wealthy, rather dandy, gay man. He lived on Park Avenue up here in New York and would often send his southern yokel sister expensive sophisticated gifts. She wouldn’t always realize what they were.
Under the sink in the kitchen, when they were sorting things out, my father found an old vase stuck in the back of the cabinet with a dried sponge stuck inside it. He asked me if I wanted it and I said yes.
In between stage management gigs, I’d sell things on eBay to make my rent. I shared the proceeds from the family stuff with my sister. I figured I could see if it would sell.
The vase, which listed to one side a bit, turned out to be a signed Tiffany piece. My great uncle had sent it to my grandmother who didn’t really care for it, so she’d found another use for it. It sold for about two thousand dollars, which from what I could tell from other auctions was about right. My father was dumbstruck. Both my sister and I paid our rents on time that month.
Yesterday, I shredded a pile of my old driver licenses and other old IDs. I had kept a huge envelope full of all of them. There was a whole series of cards relating to my Junior year in London. I scanned all of those because some of the pictures were fun, then destroyed them too.
The only things I decided to keep were my old cancelled passports. I have had about six or seven of them. The first one I had, I shared with my sister. I was about five and she was probably two when we got it to travel to South Africa. That one I can’t find, but I know I have seen it somewhere, so I am fairly certain that it’s in another one of these boxes. The collector in me is itching to put it with the others.
The things that I am keeping as I sort through it all are things that I think help tell my story - my passports, my old calendars, old journals.
I’ve had most of my old photographs scanned and then I destroyed the hard copies of them. There were albums upon albums of them - all sitting in boxes, unseen. I had old VHS tapes and home movies and family slides digitized and then destroyed or recycled the originals of them as well. They now exist virtually, backed up in several places, but the many boxes that held them have been emptied and broken down.
My goal is to scan all of the old family photographs and letters and put them into some sort of clear order. At the end of it, rather than a truckload of boxes, I hope to be able to hand my nephew and niece each a single hard drive with the entire history of their family on them. There will be one or two small plastic crates with the originals of things like my father’s letters home during World War 2 and the photo albums my great-grandmother put together in the Philippines in the early 1900’s, but that will be it.
The old dolls, uniforms, glassware and tools will have been sold or donated. The few things that we’ve kept, are practical. My grandmother had an old kitchen timer from the 20’s or 30’s that still works. Michael uses it in the kitchen.
The whole process is going to take a while - just the envelope with my old IDs took me all afternoon yesterday to sort through - but if not now, when?
It will be interesting to see if future generations will be interested in the things that we decide to keep.
After months of partisan wrangling, Republicans and Democrats finally agreed on the terms for a stimulus package and, at the eleventh hour, passed the bill in both the House and the Senate.
The President is now threatening to veto it. If the situation wasn’t so dire, it would be hilarious.
The President didn’t engage in discussions around the bill at all. Despite that, right up until about an hour before the President released his video slamming it, aides at the White House were touting it as a major win for him.
Instead of $600 payments, the President wants $2000 payments to go out to every American. The Republicans are horrified, the Democrats are elated.
The President, who doesn’t understand many of the basic concepts of the 5,000+ page bill, is objecting to parts of it that are actually necessary to keep the government functioning. He objects to things like long-overdue and deeply needed arts funding and foreign aid payments considering them wasteful when, in fact, they are vital parts of our economic health.
On Sunday, many of us file for our final payments. Passing this was going to keep that funding flowing. Not anymore.
Even if they can override his potential veto, it will take some time to do that. It will make the first weeks of January even more challenging. It will also shut down the government.
Leading into Christmas, the President also announced pardons for a whole slew of bottom feeders - two friends who lied to investigators in the Russian probe, a few corrupt Congressmen, some Blackwater security guards who massacred men, women and children in Iraq.
None of the people pardoned were wrongly convicted. With these pardons he is not righting and greater wrong, he is just rewarding his supporters and protecting his own hide.
Yesterday, the Vice President, after being among the first to receive the COVID vaccine, appeared at an event where supporters stood shoulder to shoulder without a mask in sight.
Republicans legislators who have called the virus a hoax time and time again are, nonetheless, lining up in front of millions upon millions of worthy Americans so that they can get the vaccine first.
What will we remember from this year? What stuff will end up in the boxes that the following generations will need to sift through?
So far this year, I have kept the programme from the production of Uncle Vanya I saw in London which was the last show I saw in March before the pandemic shut everything down, a couple of sweetgrass baskets from South Carolina that I picked up during my road trip south, and my “I voted Early” sticker from the election. One of the baskets is where Michael now keeps his masks and the other one has Christmas ornaments in at the moment.
Not a bad haul for a whole year.
Getting rid of the stuff I don’t want is every bit as satisfying as gathering it up in the first place was. It’s like a tide of junk. It all flowed in and now it’s flowing out.
Not all of it, not by a long shot. As much as I admire the simplicity and starkness of Japanese design, I will always tend toward the Victorian.
I like being surrounded by things that remind me of past experiences. Getting rid of all of the things that either remind me of things I’d rather forget or that I have no associations with at all, clarifies the things that I treasure.
Maybe that’s something that we will all walk away with this year. A better sense of what’s important and what isn’t.
That actually may be the backhanded gift from the pandemic this year.
Clarity.
I, for one, am grateful for it.
You have your own Antiques Roadshow!
💕Greatful for the Profound Pause the Stillness to look and see everyone and everything around and within me💕
and your daily posts of anything I missed 💕❄️🙏🎄🌟