Perils of Caffeine in the Evening

Musings on clutter.

I ran across this piece today in the New Yorker by author Ann Patchett. Her best childhood friend’s father had died, and over the course of several weeks she assisted this friend in breaking down his house and distributing the plethora of stuff.

As that task unfolded, she consulted her husband and they decided on a pre-emptive purge of their own house, which had not changed ownership in 26 years.

If you’ve had a similar experience of ridding out a parent’s house after a death or involuntary downsizing, you’re familiar with the drill. It’s an archaeological expedition whose hieroglyphics are a stream of disassociated objects rather than something meticulously chronicled. One thing might trigger a flood of memory, the next an inscrutible puzzlement.

In engaging her own house, Patchett finds cache after cache of champagne flutes, brandy snifters, flatware, mixing bowls, much of which was still in its original packaging. It seems much of it was self-inflicted and not scapegoated by mistargeted wedding or anniversary gifts. It seems, instead, that they were aspirational purchases:

“I had miscalculated the tools of adulthood when I was young, or I had miscalculated the kind of adult I would be. I had taken my cues from Edith Wharton novels and Merchant Ivory films. I had missed the mark on who I would become, but in doing so I had created a record of who I was at the time, a strange kid with strange expectations “

We had a similar experience a couple of years ago when an overachieving toilet was paired with an underperforming side sewer, and our basement was flooded. We’ve lived in our house for 46 years, and you can let your imagination populate this disaster. The basement was chock full of stuff from 1975 on, an uncurated time capsule born of expedience and life’s inexorable velocity.

A team from the insurance company was on hand to remedy, and for each object we were faced with a binary decision: trash it or sanitize and repatriate.

I’ve said elsewhere that this was an exercise in speed-dating my past. As I regarded objects, I felt that in my case they were just souvenirs of a prior self, and not (with the possible exception of a 1980 edition of The Writer’s Market) aspirational. Just life trudging forward.

In the end, I’m mostly happy with the result in the basement, the sight of concrete floor that I hadn’t seen in decades, and I hope to spare our son the horrors of the other two floors. And I think Patchett’s takeaway may seem at first glance morbid, but in fact is liberating:

“I was starting to get rid of my possessions, at least the useless ones, because possessions stood between me and death. They didn’t protect me from death, but they created a barrier in my understanding, like layers of bubble wrap, so that instead of thinking about what was coming and the beauty that was here now I was thinking about the piles of shiny trinkets I’d accumulated. I had begun the journey of digging out.”