Stuff

Tryin’ to figure what it is about material possessions that seem to sometimes take up way too much space in our physical environments and our consciousness. Like way too much space: And I’m guessing that I don’t hold a patent on the concept, as in I am not alone.

The challenge for me is that I have always been a collector. From way back to my early teens. My home environment then was one where my father loved to restore old pieces of furniture. Spend weeks and sometimes months in his workshop stripping paint or varnish, then smooth the grain with sandpapers with grit numbers I swear went from 1 to 100. Then newly stain and varnish or shellac the wood before sending out the piece to be re-upholstered. I understood, later in my own life when I took on pieces of furniture—indeed my tastes went more for the primitive-barely-holding-together kind—that the process of restoring something, working with your hands and making something yours, was simultaneously restorative to the soul; transforming; giving new life and purpose; calming.

Along the way, the connection to certain pieces inevitably grew a story, attached like a barnacle to the hull of a ship. The story could be related to a summer trip; or a hand-medown or the night I went to pick it up; or that Sunday drive down lost roads. So along the way, the saga, emotion, event or person connected with a certain piece becomes encapsulated within the fibre of the thing and the thing is now way more than a stick of furniture in your house. It is a piece of you. “And how are you gonna separate that?” my mind will shout. Hell, I’ve moved it seven times over past years because it is a caseload of sentiment and attachment: like the grandfather clock with wooden works made in Massachusetts with its dial face hand-done in milk paint by the hands of children that once worked in clock factories to undertake such tasks with their small delicate hands. And how the antique dealers I bought it from became good friends and mentors and would invite us in for homemade baked beans and fresh tomato sandwiches and gave me slack to pay for the thing over time with cash I earned from playing drums in a jazz trio and which gigs they were and on and on. Sheesh of sheeshes! I mean come on. Get past all of this right? Now you’ve come to a place in life where you are settled, but are challenged getting around the house or basement or studio because of baggage.

I say baggage, because it is often said that hanging onto stuff means one is living in the past or the future and not living in the present. Is this in a book in the self-help section of the Milford library? I nailed myself on that one fairly recently. In particular when it came time to prepare my father’s house in Ottawa for sale. Holy warehouse! You wanna try that sometime: A good lesson on the time demands and physicality of purging a home down to articles of family heritage and those pieces that add an aesthetic to a place. Hell, my dad’s place never looked as good as when the hardwood floors and trim and details and light from the many windows were free to embellish the space. Sure easier to downsize someone else’s home than your own, I admit.

So these days, I ponder stuff. Of how a large industry has grown around human attachment to belongings. I take notice that the outer design of modern self-store places can sometime resemble the Taj Mahal or other sorts of temples. But the buildings I refer to are dedicated to the notion of clinging onto. That the public are willing to fork out monies for stashing things, that when tallied in hindsight could have sent them on a world cruise: for two.

I once stood on the third floor of a former factory turned depository of stuff. Row upon row of units caged with fencing stood as jail cells holding half the furnishings for a small town, I swear. And I was part of it. The thing that dawned on me was the only way I could sell off the contents of my unit, which was stacked to the top, was to either unload it so the antique buyer standing beside me could see everything in the hopes of him buying or to accept his offer of a sum for the entire contents, an amount that perhaps covered six months of storage rent in the three years the stuff had sat there. Brilliant, said I as I took his contents offer and helped him haul away memory after personal memory from a barely heated, dimly lit building in an inner city core in February. Brilliant, I shivered as I thought of warm sand and the steel drums of Barbados. But I did take away a lesson.

Which brings me to now when I am soul-struck on allowing all possessions to leave my life that no longer enhance or contribute to the present: like selling the kitchen table that I ate on as a kid that has been gathering dust in the barn. Training my emotional response that I am not selling my childhood, I am selling a table. The childhood memories live on. Or the desk my mother once used in the den. I remind myself that it is a desk and that the memories don’t require an object to retrieve the meaning of these moments.

I realize some of this stuff will be tough to easily apply the theory to. Yet what prompts me to stay the course of this cleansing process is the goal of living lighter in a house where the place itself speaks of timelessness: Where the light of morning and the glow of the moon resonates on imperfect plaster walls that have held for two centuries; Where I live my story beneath the rafters of a building that have captured the stories of the many who have once called this old house home.