#174 Musings Beyond the Bunker (Wednesday October 20)
Good morning!
I wrote a while back about our penchant for filming virtually every tiny event in our lives, sacrificing being “in the moment” for creating a chronicle that few people will ever see. It’s not as if we take just one photo. When many of us were kids, developing film cost money and, therefore, there was a “price” to pay for multiple photos. These days we take multiple photos of everything (for which there is essentially no incremental cost). But doesn’t this massive photo library become a digital version of the boxes of school papers, baseball cards, mementos and old furniture that fills our garages? We should think about the detritus we leave behind, the burden it will someday place on our survivors, and what that detritus tells others about us.
SAVING STUFF
My mother was a packrat. She loved small items that she saved throughout the years. My father, on the other hand, was unattached to physical mementos of his life. I’m more like my mother on this. I’m actually worse. My mother would regale me to get rid of stuff I collected, regularly reminding me of the story of the Collyer Brothers, who lived together in an apartment in New York that increasingly became more and more crowded with the things they saved.
When I was a kid, I saved everything: baseball programs, programs for every concert or play I had attended, maps of cities I visited, old ticket stubs, letters, and even papers written for school. Much of this I have jettisoned—although I kept a few things from each era of my life. One such item is a scrapbook I did about a “news item” of our choice. This scrapbook is significant less for what is in it as events interfered and I was forced to change course midway through. What had begun as a collection of stories about some insignificant accident on a local freeway switched on November 23, 1963 to clippings on the Kennedy assassination. It’s sharp shift in focus in a way is reflective of how this event turned everything and everyone from the everyday to a specific unimaginable horror. The next times I had this feeling were the Challenger explosion, September 11, 2001, and election day 2016.
In any event, one of the slow processes I began to undertake during the pandemic (too slow, if you ask Andrea) is methodically going through the boxes in our garage. Sadly, I’ve become the repository of items from relatives no longer with us—my grandfather, my mother and my sister most significant among them.
It is instructive the items that people save. And it offers a “time capsule” of their lives. As I look at some of the “savings” by some (such as my grandfather’s gas and electric bills), it reminds me that it would be a good idea to “curate” some of my own things. By culling out some of the excess, I won’t burden people with the obligation to plow through what I’ve saved. I’ll help them by reducing the detritus I leave behind!
THE COLLYER BROTHERS
The Collier Brothers were compulsive hoarders. They collected books, newspapers, musical instruments, furniture and many other items. They set booby traps in their Harlem brownstone to crush intruders. Sadly, the system worked too well and killed them both. When they were found dead in March 1947, they were, to quote the Wikipedia entry, “surrounded by over 140 tons of collected items they had amassed over several decades.”
The Collyers were the subject of an E.L. Doctorow novel based upon their lives (imagining them living until the 1970s), entitled Homer & Langley. And while the book is a good read, it’s a little bit of a downer and not Doctorow’s best. Better to go for Doctorow’s magnificent World’s Fair, Waterworks and Ragtime (upon which the musical is based). All are great stories told through different eras and share wonderful mental images of New York.
THE COLLECTION OF RICKY JAY
You may recall the great illusionist, Ricky Jay (he also the pit boss on Deadwood, among the greatest dramas ever on television). Sotheby’s is managing the sale of his extraordinary collection of paraphernalia from the history of magic, illusions, charlatans, and gaming. This is a great article from yesterday’s New York Times, together with some great pictures of some of the items: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/19/arts/design/ricky-jay-magician-collection.html
Have a great day,
Glenn
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