The things we keep

I’ve been having a hard time finding the energy to write a post lately. I feel like we need to revise our scale for how we’re doing – struggling, surviving, coping. I mean, is anyone actually doing great these days? To clarify, is anyone sober and doing great. I suspect everyone is feeling some degree of anxiety and malaise with all that’s going on in the world. The sociologist in me is fascinated by the stages we’ve been going through with this pandemic, usually evidenced by a shortage of items in the stores.

Stage 1. Emergency preparedness mode. People stock up on toilet paper, anti-bacterial wipes and condoms. We can handle this. We just need to be prepared!

Stage 2. Realizing this may go on longer than anticipated, people take up new hobbies, almost universally choosing sourdough bread, leading to empty flour shelves in grocery stores globally. Make-up and bras become expendable and pants become expandable. Condom sales take a big hit.

Stage 3. Parents working from home while home-schooling young children unfriend those complaining about how hard they’re finding it to fill their time. Fuelled by both of these groups, stocks in a small Chinese company that makes mobile phone parts increase 1800%. Wrong Zoom folks!

Stage 4. Warmer weather arrives, bringing with it sunshine and hope. People optimistically buy exercise equipment and bicycles to burn off the extra sourdough bread poundage.

Stage 5. Thousands of sourdough starters die of neglect as outdoor projects replace indoor hobbies. People try to ease their claustrophobia by building decks, causing a shortage of lumber and patio furniture.

Stage 6. Having spent five months trying to numb themselves from reality with food and alcohol, people resolve to lose that extra COVID-10 or COVID-15. Soon. Maybe after the U.S. election in November. Sales of ‘barely-used, like-new’ exercise equipment and bicycles increase on Kijiji.

Think we’re in stage 5.5 here. #margaritamood

Ray and I have been in purge mode lately, sorting all our stuff into keep, toss, donate or sell piles. We were purgers long before Marie Kondo made it trendy, but we still fall prey to some of the common hoarding traps. (I seem to be in a list-making mood today.)

“The curse of the perfectly good.” You know this one – the VHS player that you can’t throw out because it’s a perfectly good VHS player and surely someone could use it, so you put it aside until you can figure out who that might be. (That’s a hypothetical example. We don’t own a VHS player.)

“This might be worth something.” We’ve all read stories about someone picking up a painting at a garage sale that turned out to be worth millions, and we don’t want to be the poor schmuck who sold it for peanuts. So we hang on to our childhood stamp collection, just in case there’s a super rare and valuable stamp hiding in there somewhere. (Not hypothetical…just sold on Kijiji, waiting to see if we’re the schmucks.)

“I might need it someday.” The hoarder’s classic. It doesn’t help that as soon as we get rid of something we’ve had around for years, we find ourselves needing it. I suspect it’s due to the recency effect. We only remember we had it because we just saw it. Ray’s workshop is a veritable goldmine of bits and pieces that come in handy when he goes into ‘MacGyver’ mode. It’s also full of junk. Knowing which is which…that’s the tricky part.

“It has sentimental value.” This is a tough one. It was a gift from / belonged to / reminds me of [insert name of cherished loved one]. I’m not the sentimental type so this isn’t a huge issue for me, but I do keep things Nick’s made me over the years (I’m not a monster). I don’t know what he was congratulating me for with this one, but it appears to be the scene of a hit-and-run.

Nostalgia. Memm-rees…Misty water-coloured memm-ries, of the way we were…scattered pic-tures of the smiles we left behind. This is definitely my weakness. Photos and correspondence. I’ve kept every card, letter and note I’ve ever been sent. During the years I lived in Stockholm in my 20s, I didn’t have a phone and it was during the pre-email era, so I sent – and received – hundreds of hand-written letters. I’ve kept my report cards (according to every grade school teacher I ever had, I was a ‘quiet conscientious student who needs to participate more in class’). I have the pay stub from my first job ($2.15 an hour at McDonalds).

One of the reasons I keep documentation of my life is that our brains are incredibly adept at filtering our memories and creating a new version of how things happened. One story I’d been telling myself – and others – was that I’d kind of coasted through high school, getting B pluses and A’s without putting in much effort. I’d joke that the only C I’d ever gotten was in Home Economics. That appears to be mostly true, except for my last semester of high school when I was only taking two Grade 13 classes and my mid-term grades were a C and a D. I ended up with two Cs. I have no recollection of that, but it seems likely I made more effort than I remember and then stopped once I’d received my university acceptance. Not so conscientious any more I guess.

Grade 8 math teacher. Notice my name at the top and my sister’s name in the comments.

It’s also fascinating to remember what life was like before the Internet. To share pics, I had to get film developed – not cheap – and then request “doubles” so I could send a copy home. Long-distance phone calls were expensive so kept short and sweet. I was reading through the letters – yes, I’ve finally started to purge some of them – and thought, “Why are they telling me about what’s happening in Canada?”, then realized that if it didn’t make international news media, I wouldn’t hear about it. At the time, Quebec separating from Canada seemed like a foregone conclusion and the abortion debate was at its peak with clinics being bombed and doctors’ lives threatened. We still had our problems, even in the ‘good ol’ days’.

≈