I opened my dad’s office desk drawer after he died. In it, I found neatly organized items from the insurance and financial planning businesses he had run. Pens. Letter openers. Calling cards. Rulers. Dirty jokes on calling cards. Mostly promotional materials saved throughout the years. When I was a child and out of school for a holiday or break, he sometimes took me to his work. His office was in a nondescript building in Kendall, shared with lawyers and other professionals who each leased a space. In his office then was a binder full of dirty jokes he had collected. Photocopied pages filed by category and joke. Pre-Internet, where did he find all of these papers with dirty jokes? These jokes were vaudeville styled raunchy humor, often at the expense of women’s large breasts or immigrants’ accents. This may have been the first time I saw something he had collected. When he died, I saw the last thing — to me, at least — he had collected.
When someone dies, the impulse is to go through their things. Not to keep their stuff. Not even to throw it away. But to sift through the objects that they collected and saved as if some secret might be discovered. What is within their belongings that we never understood when they were alive? Can we find secret messages in left behind possessions? You didn’t love me? Maybe those pens with your name on them will give me a clue as to why. You didn’t want to talk about anything or do anything together? Maybe those letter openers show me why. To every request you said no, why? I’ll look at your calling cards to find out. Their discovered things promote what we might imagine them to still be. Or to finally be.
In my dad’s house are kitchen drawers full of I don’t know how old they are candies, pantry cupboards stacked with paper towels, kitchen pantry cupboards with ten year old spices, a liquor cabinet with alcohol purchased forty years ago, bathroom closets stuffed with towels no one has used in years, if ever. There are dresser drawers full of photographs, birthday cards, holiday cards, playing cards. There is Tupperware. Lots of Tupperware. The bottoms are in one cabinet; the tops neatly stacked in another cabinet. There were twenty different Talenti ice creams in the freezer when he died. In the garage, there are more paper towels, broken and functioning ice chests, boxes of garbage bags, many rakes and hoses, more dog food than the dog can eat. In his workshop, there are enough tools for forty men to use at once.
Is there such a thing as subtle hoarding? I’m not talking about the TV show Hoarders where people collect so much trash that no one can walk through the house. I’m talking about the collection of items placed into neatly arranged spaces, not obvious to the casual eye, not in anyone’s way, not broken, not decaying, not noticeable. Yet, without the chaos, there still is so much stuff. I feel his house is one of subtle hoarding — collections of mostly insignificant things and items bought over the years that demonstrate his ability to purchase at will. Even if he did not need more paper towels, more were bought and put in the cupboard. We collect what we emotionally do not have, any basic psychology course would say. Sometimes, paper towels are not paper towels.
He was a clean and neat person. All foods went into Tupperware: ice cream, cream cheese, butter, deli meats. He didn’t come out of his bedroom in the morning until he was showered, dressed, and cologned. His car was spotless. I could name this subtle and organized way of being as one of anxiety. This type of anxiety might be pristine in appearance, and, on the surface, in control of appearances. But it is still anxiety. This definition runs counter to a more popular narrative of the anxious as frazzled. Most people are anxious, yet most people do not look frazzled nor do they live in homes crammed with so much shit that they cannot walk through their living rooms. They live subtly with their anxieties. They live quiet lives of anxious desperation.
I sometimes wonder who will go through my things if I were to die tomorrow, and what would they find? Boxes of old letters. Containers of odds and ends. Books I no longer read. Old t-shirts I never could let myself throw out. CDs I don’t play. Socks I don’t wear anymore. Empty growlers I have no usage for. Beer that may no longer be drinkable. Some people think our narratives can be told via what we own. I don’t collect anything, and I own nothing of any monetary value. My possessions are useless and obsolete. That doesn’t mean I don’t have a narrative, though. That doesn’t mean I don’t have anxiety. I’m still figuring out my narrative, and, at times, why I have anxiety.
There is anxiety in not knowing as much as there is in knowing what is wrong with our lives. Therapy allows us to know what is wrong with our lives. Things allow us to not know. Why did my dad save these things? When did he first order them from a company that does promotional materials? Which clients did he give them to? Did he save these items in order to remember the businesses he began? Did he want a small piece of his business past to remain with him? When the businesses ended, did he not want the insignificant, promotional things to end up in a metaphoric or real trash as well? For a man who may have only loved work over everything else in life, this type of speculation makes some sense, yet it still leaves me wanting a more concrete answer. It is common to have anxiety about what we do not know. I don’t know him. He did not know me. Some relationships are all about not knowing, whether the relationship is parental, spousal, romantic, indifferent. What was that person doing during the day, when on a trip, when on the phone, when not here, when sitting in front of a computer, when getting ready for bed behind a closed bathroom door, or even when in the same space as someone else? Sometimes we anxiously wait for the next awful thing to occur because we don’t know what it may end up being or where it may end up materializing. Sometimes, we collect shit because some awful thing will inevitably occur, and we don’t know when. The shit gives some semblance of comfort. We don’t know shit. And even if we don’t know, at least, in the end, we can have enough paper towels.
“I’m going to publish a joke book,” he once told me. He was not a funny person. “It will be a book of all these jokes I have collected.” “But those jokes are available everywhere, and now they are also online for anyone to view or download. You didn’t write those jokes,” I said. “No one will publish that.” He left the room without saying anything.
When I was maybe ten or so, my dad decided I should paint (as he once did in college) and took me to one of the local, nondescript department stores in Miami, Gold Triangle, to buy supplies. He bought an easel, gesso, paints, and brushes. It was a collection of materials any young artist might need. We went back to the house and he set everything up in the garage. Then he painted, and I watched. I never got a chance to paint.
Don’t you think each one of us wants to be either an artist or to think of ourselves as such? Artists are creative. They horde emotions. They express themselves in ways other humans cannot. They play with what they don’t know and make it, somehow, seem like something they know: a landscape, a story, a sculpture, an installation, a song. They write jokes and paint and publish books and collect ideas and observations and things for themselves and for others. We look at their “things” — a song, an essay, a painting, a joke — and we say: I know that person now.
Writers, too, are artists. I write. I don’t write poetry. I don’t read poetry. I don’t particularly like poetry, I think, though, in poetry. My thoughts feel, to me at least, poetic. Imagine, for instance, waking up besides yourself from ten or fifteen or twenty years ago, and you see all this stuff you own. When we imagine a returnable past, I know we all think the impulse is to talk about the regrets, the could haves, the mistakes we made. I know that’s the cliché impulse. But I’d rather ask of my former self something like: What types of kitchen utensils do you have? What kind of shirts do you own? Are there enough paper towels in your house? Imagine, I say to myself, I can wake up back then and take stock of the material things I own and maybe collect. There really is no It’s a Wonderful Life Moment where we get to go back to the past and realize what went wrong so we can rectify the present. The thing is, everything went wrong. And if we could change it all, everything would go wrong again. Our parents still wouldn’t talk to us, we’d still get divorced, we’d still make mistakes, we’d still find hurt. Instead, what if we could go back just to stare at our collected shit and those bad, somewhat dirty jokes collected in a binder again? Just to stare. Nothing else.
Late last year, I thought my dad had a come to Jesus moment when, recovering from the stroke and riddled with cancer, he said on the phone through tears “I’m sorry for the hurt.” I’ve spent a long time thinking about that moment. Which hurt did he mean? The hurt of retiring too early? The hurt of not saving enough stuff? The hurt of our failed relationship? When he had a heart attack ten years earlier, my mother and I left him at the hospital and went for dinner at Tupelo Honey in downtown Asheville. My mom said to me: “This will change him. You’ll see.” It’s also a bit cliché to believe that health failures lead to life changing decisions. “I almost died, but I didn’t, so now I’m a better person. It’s a Wonderful Life.” What, however, actually creates change? Fear of our fragile mortality? There are people in our lives — parents, ex-wives, colleagues, etc. — who, even when faced with potential death or health scares, don’t change. They cannot. They have collected within themselves so much anxiety and trauma and inability to love that no change could ever occur. And can I? I’d rather answer that brief interlude of self-reflection poetically and not argumentatively. Can I ever change? My answer might be: It’s like you wake up in a mirror where all your reflections shine back. They are all collected into your supposed single reflection, layered on top of each other like photocopies neatly organized in a binder of dumb jokes. That’s how I think of my own change.
In my Lexington home, I have some of my dad’s things. I have some of the promotional materials, a jar he kept spare change in, an army jacket, some odds and ends. It’s all so insignificant. When we collect things people who have died collected, we are engaging in our own self-promotion. We are saving promotional materials. Look, we seem to say, I’m within this person’s stuff. I am identifying with the person through his or her stuff. That’s, in fact, how I remember — through stuff. Some of my stuff. Some of someone else’s stuff. Like looking at myself over and over again in a mirror that is layered with so much collected angst, anxiety, depression, hurt. But the things my dad saved, they weren’t really personal. They were business materials. Paper towels. What am I looking at when I look at paper towels and rulers with his name on them and not personal items like drawings, photographs, art projects, letters? I don’t know that narrative just yet. Or maybe I do, and I’m not ready to write it down.
