By Edward H. Garcia
On a window sill in my study is a small conch shell. It’s nice but not particularly colorful or beautiful. It’s a souvenir of last year’s trip to Ireland. I picked it up on the Bay of Dublin beach, about a block from the house where we stayed. When I happen to notice it, I think of that trip–the sometimes-bitter cold, the wonderful hot soup which helped with the cold, the plays we saw, the train rides we took. Because of the cold, we took a lot of taxis, too. We had an Indian taxi driver, one from Africa, many native Irish. By far the hardest to understand were the Irish. The shell brings all that back and a tour of magical Newgrange and more.
But when the kids come, as they will someday, to clean out the house, organize a garage sale and try to make sense of whatever mess I’ve left, they will look at my nice shell, wonder for a moment at most where it came from and what it meant to me, and then someone will toss it in a large black trash bag, ready to be transported to the dumpster.
The house is full of things like that, some of which puzzle even me when I run across them. There are old teaching notes and a stack of old grade sheets, a paperback book signed by George Peppard in an airport. He didn’t write the book, but it was what my friend had in his hands when he recognized George. The ink on the signature has worn away, but if you know to hold it up to the light, you can barely recognize George Peppard’s signature. If it’s grandkids that are cleaning out the “estate,” they almost certainly will not know who George Peppard was and wouldn’t care anyway.
In my wife’s closet they’ll find the dress she wore when we got married and the coat she bought and shared with her mother and the dress she wore when we adopted our youngest son. They’ll look at them as out of date but worthy of donation to Goodwill. They won’t know that she wouldn’t have parted with them.
Is it sad that these treasures and so many more won’t get a second thought and will be seen as the junk their parents or grandparents accumulated? I don’t think so. I could label things, but it still wouldn’t mean much to them. I could throw them out myself, but I want them around to help me hold on to my memories for as long as I can.
So I hereby invite and even encourage them to throw out anything they want to. They can put a match to the whole lot if that’s what they want to do. Their lives will be full of their own mysteriously special objects, and it will be up to their children to figure out what to do with those.
