texified

     Today I made an attempt to clean out my closet, chest of drawers, and other miscellaneous trunks and boxes.  Now I have attempted this before, but I was always diverted by unexpected complications.  So I tried it again today, knowing that these complications would arise, but determined to do my best.  I’m afraid that I was only partly successful.

     I started with my chest of drawers and immediately became face to face with this complication that I mentioned.  I reached into a drawer and drew out some t-shirts that I rarely (never?) wear, thinking this would be a good place to start.  The first shirt was a shirt that I have had for (censored) years.  I remember buying it back in (censored) one summer when I was working on a research project.  I bought it in the Baylor book store and wore this shirt for many years.  It was stained with the smoke of a fire that once swept through my place, and I might have been able to put it over my head, but there was little chance that it would fit.  After all it has been (censored) years since I had bought it, and I’m afraid that I may have…umm…became a mite stouter than I was back then.  There were about three other shirts that I had gotten about 6 years later when I was attending graduate school at KU.  I looked critically at them.  One of them had the “ecology flag” emblazoned on the front.  I remember wearing this flag all through the seventies on many a field trip.  How could I simply discard it?  And no, I don’t think it would fit.  Let’s be honest I know it wouldn’t fit!  So I threw these shirts in to the “keep” pile.  Now a few months ago in a fit of industry I had thrown these shirts into a bag for Goodwill.  Unfortunately, I had left the bag sitting in my computer room, and in one idle moment as I looked through the bag, I found the shirts and decided to keep them after all.  This time I was determined to not keep the Goodwill bag sitting around.  I was going to take it directly to Goodwill.  However, I decided to keep these shirts.

       And so it went.  Here was the black turtleneck sweater that my sister had sent me for Christmas back in 1974 during my sojurn in Eugene, Oregon.  I remembered the many times that I had worn it.  In fact I had worn it just last week.  Of course it was a little snug.  Here was the back pack my daughter had used through school, covered with doodles and graffiti.

     Here were the sweaters that my mother had given me back in the eighties, and here the shirt my grandmother had given me in the early seventies.  Here was the electric blanket that my mother had given me in 1980.   Each time that I tried to discard something, I would remember all the circumstances as to how I acquired it, and who gave it to me, where I wore it, the place and type of life that I was living at the time.  To other people it was junk…to me each item was a link to another life, a world that had past, and a link to precious people lost in the mists of time… 

     I found myself sitting on a huge pile of clothes, lost in the memories the old things had evoked.  I made myself concentrate on the task at hand.  I had no problems (almost) in discarding recent items that I never used.  They had not acquired that patina that memory and use had cast over the other things.  Once again I realized how enslaving things could be–not the expensive new things, but the old, the worn, the things imprinted with some essence of self.  This isn’t the same as sabi (see earlier post) but it seems related somehow.