Monday, June 21, 2021 Stuff, The Movie Series

When we got married, we lived in an apartment at first. It wasn’t until we rented our first house that the stuff started arriving. Every time my parents came for a visit, a couple more boxes of childhood memorabilia, books, saved schoolwork, etc. would arrive. We’ll call that “Stuff, Part One.”

Then came “Stuff, the Sequel.” In this phase, my parents started getting rid of their stuff. Fool that I was, I often took it. Sometimes I got rid of it and sometimes I didn’t.

And now we’re in the third phase “Revenge of the Stuff.” Our children have all moved out; some of them have been gone for over 10 years. The first summer that any one of them didn’t come home from college, I boxed up their stuff, labeled the boxes and stuck them in a closet. Every Christmas when they’ve come home for the last 5 years or so, I’d say, “I’d really like you guys to look through your boxes and get rid of the things that you don’t want to keep.” Ha! The words evaporated into a mist and floated away. Most of our children still live in apartments and don’t really have room for things and we have a large house, so it hasn’t been a huge issue.

But now I’m getting serious about this. Very serious. This year, I’ve been making phone appointments with each one of them to review what’s in each box. Much has been given away or thrown away at long last!

Some of you may be mystified by this strange habit of saving stuff. We recently had a family over and the father told us that he had just one small shoebox of things from his childhood. Our oldest son has 9 regular packing boxes of stuff, the next oldest has 11. Clearly we are a family of savers. And they came by it honestly.

When I went through our second son’s things with him, he had a huge box of specialty bottles and cans that he’d saved. I finally persuaded him to get rid of most of them and then I ended up liking some of ones he got rid so much, I kept them.

Is it time for an intervention? To justify this ridiculous decision, I found a use for one of them:

It’s probably time for the final phase: “The Zombie Stuff Apocalypse.”

I’ll probably delete this in the morning. Either that, or I’ll put it in a box marked “Blog Posts to Delete” and forget about it for 10 or so years until my kids have to throw it away.