SHOOT IT AND BOOT IT

By MICHAEL PERKINS

IT’S BEEN NEARLY TWENTY YEARS since the last time I changed residences, and the process of taking inventory of the trail of quaint trash accumulated over that period is both hilarious and humbling. Hilarious, because I recognize a lot of stuff that I somehow justified bringing along the last time I moved, and humbling because I hadn’t heretofore acquired the discipline required to just consign much of it to the dustbin. It’s not merely a case of asking “what was I thinking?” once and being done with it, but, in the present sorting process, posing that question several dozen times each day.

One way to calm the emotional unease of parting with stuff that you can’t logically justify hanging onto is to make formal photos of the items on their way out. We are physically downsizing our total household load of chazerei by quite a lot on the way to a much smaller joint, a process which makes it easier to make quick keep/trash decisions than if we were relocating to same-size digs. That strikes a lot of purely sentimental things off the list right away, like china my wife has carried from house to house simply because it’s always been in her family (top) or souvenirs of the 1939 New York World’s Fair (below) that I retained in hopes of someday creating a massive showcase display, a project which I now realize only exists between my ears. Some bits are old friends, automatically transferred to each successive house or apartment over decades. Many of them cannot accompany us on this one last adventure.

We will probably recall a lot these passing bits in detail for as long as our minds remain intact. For those that we have partially forgotten, there will be the pictures. For those that we have totally forgotten, there will be more room for other things in the crowded attic between our ears. In any event, there will be far less weird lore for our children to sift through later, wondering, as they go, what the devil this or that thingamajig was used for, or who in hell would want to hang onto it. There again, the pictures may provide a clue. Or not. And so it goes.