A friend of mine was telling me recently about going through
his personal items and deciding who he’d like to leave them to. He’s not ill, but, like myself, he’s
middle-aged, and at some point you start thinking about creating a last will and
testament. “Who’s going to want
all of my show posters?” he asked me?
Well, who indeed?
Coincidentally, I’ve been purging my apartment, and the
answer to the question we all ask ourselves, “Who’s going to want
my…fill-in-the-blank?” is – probably no one wants that stuff. If you’ve recently moved to a new place
and had to purge before packing, you know what I’m talking about. That stuff is going to end up at the
dump. That stuff is probably going
to cost you (if you’re thoughtful), or your loved ones (if you’re not, or have
a sudden demise) a bunch of money paid to 1-800-got-stupid-shit-and-I-have-no-idea-why-I-kept-it
to go and haul it out of your place.
There have been articles on facebook, of course, about people having to
deal with their deceased parents’ stuff, houses and houses full, picking
through thousands upon thousands of items to see what’s valuable and what isn’t
and finally deciding well, hell, nobody wants any of this.
To be honest, I have a very ambivalent relationship to
things that I own. Maybe it’s
because we were pretty poor when I was growing up, and most of our stuff was
the cheapest stuff we could put our hands on. My mother used to take us to this joint called “Mickey
Finns” in Perth Amboy every September so that we could buy school clothes that
fit us. They specialized in
“irregular” clothing, which meant clothes that had holes that could be sewn up,
or parts that had been sewn on backward, or sleeves that were a different color
than the rest of the dress or jacket – fortunately, it was the 60’s, so that
didn’t present as much of a problem as you might think. The clothes weren’t on racks or
anything fancy like that – they were just tossed into enormous cardboard boxes,
vaguely arranged by category, and you’d have to go diving down into the boxes
to see what the hell had been thrown in there. The guys at Mickey Finns would put stickers over the
irregularities so that you could identify what they were and make a decision as
to whether the flaw was going to cost more in time and effort than you’d be
saving in cash. My Mom was also
not the greatest seamstress in the world, so more elaborate flaws were passed
over for pieces that “only” had rips and tears. The air was thick with thread dust, and we’d always come out
of there rubbing our eyes and feeling like we’d found treasures; at least what
we were taking home was new and not hand-me-down from my mother’s friends.
Most everything else we owned was disposable as well,
including the electronics, the cars, and one or two of the appliances. The highest quality items we ever had
at any given time were probably the refrigerator and the home heating unit,
because, after all, without them you’d literally die. So I learned not to get too attached to stuff, but I also
very unfortunately learned that having an extensive crap collection was
perfectly okay. Some people are
very sentimental about the things they own, and so if any of those kinds of
people are reading this they’re likely to be offended by my talking about the
things I end up, and will always end up, throwing away. I don’t have a large house where I can
lovingly display trinkets and knickknacks. I don’t have very much room at all in my one-bedroom New
York Apartment. So here is my
confession regarding stuff that I end up accumulating, then tossing out or
giving away when it gathers enough dust.
First on the list, photos. Not all photos – but I don’t keep the ones you would think I
would keep. Photos that I took of
scenic naturalness while traveling some cool place? Those I keep.
Pictures of my nephews and nieces, and now my grand-nephews and my
grand-nieces? Hate me if you want,
but I don’t keep those. I love
them all – the kids, not the pictures – but honestly there are a lot of them,
and when you add in pictures from cousins and grand-cousins and others that come
to my home every Christmas, then you get an idea of how many photos like this
I’ve been given after over three decades in my apartment. Old photos, birthday cards, Christmas
cards, all of it goes. I also
don’t have a lot of selfies, and I don’t take them, because I’m a mild
depressive, and looking at pictures of my 30- or even 40- year-old self makes
me really sad. I envy people who
can revel in how happy they were in their own past photos. I don’t have any such revels
recorded. I’ve had kind of a hard
life, emotionally, and looking into the past usually just makes me glad that
it’s over. I recently ran across a
photo taken in 2005, the year before my Dad died, of him on one of my sister’s
sofas, and me on the adjacent sofa.
I was happy to have found a picture of my Dad, and considered, for a hot
second, cutting myself out of the photo because I looked ugly and fat. I didn’t do it. I also saved the picture, but mostly
because it’s something I know my sister would want, should anything happen to me. Pictures of my cousins weimaraners,
however, are enjoyed for a moment and then ditched. Sorry guys.
I also give away books. I didn’t used to – I used to save books when I was younger,
figuring that someday I’d have more space. Perhaps I’d even have a room that could just be an office or
even a library. The likelihood of
that seems smaller and smaller. But
I’m an avid reader, and rather than hoard books anymore, I just take nearly
100% of them down to the lobby of my building when I’m done with them and let
someone else read them. The ones I
keep are reference books – the complete works of Shakespeare, my 12-volume
Pritzker Zohar, the Encyclopedia of the Golden Dawn, those I keep. The Betty White biography or the Fran
Leibowitz essays I pass along for someone else to enjoy.
Records, CDs and Tapes – this is hard. I love music, but now that most of my
music is digital, the CDs go because I’ve copied them years ago. The cassette tapes went, too, because I
have nothing to play them on. But
the vinyl – Jesus Christ, what do I do with the vinyl? There are albums in there that we’ll
never see the like of again.
Nobody is going to digitize this stuff, yet I love it. I don’t even have a turntable anymore,
but this vinyl – do I just keep it because I have bookshelves in which it fits
perfectly? No, I keep it because I
intend someday to get another turntable and listen to it. I should probably sell some of it, but it’s
in bad condition – it’s been well used, this vinyl.
Pictures, furniture, dishes, shoes, clothes – all of it can
go with very few exceptions. I was
never a shoe collection girl, and now that I’m older I can only really wear
sneakers, so all of the not-sneakers go out. Ditto clothes – never been very girly, and I only have two
types of outfit that I keep – jeans and t-shirts, as long as the jeans fit, and
work clothes, as long as I’m working a job that won’t let me wear jeans and
t-shirts. “Oh, but what happens
when you have an ‘occasion’”, you ask?
If I can’t adapt some of the corporate clothes to serve the purpose,
then I go out and buy something for that occasion.
I had a friend who had had the experience of losing all of
her stuff in a house fire. She
was, of course, traumatized by that experience, and talked about it decades
later as a milestone in her life.
It was hard for me to relate to, though, as virtually nothing I own is
of any value whatsoever. I would
be annoyed as hell if I lost my laptop, but then again, all of my plays and
screenplays are available in backed up copies and other forms. My ID documents are in a fireproof
box. About 15 years ago my
apartment was broken into and the thieves basically took nothing except a CD
collection (see above for reference to what I now do with CDs) because my
laptop was on me at the time of the robbery, and I don’t keep cash in the house
and don’t own any jewelry. Again,
not girly. The one thing I
couldn’t replace all that easily, aside from an extremely small collection of
photos, is a vintage Martin guitar, three-quarter size, that is only worth
something to me because my friend Rich restored it for me – the “collector”
value was taken away, but the restoration enabled me to play it, and that was
more important to me. I’m not, as
I’ve been saying, a collector of valuable things.
I’ve never owned a house, a car, or anything I could
subsequently hock. Would I LIKE
to? Not particularly. Does this mean I’m living some kind of
Buddhist ideal, where material things don’t matter? No way – touch my money and I’ll freak out. I’m good with money, and I have
investments. I feel secure when I
have money and insecure when I don’t.
But even when I was making much better money than I’m making now, I
didn’t go out and buy stuff – jewelry, paintings, higher-end furniture –
because empty space makes me happier than stuff ever does.
There was a travel writer called Dervla Murphy whose books I
loved. Dervla would take a pan for
collecting water, a box of matches for starting fires, and whatever cash she
thought she needed, and she’d hop on her bike and go and see something of the
world. I have a fantasy that I
could carry my life in a backpack and go anywhere I wanted to. It remains in the realm of fantasy,
though, that I could do such a thing, because I actually don’t have a lot of
experience camping, and I hate the idea of falling asleep somewhere where there
are bugs and snakes.
I wonder if I’d feel differently about stuff if I just had
better stuff. Steve Martin has
millions of dollars’ worth of paintings in his home. Does he sit around and look at them all day? Yoko Ono lives in a fabulous apartment
in the Dakota here in New York, surrounded by stuff she and John Lennon
accumulated together and separately.
Does she give any of that stuff a second thought living her life day to
day? Who knows?
The things that are most precious to me are things you can’t
own anyway. Someday I would like
to have a dog, and I guess in some sense you do “own” a dog, but then again,
the dog has no concept that you are an “owner”, and just thinks of you as his
human. Your dog, your cat, your
turtle, they’re not stuff. And
your friends are definitely not your stuff – thinking of them as your stuff is
dangerous, impractical, and wildly inaccurate. And as for your significant other, should you be lucky
enough to have one, ownership does not come into it in any way. You may think it does, but, trust me,
I’m old, I know things, it doesn’t.
Perhaps if I owned a boat, and I lived on this boat, and
then the boat sank and I lost my boat, then I would be sad. I’m sure I would be sad. I will probably never own and live on a
boat. And I’d offer up Winnebago
as another possibility, but I don’t drive, so that’s even less likely.
Until then, I’m giving away, throwing out, or otherwise
arranging to remove most of my stuff, and this will constitute a good portion
of my last will and testament (which I hope won’t be executed for a good long
while). Nobody wants the notes
from an improv class I took 30 years ago.
Nobody wants an afghan that I crocheted to cover a couch that I got rid
of two couches ago. Nobody wants
the junk in my apartment, including me, so I’m not leaving it to anyone. If someday I should win the lottery
and, subsequently, buy a boat, or a house, or one of Steve Martin’s paintings,
then I suppose I will have to revise this plan. Until then, my will, should I stop procrastinating and
finish one, will be all about who gets my 401K, and not at all about who gets
my show posters.
