My mother was a collector and hoarder of junk, especially later in her life. As she grew older, her life became more and more unhappy, and to me the implicit connection was obvious between the unhappiness of her silver years and her unwillingness to throw out old junk, however distantly related to her memories of golden days. That junk had acquired meaning somehow, somehow embodying the joy she felt at remembering the people to whom it had belonged or the simpler times in her own life, when her children were small and the future held promise.

My contact with the junk was frequent. My bedroom was in the basement—beginning in high school, and stretching into the various spans of time when I moved home between tentative forays into the frightening world of adult responsibilities—and was separated by a flimsy paneled wall from the piles of junk in the “back part” of the basement, as it was termed, which was the cement and cinderblock depot of broken chairs in need of wood glue and reupholstering and the boxes upon boxes of old, horribly scratched records whose sleeves had been ruined one, two, or three floods ago. There was so much old and unuseable furniture: a huge turntable/8-track console with built-in speakers from the early seventies that had belonged to my mom’s aunt, several rocking chairs and a couple of wooden armchairs from my dad’s mom, old bedframes, broken desks, several pieces of barstools from a set they’d bought twenty years before, a six-foot round coffee table, a couple of matching mahogany-stained oak end tables—all remnants of the days when they’d lived in a much larger house, before my dad had blown through his bank president’s salary in a binge of post-heart-attack depression and irresponsible existential angst and racked up about a hundred grand in credit card debt. There were knitting magazines from the sixties with lovely ideas for lime-green sweater vests and matching miniskirts or pillbox hats, and boxes piled to the ceiling containing fondue pots, wooden punch bowls, Waterford crystal, and cheese platters, remnants of the days when they had friends and hosted cocktail parties, before they had retreated into the creepy solitude of evenings spent in separate parts of the house, my dad in his recliner in front of the TV, my mom at the sewing machine or the computer or reading in bed.

In order to do laundry or add salt to the water softener, I had to tread carefully between the piles of this junk, down a narrow path we would carve out once a year or so, by piling the boxes even higher and, after much argument with my mother, throwing out just a couple of the things that had begun to stink of mildew. The basement would flood once every three or four years in the Spring. We’d throw out some things that had obviously become ruined, but the bottom-most chairs in the stacks of chairs and chair-parts had several rings on the legs that, were one so inclined, could have been used to measure and date the floods of the past couple of decades. One spring we got clever and collected a bunch of palettes from behind a department store. We put all the boxes of old junk six inches off the floor to protect it from future floods. Over time, those palettes and much of the dead junk nonetheless became so nasty and mildewy that my sister-in-law, who is allergic to it, could barely spend half an hour upstairs in our house where the living tended to gather. Once a year or so, usually after a flood, a sibling or two and I would attempt to clean out the basement, my mother watching over our shoulders and directing our efforts, but this ritual was never much more than an exercise in rearranging the junk, since it was all so precious and laden with sentiment that my mother would permit nothing to be thrown out.

The Christmas after she died, I flew home from college and spent my Christmas break cleaning out the house with my siblings, getting it ready to put on the market. We rented a 30-yard dumpster, and with relish and joy I finally carted all that junk up out of the basement and threw it away, letting it pile up higher and higher in the dumpster with an almost inappropriate feeling of satisfaction. We also took what we wanted for ourselves and filled what had been the dining room with more than sixty boxes of books and other stuff worth giving to the Salvation Army.

All in all, the resolution of the house and estate went very smoothly and with almost none of the emotional flare-ups that I’m told plague many families upon the loss of a parent. But there were some arguments between the brothers and sister and I when it came to disposing of the stuff in the house. Whenever someone held up some old thing of my mom’s and asked what we should do with it, my response was almost invariably, “Throw it out!” After all, her memory was safe in my heart, or at least I was sure it would become so in time. I had my photographs and all her letters. What was her would remain. What was her stuff had no reason to. Why on Earth would I want to save all this junk that had been plaguing me for so long? Why would I want to keep a bit of my mother’s madness for myself? These moldy piles were but broken shadows of her happier past, and if she could never bear to part with them, I felt like I was doing a service to her memory by cleaning the cobwebs of her past with a thoroughness she could never muster. At 30, I have long enjoyed saying that my worldly possessions would still fit in the back of a van, and that includes a large book collection and a bunch of records and stereo equipment. I must assume that my allergy to accumulating things is in some way a reaction to the ghostly piles on the other side of my bedroom walls when I was growing up. Well, that and a distaste for consumerism in general. It is so easy to become attached to stuff that has no meaning. And all that stuff can so easily come to dominate you.

And so it was that my extreme views and violent reaction to hanging onto the crap of other people’s pasts led to recent conflict with some of my siblings. When divvying up the stuff of my mom’s that we wanted to keep, it fell upon me to keep her old Nikon camera and lenses, and I intended to learn to use them. I have since been taken in by the ease and versatility of digital photography, and I have had to admit that her old camera is going to stay right where it’s been, in the back of my closet, for years. While considering whether and how to get rid of it, preferably to give it to someone who would actually use it, otherwise selling it on eBay, I sent out a cursory email to the immediate family asking if anyone minded if I got rid of it, and was greeted with a flurry of impassioned replies arguing that it should stay in the family.

One reasoned thusly: “There are things I have I wouldn’t worry too much about giving away. But this is mom’s camera. This was something which had a lot of meaning and importance to her, something that made her feel as if she had a life of her own outside of her kids and husband. It’s not just an object, it’s something of an heirloom: at least that’s how it feels to me.”

I understood, and it made perfect sense. I am not a heartless unemotional robot, and I understand how heirlooms work. I have my dad’s wedding ring—which he bought when we was in his 50s, because he had been too poor to afford one for himself when they first married—and some other odd trinkets that belonged to him. And I feel a soothing familiarity upon seeing how their nicer furniture has been assimilated into a new context at my brothers’ and sister’s houses when I visit them.

But isn’t it strange? How do these objects absorb significance from the people who owned them? Is it simply association? Looking at this thing reminds me how much I loved my parents? What if I found the same model camera, or the same set of dishes? Of course it wouldn’t be the same. It has to be the same one they had. But why? Is it something about tangibility? Is my father’s letter opener significant to me because I saw him hold it in his hands at the table every night when he came home from work as he sorted through the day’s mail? What about the bad art that hung in his den, given to him by some distant friend or another one Christmas, a print called “Boulevard of Broken Dreams” featuring James Dean, Marilyn Monroe, and Humphrey Bogart sitting around a diner with Elvis as their soda jerk? He never held it, never touched it except to hang it once, and probably didn’t really even like it very much. Why did I hesitate when it came time to decide how to dispose of it? Is it tied into ownership? Things owned by the people we love absorb something of them? It sounds ludicrous. If it’s not ownership, then it comes back to simple association, and I have to wonder why I don’t feel a surge of sentimentality driving on I-90 into Chicago because that’s the highway my dad sat on in traffic every morning for the last ten years of his life. Or why I don’t feel any particular attachment to silver Ford Tauruses but I do feel like I’m eating a lime-green popsicle in my father’s lap whenever I touch a brown velour shirt.

I’m asking the question because the whole thing is so sub-rational, so gut-level, but I suspect there are some rules, or at least guidelines, to how it operates. And I also suspect that the particular relationship between the person and the object, the relationship that somehow infuses the object with identity apart from its membership in the genre of things—no, don’t throw those out! Those were my mother’s dingy gray canvas shoes—must also somehow be primary. Or am I being too logical?

Indeed, what else can we say about the flowers of victory, if not that pardon is the choicest? Not much, I’m sure you’ll agree. I’m still trying to figure out the meaning of my fortune-cookie fortune from tonight’s dinner at the Uptown Cathay Restaurant, but I have made little progress. I’ve identified it as a bad and perhaps overly-literal translation of what is probably a poignant Chinese aphorism, but I can only assume it’s something about the humble exercise of power or having mercy upon the vanquished.

I didn’t realize just how speechless the election left me until noticing that it has been over five weeks since my last post. Sorry to leave the audience hanging like that. I have very little to say in my own defense. In some ways, I have to admit that there’s less to write about these days. Though I have already lapsed in my vow not to read the news until 2008, I am proud to say that I am not as glued to Google News as I was from March through October. That’s a good thing. While comparing multiple versions of the same story can be very enlightening and provides an interesting study in media bias, it takes a shedload of time to do it right. Having semi-unbumpily transitioned from the glamorous lifestyle of a shorts-and-sandals freelance professional into a more straight-laced and conservative kind of professionalism, and having committed to spending an hour and a half on most weekdays days at the gym, and given that my girlfriend has finally joined me in DC after all her travels, and given further that I enjoy joining the residents of the house where I live in their undertaken task of cleaning out years of accumulated trash, junk, and sediment from long-gone tenants in an attempt to turn it from a place where we crash into something we might term a ‘home’, there hasn’t been much time at the end of the day to write. I’m endeavoring to make more time for seeing to the meaningful arrangements of words on screen. Be assured, I’ll keep you abreast of the developments. Coming soon . . . collected musings on the accumulation of various kinds of sediment in the lives of humans. For homework, start here.

By the way, ‘shedload’ is perfectly acceptable in British English, so there’s no need to correct me on it. I’m just doing my part to internationalize the vernacular.