Moving Mema, Pt. I

Alas, after a certain age, every man is responsible for his face.”

-Albert Camus

I cannot believe it’s August.  I hardly remember June!  This early onset summer nostalgia only further reminds me that my time with this lovable city is limited.  I fear the chill of winter; I’d rather live in a place that simply didn’t include it.  Unfortunately, any move I make would result in losing the really sweet deal I have with work/traveling right now, so relocation, while perhaps climatically desirable, will for now lose out to my mobility addiction.  So when winter comes, I suppose I’ll just shiver and bear it.

Actually, I haven’t done that much (for me) international travel this summer, partly because it’s just a really nice time to stick around and partly because the flights get very tight and I have an increased risk of getting stranded.  So it’s been a lot of stateside, and I’m more than ok with that.  Recently, I flew to Oklahoma to help my grandma move.  It’s been in the works for a while, but this was supposed to be “the big push” – a relocation from a 7 room house in Oklahoma to a one bedroom apartment in an assisted living facility in Texas.  It’s complicated.

For starters, my grandma is a hoarder.  It’s not as bad as what I’ve seen on TV, but she has most definitely earned that designation.  Two years ago when I first bought my truck, I drove it up from Texas to her house and loaded it up with a bunch of stuff, just to get it out of her house.  Some of it she gave me because I said I or my friends could use it (and I/we did!) and some of it I absconded with while she was sleeping; running back and forth to the truck with armloads of stuff I knew she would not willingly part with it, but she would also never know was gone.  I took away complete magazine anthologies from several separate subscriptions, dating back to the 70s.  An overabundance of unused planter pots piled up in her garage, for decades serving exclusively as rent-stabilized condos for generations of spider families.  Cupboards full of candles, many half burned.  Dishes.  Liquor.  And I hardly made a dent.  I simply did not have room; the magazines alone took up a good quarter of the bed of the truck.  So this should give you some idea of what we’re working with.

As I suspect is true with most hoarders, my grandmother’s situation is one deeply rooted in sentimentality.  To give a little more context, my grandfather was an Oklahoman congressman, thus making her a congressman’s wife.  It’s a role she excelled in during his lifetime through her support of his endeavors and her genuine concern for her community.  So much so, that after his death she was propelled into the role of a formidable community leader in her own right.  In fact, recently the mayor declared June 13th, “Barbara Gish Day”.  And it’s no small town, either.  Stillwater is home to mega-college OSU.  She sits on the heads of numerous organization boards, oversaw a thrift store, and helped found a shelter for sexually abused children.  People have friends on social media out the wazoo, but she neither has nor needs a facebook account.  This woman hasfriends.  To this day, going out to lunch with my grandma is like going out to lunch with Kelly Ripa.  Getting through a meal can be difficult because everyone knows her and loves her and they all want to stop to say hello.  The only difference is that Kelly Ripa is not nearly as proud of me as Mema is.

In short, she has led a really tremendous life and has a tremendous amount to show for it.  But in addition to all this, she has experienced a great amount of loss.  Logically as one ages, one may expect to lose parents, a spouse, or a sibling (all which she has), but she also lost two children, both at young ages.  And although this was obviously well before I came into being, I am very sure that it played a role in making her a constant worrier who is very resistant to change in her personal life.  She is also exceedingly determined, which I suppose one must become to navigate some of the rough waters she’s seen.  And further (as I’ll explain) because her sociopolitical mindset is so contradictory to the great majority of people surrounding her, her convictions must be that much more assured—a quality that lends itself to presenting as stubbornness in other facets of her life.  To her great credit, she maintains an exceedingly open mind as compared to many others in her generation and geographical vicinity.  One of the most vehement Democrats I’ve ever known, she spends her days watching probably the only TV in Oklahoma tuned to MSNBC and defending items up and down the party line to complete strangers until she is –no pun intended- blue in the face.  As we were packing her up the other day, she said, “That Rachel Maddow is just so smart.  You know…she’s a lesbian….and that’s ok.”  I am immensely proud to come from a family that engenders tolerance.  I sort of cannot express how much I loved her in that moment.

It’s not unusual to equate material objects with the memories they represent.  Symbolism is as engrained in the human psychological structure as music appreciation, our penchant for religion.  There is direct evidence to this in the popularity of services like Instagram, and the ever-expanding capacity of computer memory—we want to keep things amidst a world of constant change.  To return to them as we like, often just to light up a small portion of our brain housing some well-worn memory.  We even named this process “saving”.  Technologies and inventions are developed and made popular because society as a whole decided there was a need for them.  It is no accident that for all the ways technology, consumerism, and societal norms have evolved, they have does so to support our most basic desire to feel worth as substantiated by sentimentality and the symbolism that enables it.

I am lucky to live in an age where I can store my pictures on a usb and not have to choose between devoting a closet of my house to shoeboxes of old photos and newspaper clippings or losing them forever.  If I want to read an old love letter, all I have to do is log on to my email.  I am also very lucky to have developed such a profound respect for impermanence, largely because I was able to see concrete examples of what happens when change is resisted.  As a result and also possibly consequence of this, I keep a pretty light but dense living space.  Although I have a lot more stuff than I want or need, it is substantially less than other people (in this country anyway) have, and I attach less import to the space itself   I move a lot.  Ten times in as many years, to be exact.  And this does not count living basically out of a backpack, which close to 2 years of that was.  Each time I moved, I tried to give away boxes upon boxes of things I’d never used, didn’t need, but still saw value in.  When that failed, I ruefully threw them out.  Repeated, the process has helped me to remain mindful when shopping and distrustful of anything that falls into the “household decorations” category.  It’s also ridded me of countless unnecessary items that would undoubtedly have piled up had I not the occasion to purge them.

Once again, this is going to be a longer post than I intended.  So, to be continued…