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A Checkbook, A Teacup, A Jacket

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The Tampa Tribune

Published: December 10, 2008

As I age, I find myself wanting to reduce the accumulated collections of things in my life to a concentrated core. For example, I opt for frozen orange juice, which takes up less 'fridge space than a quart of the real thing, which takes up less space than a dozen of the truly real things.

I have written about throwing away my parents' records and papers after they died, and of returning my children's treasures to them in their adult homes. I have what may be a middle-aged mindset that is advising me to disencumber myself while I still have the strength and energy. Even a hermit crab abandons ship when the shell becomes too crowded. Even a chambered nautilus has to stop adding chambers at some point, lest it be unable to carry its home on its back.

But there are certain things with which I am unable to part, and I sense I am not alone in this feeling. A reader wrote to share with me her attachment to her mother's mortgage book. Marked "paid in full," and preserved and protected long after her mother's death, the book is a symbol of her mother's pride and accomplishment that the daughter cannot discard.

I recognize the feeling, because I have my mother's last checkbook saved in a desk drawer. It traces her final efforts to remain independent and details the decline in her physical health as the handwriting deteriorates from the fine script she had for most of her life into the spreading scrawl that marked her final illness. It is painful for me to look at because the last writing is jagged, and the numbers are impossible to read. But it is her dogged determination, her perseverance and strength that I also see.

My grandmother's chipped tea cup is the one thing I have that pulls together all of my memories of her-her home, her habits, her look, her love.

I wonder if this kind of saving is something mostly women do. When I asked my husband if he had any special thing that he had saved that belonged to his parents, he shook his head and said, "Only my memories." Of course we have special things to remind us of them all over our house. We have my mother-in-law's china and several of my father-in-law's prayer books. We have things they gave us and things they left us. But it is interesting to me that my husband, who saves almost everything, has no cache of special objects that belonged to his parents.

My son has a friend who was very close to her grandfather who had a farm in Oklahoma. She has spoken lovingly of planting crops and gardens with him as a child. He died recently, and she recalled with special tenderness planting his final garden together when she was a graduate student on spring break and he was too weak to plant alone. With sensitivity, her grandmother sent her the worn denim jacket her grandfather always wore on the farm. It hangs respectfully next to his photograph in her apartment.

Finding a thing to save, a special object that summarizes a person and a perspective, that calls up a face and a feeling that makes a good memory last, can be very nourishing. They are often the things we tuck away in a desk or dresser drawer. They are the pieces that get lost in a china cabinet or hang in a dark corner of a closet. They are the things we can touch and treasure, just s we did the people from whom they have come.

Judy Kramer can be reached by e-mail at JudyandOz@tampabay.rr.com.

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