Greetings, friends. (XLIV)

Greetings, friends. Today I’d like to talk about what we keep as mementos, and why.

Adah came early this morning to escort the antique and architectural salvage dealers through house and barn. She and I spent the afternoon combing through family photos and other such mementos, which is a great way to relieve the tedium and strain of endless bagging of garbage and giveaways. It feels like a treat we give ourselves when the work becomes a little much.

But it’s also productive work, in the sense that our mother took many photos of many things, quite a few of which no longer have any relevance to us today.

As an aside, our mother kept a lot of her archives in 135mm slides. Remember photographic slides? Dealing with photo slides is going to be the topic of a future journal entry. For now, imagine a lot of me and Adah holding up slides to the light, and squinting deep into a moment buried in the past, like examining a fly in amber. Only, like, several thousand times, because that’s about how many slides we found.

What to keep? Photos Mom took in the mid ‘70s of 18th Century paintings to use for reference in costume design? Toss. Photos of sunsets from the late ‘80s? Toss. Photos from the early ‘90s of our house in Pennsylvania? Keep one or two, toss the rest. Photos of automobiles, landscapes, other buildings? Toss, toss, toss.

But the photos of people, that is where the real reward is to be found. Sometimes a single glance at a photograph can jar loose a long-buried memory, and many of the memories captured in photos are joyful.

Adah mostly keeps those of her dad and her half-siblings and some of herself. I keep some of the ones of myself, but also of Adah, of old friends of the family, and also some of my dad from the mid-’70s with his awesome ‘70s-vintage facial hair.

“I have a photograph,” Paul Simon once sang, “Preserve your memories. They’re all that’s left you.”

Adah and I also have several large boxes of photos of our mom and the rest of the Burnston clan, that we still need to go through together. Eventually we’ll digitize the lot, so everyone can see, and then probably parcel the originals out to the people who are depicted.

But I can now pick out relatives I never met, whom I only know in half-remembered stories — my grandfather Sidney and his brothers, their mother Rose, my mother’s Grandpa Mark, Grandma Adele. Sometimes, I can find them even in a crowded group.

There are also lots of photos of people we don’t know — cousins we can only recognize by their surnames: Aronowsky, Sohn, Eisenstadt. These photos we save for Cousin Bonnie, the family genealogist, to pore over and catalog.

Or maybe not? If memory attenuates rapidly over a person’s lifetime, how much more so over the course of generations? If Bonnie can’t identify these cousins, then are we as a family not, in some sense, sundered from them forever?

Knowing what of the past to keep, and what to let go of, is really hard to do.

These mementos give us a tangible connection to ourselves and to our loved ones in the past, especially those who are gone forever. Those memories and relationships, in turn, make us who we are today. So interacting with our mementos strengthens our connection with our own selves.

But the mementos are also burdensome physical objects that forever have to be carted around, curated, stored, preserved, et cetera. There is always a terrible tradeoff in terms of what mementos we choose to keep, and the interest we pay on investing in the act of keeping. My mother was really bad at exercising clear-eyed judgment in that regard, which is why Adah and I now have so much work to do.

A few years ago, I had the privilege of helping my cousin Joe clear out a storage unit containing his belated mother’s belongings, and, unlike him, I had no sentimental attachment whatsoever to anything in that unit, aside from maybe the photographs.

So he’d pick up, say, a box of his mother’s beloved Christmas decorations, and say, “Well, I guess I should keep these…”

I’d say, “Why? Are you planning to hang them up in December?”

Joe would say, “No… It’s just that we’ve had them forever.”

I’d say, “Joe, ‘should’ is a strong word. Every object you hang on to is yet another object you are going to have to touch again at some point in your life.”

I didn’t add, “or, worse, burden your heirs with,” because I didn’t know then what I know now.

But there’s a trap there, see, a reductio ad absurdum, and one I think that might be widespread across humanity:

We keep this thing because we’ve had it forever.

How often do we say that? Do we own these mementos, or do they own us? You can drown in enough of those things.

At some point in the process of clearing out his mom’s storage unit, Joe gave out an audible sigh, and I turned to discover that he had unearthed a roughly three foot high plastic figurine of a clown.

I was about to tell him to throw it away, like the Christmas decorations, when I realized that he was beaming at the damn thing with rapt satisfaction. He made a comment I don’t recall now, to the effect that he had loved that giant clown figurine when he was a child.

I assured him that he should keep it. The look on Joe’s face told me everything.

You have got to Marie-Kondo the shit out of your past, or it will suffocate you completely.

Meanwhile, back in the present, Adah’s shield from the risk of drowning, as we sort through our mother’s estate, is the fact that she and Keith live in a modest-sized condominium that is already full.

Mine is that I live on the West Coast. I have further decided today that I don’t want to rent a trailer for the cross-country roadtrip home, so I’m only keeping what will fit in Leto II. These constraints, plus Adah’s iron self-discipline, keep our disposal operation brisk and business-like.

But each of us are finding things we want to keep, things that spark joy and will continue to spark joy. Sometimes they are things we did not expect. Like those Fisher Price “Little People” toys. Maybe someday I will find a child who will get more use out of them than I, but, in the meantime, if they fit in my truck, I’m keeping them.

As I mentioned, we reached a phase change yesterday. Today I started in earnest packing some of the mementos I plan to hang on to. In my “keep” pile was a small cardboard box I found, containing some effects of my father’s: A hand-written birth record with his particulars, some photos of him as a child, a knit baby sweater and cap, a collage signed with his name in a shaky child’s hand, his high school diploma, and a folded piece of colorful crepe paper.

I have seen this box and its contents before. My parents separated over 40 years ago, but my mom hung on to the box for decades anyway, presumably for my benefit.

Why? We keep this thing because we’ve had it forever.

Today, as I was trying to pack said box for transport to the West Coast, I got curious. What was the brightly colored folded paper, packed in with the child’s collage and the baby clothes? So, for what was probably the first time in almost 75 years, I unfolded the crepe paper.

It turned out to be a kite, or maybe a streamer, in the shape of a fish. Aside from being obviously Japanese, something about it looked naggingly familiar.

The whole thing wasn’t quite as random as it might seem. My Granddad Red was stationed in Japan after the war, and my father spent some of his earliest years there.

I texted him a photo of the fish.

“I don’t remember this critter,” Dad replied.

“Anybody who knows why it was packed with, what I think must be baby clothes of yours, are all long gone, then,” I wrote. We keep this thing because we’ve had it forever.

“My baby clothes?” Evidently he did not know that my mother had kept this box. I described its contents.

“Someone,” I concluded, “presumably thought this kite or streamer or whatever it is had some significance to you about seventy years ago?”

“That would be my mom,” Dad wrote.

Now Grandma Pippy was an Army wife, often obliged to move house on short notice, a very practical person, and, in any event, not much given to sentimentality. In 1949, in a time (just) before the introduction of jet airliners, and despite having a broken leg in a cast, my Grandma schlepped her two young children — Joey’s mom Mickey, and my father David — halfway across the world to join Granddad in Japan.

So why did my grandmother see fit to save for my father, of all things in the world, this bit of paper in the shape and aspect of a red fish?

I fumbled around for a bit, then searched Google for the words “Japanese fish kite”, and became immediately ashamed of my ignorance.

The koinobori, which actually does basically mean “carp streamer,” is traditionally flown on Kodomo no hi, Children’s Day, in Japan. The image is meant as an allegory, and a wish, for children to grow up with the strength and determination of a carp swimming against the current, making its way upstream. It’s such a quintessentially Japanese image that there’s even an emoji for it: 🎏

And the red koinobori was traditionally flown for the eldest son — my father. Probably their first summer in Japan. He would've been shy of two years old. And my grandmother saw fit to hang on to it.

“Reminds me of how much I miss her,” my Dad finally wrote back. “Save the koi for me.”

You’re damn right I’m saving it, Dad. We keep this thing because it connects us to who we are. I can make room in the truck for that.

If you’re reading this, I hope your judgment about what to save, and what to let go of, is as good as mine is belatedly getting to be. I send my love. More tomorrow.

Subscribe now