You or I pack for a long weekend – just a few days somewhere else – and we fill a suitcase. More than a suitcase. There’s the duffel back for shoes and shampoos. The computer bag. The briefcase. The books we’re reading, and the books we might. Music, and something to play it on. A favorite sweater. A favorite letter.
They left with nothing.
We leave home for a week or two, and we know where we’re going, and when we’ll return. And we’re confident that all the things we didn’t take with us will be waiting there, just where we left them, when we get back.
They’ll come back to nothing – if they come back at all.
First it was Katrina. Now it’s Rita. We’re nearly through the alphabet, but nowhere near the end of the hurricane season; there may be even worse to come. (Do you really think the storms will stop just because we’ve run out of names for them?) The waters rise, and those who can escape, escape. And the waters take whatever’s left behind.
I can’t even imagine what that’s like.
But that’s the part I keep thinking about: People losing everything. Losing every thing. Not just the big-ticket items – a house or an apartment, the furniture, the clothes – but all the other things, too. Everything, no matter how small, that makes your life your life.
I admit it: I’m a collector. No – “collector” isn’t quite the right word for it. “Collector” sounds like I’ve got a plan.
I keep stuff. That’s what I do – I keep stuff. It could be an interesting newspaper article from 1985, or something I read yesterday. A bag of sea shells. A college notebook. A box of campaign buttons. A T-shirt I’ll never fit into again. A floppy that’s lost its flop. A magnetic whatsis. A troll.
I keep it all.
Family photographs are worth saving, absolutely. But a half-empty bottle of barbecue sauce?
I must be the world’s most sentimental person; everything – no matter how obsolete or tattered, or useless, or strange – has sentimental value to me. That’s what I tell myself, anyway. Or else (because this is my other excuse) I’m saving it for the museum.
What museum? Good question. I don’t have a clue. If there’s a Museum of What Should Have Gone Into the Trash Years Ago, I haven’t seen it. Is somebody really going to want handwritten drafts of my early columns, or a pile of “Thanks, but no thanks” letters from editors? I doubt it. How about my old Halloween costumes? Kitchen utensils? Ticket stubs?
It has to stop.
Sometimes I think I’m living in my past. I have to stop doing that.
I have to let go of things – or make them let go of me. Otherwise, it’ll hurt too much. If something ever happens to them, I mean. A tornado. A fire. A Rita. A Katrina.
I have to start letting go of things while it’s still my choice – what to keep, what to toss. Not everybody gets the chance to choose. That’s the lesson pounded into me by these weeks of wicked weather: Not everybody gets the chance to choose.
I worry for the people along the Texas coast whose lives are being so thoroughly uprooted. And I keep thinking about those people in New Orleans, and Biloxi and Gulfport – people who lost everything. Every thing.
I can certainly manage with less.
Rick Horowitz is a nationally syndicated columnist. Contact him by writing to rickhoro@execpc.com.
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