Lightening the Boat

It started shortly after my Dad died and the dust settled after his funeral, the urge to start throwing things away.  I remember sitting alone by his workbench a month or so into life without him, and just looking at all the things he had amassed by way of tools and gadgets and his own creativity through the years, and realizing with a heavy heart for the first time that you can't take it with you.  Oh, I knew that all my life, in a nebulous, hypothetical, cerebral sort of way, but it had never hit home as it did then and since.

I go there still, from time to time, to Mom's house, and sit by that workbench where most things are just the way Dad left them.  I open drawers and look in cupboards and find things that still tie him to this side of heaven.  So many things he made in that work space, and whenever he perfected something that he'd want to duplicate he'd break down the prototype so new parts could be crafted to match the originals.  I find them as I snoop around - different things like that which he'd made and set aside to use in the future.  Alas, though, his future isn't here any more, and those things of his will continue to gather dust until Mom, my sister, or I find reason to part with them.

I look around my own house now, and find myself wanting to get rid of the so many items I bought once upon a time, thinking with the purchase of each that life was very good and that with the acquisition of it I'd be very satisfied for a long time to come.  It's difficult to admit to myself that I wasted a lot of money in the past 30 years piling up such mementos of life's goodness that quickly fell by the wayside shortly after I bought them, and I wish I could go back and recollect the cash I squandered and scattered like various bread crumbs on life's journey.

Since mid-winter I filled at least a dozen large garbage bags with pounds and pounds of many things and hauled them to a friendly dumpster a few at a time.  I tossed things away with a vengeance, feeling some kind of burden lifting with each elimination.  Yes, I threw out things I could have sold at a flea market or perhaps donated to some second hand cause, but the urge to purge was immediate and deep and I needed to get the things out of my house before I had a change of heart about tossing them away.

There's a drawer in my house full of pencils and pens - so full that it's difficult to close sometimes after rummaging around and dislodging the contents from their precarious places in the three dimensional puzzle they seem to form.  Why keep so many of them?  I don't think I ever wore down a single pencil in my lifetime without replacing it five times over before it became useless. (Ah!  Maybe I needed to replace them faster because I used up the erasers?)  That drawer is painfully symbolic of my adult existence and all the time and money I spent in getting things for myself and just piling them up for the sake of having them.

I am arriving, I think, at that point in life where I could be happy spending out the rest of my years in a much smaller space, with many fewer things than I have now.  I am more aware than ever before of the keepsakes in life that are worth the effort to acquire and hoard and they're not things at all.  As St. Paul put it, "... the greatest of these is love."  And as my Mom said so many times to me when I was growing up, "You like things; you love people."

The Shoebox

Today was the first day of 2013 on which I was able to take out the scooter while wearing short sleeves and short pants!  There's a kind of liberation in that which is difficult to put into words.

I didn't go far.  I usually don't.  I just scootered along some of the usual evening routes that I take when I want to get out but don't have anywhere in particular to go.  And I ended up at Uncle Slim's for a beer as is customary on Thursday evenings when porch sitting weather hits.  (Uncle Slim's isn't a bar.  It's my uncle's place.)  Although it hadn't been my destination when I left the house, I'm glad I remembered that it was Thursday and that the porch would be open for the season.

Uncle Slim calls this neighborhood the "shoebox" for its small and comfortable familiarity.  His place is only two blocks away from my house, as is my Mom's house, a number of my aunts' and uncles' homes, and those of various cousins a few times removed.  A number of my schoolmates live within these same blocks, as do some of the kids I taught through the years and their families.

I like it here.  Although the homes that had once belonged mostly to the folks who went to the same church as I have fallen into the hands of absentee landlords and the neighborhoods have taken on a little bit of the "other side of the tracks" feel, it's not so bad a place to be, the old shoebox, as long as there are people right around the corner who love me, and plenty of others who wave with a smile when they see me go by on the scooter.

Trying This Again

If I had to nail down a reason for why I just disappeared from writing and maintaining a presence here, it would probably be that the me that I knew for most of my adult life gave up its ghost with my workplace transfer nearly two years ago.  Perhaps for too long I tied up too much of my self identity in being who I was at my job in the days when my reflection in a mirror usually returned a smile.  In the past ten years or so I tried on various mid-life crises, and although some of them shook the whole foundation of my self identity, being of my own choosing they were under my control and didn't take me anywhere I didn't want to go.  The job change, though, was out of my hands, and, unfortunately, it has changed that view in the mirror more than I dare or care to admit most days.

The sad truth is that for 28 years I was genuinely happy to get up in the morning and go to work, and then overnight that all changed, and I kind of don't even know who I am any more because, as I said a few sentences ago, I allowed too much of my self perception depend on who I was at work.  Even more than that, I gave my heart and soul to the schools, the colleagues, and the kids with whom I worked at in the past; I don't have enough left to invest in another place.  I do my job, and I do it well, but without my heart being in it and with my step missing the spring that buoyed me so well for 28 years.

The opus I started here a month short of five years ago at this writing was the work of a different Joe.  As I am now I find it nearly impossible to fit my feet into his shoes, though every now and then I try as I'm doing at this very minute and feeling woefully inadequate.

And, to trump it all, I lost my Daddy on the last day of last October.  I had said so many times through the years, both to myself and to those to whom I am very close, that I would never feel like I'm a man (rather than a boy) until my dad was gone.  Well, he's gone, and here I am, still his little boy riding around on a little scooter.  He had a beautiful death with mom, my sister, and me there with him, and I learned at his funeral Mass that I truly do believe all of the things about God and heaven and the afterlife that I was taught as a kid.  Even at the end he taught me something, and some days I talk more to him now than I did before he died.

I read or heard somewhere through the years that the visionary musical satirist and humorist, Tom Lehrer, once said that he stopped writing funny songs "because nothing's funny any more."  Although I can't substantiate that I can readily identify with it because on too many days I feel that way myself.  I look to eke out some simple joy from some familiar thing or activity, but too often, as I do at my workplace, I feel like I'm a stranger in a strange land.

Anyway, if you knew me in the past from my writings here, that's the long and short of my absence.  I have felt at times the desire to write here, but without the impetus to get my butt in gear.  It was Carl and his dad at the start of a spring ride to Scranton a few weeks ago who kicked me a little into wanting to write again when they said that they missed the blog and that that they liked my style of writing.  So, I'm going to try this again, and I'm going to try my best not to be full of doom and gloom even when I'm feeling it.