Remodeling the house required me to pack everything into boxes, and in the process, to touch and consider (albeit briefly) each and every thing.  HOW did I acquire so many fucking THINGS?  It befuddles me.

I moved into my parents’ home after my mother’s death; I shared time and this space with my dad for the last ten years of his life.  I inherited their home which I have made into my own (living without a kitchen as I write, but I SHOULD be up and running by next week), but along with the roofed structure with two flush toilets and a mailbox,  I inherited their THINGS, many of which hold no meaning or value to me.  A service plaque.  A gigantic rosary.  A pair of matched table lamps.  A framed photo of my dad standing, smiling among strangers.

Some things found new homes in a couple of garage sales, and I’ve already forgotten exactly what those things were.

We land in this world, wet and naked, and we leave in roughly the same way.  The things we acquire, without the animating force of our narrative, become someone else’s problem.

A small, painted porcelin candy dish, a cast iron turtle, a small squishy penguin toy — these objects have a story and a meaning that I know, and that my sister knows.  But when we are gone, how will anyone understand why we saved these particular objects?

It is with this mindset that I consider my own things.

I will live 30-40 more years, IF I’m lucky, and then, Maddy will be somewhere between 50 and 60  (as I am now ), and she will have to sit with a melancholy heart to sift through a pile of mysterious material objects. I’m there, Darling Heart. I know the impulse to take a wide swipe and junk the whole mess, and the impulse to hold each thing, to turn it over and try to decipher its meaning.

So: the vase, the photo collage, the doll.

This vase standing on my desk is approximately 18 inches tall.  Who knows what it is made of?  Let’s say clay.  Porcelin clay?  Very girly in shape.  Tight waist, big ass.  It must have caught my mother’s eye in the medina, a Moroccan market, and she bought it.  Did she haggle?  Did she pay with francs?  (Now that Europe has gone to the Euro, has Morocco cast off the currency of the colonizer — the French franc? Suddenly I recall currency with Arabic characters on it.)  The vase, painted in geometric shapes in rose, yellow, green and navy blue, is older than most of my friends.  This vase is at least 40 years old.  On the bottom, it says “SAFI.”  Is that the creator?  Who was SAFI, and is she alive? I doubt it.  The vase has been from Kenitra, to San Diego, back to Spain, back to Los Alamitos: in case you’re counting, that’s 24000 miles, or roughly the circumference of the Earth.

We lived in Morocco from 1966 through 1968.  Robert Kennedy was assassinated; so was Dr. Martin Luther King and Malcolm X. It was in Morocco that my mother received the news of her mother’s death.  Those were the years that my father’s drinking really caught fire.  I rode horses, and had a spectaculr bike accident.  We lived just 100 yards from the Chief’s Club, and five hundred miles above the Sahara Desert.  The heat was crushing.  We lay on the floor, on the Navy housing linoleum, in the air produced by a oscillating fan positioned behind a block of ice that my dad brought home from work.  Our couch was naugahyde — fake leather — and I remember sticking to it.