Why do so many people denigrate possessions, as if their acquisition was meaningless, trivial and of only fleeting value? Possessions can be clutched for a while, used, and be easily discarded, or they can be revered and treasured. It depends on what we’re talking about.
Every book, every photograph, every letter saved and preserved, each artwork, tiny object, knick knack, heirloom, and artifacts of every kind document many of those “in-the-present” moments that are gone, but remembered through physical reminders. Memories are the traces of our physiological, psychological, and spiritual lives re-awakened by those physical objects.
What might seem only temporary and capable of decay, are also things that become the minute assemblages of our awareness and consciousness, not trifles by any means, or simply that which is erroneously thought of as “impermanent.”
I recorded in my journal a time years ago when I went into a closet and retrieved a large plastic file box to see what was in it.
Opening it, I took a handful of items stuffed tightly in the box in various labeled file folders. The items included: a receipt for admission to the Stuhr Museum of the Prairie Pioneer in Grand island, Nebraska (one of the major planned stops on my first road trip across the country in May 1984), a brochure on Jacksonville, Oregon, a National Historic Landmark town; a letter from my sister; a note from an old friend; a street map of my hometown, New Orleans; another letter, still in its envelope from a very close and dear friend written in 1989; a letter from my grad school advisor letting me know he had received the copy of my thesis and filling me in on news on campus; a signed letter from Gov. Ray Mabus of Mississippi, responding to a letter I had written to him on an issue of concern to me at the time; more maps, letters, newspaper clippings, and photos, a treasure trove of memories, an index for an era of my life.
But I found something I forgot I had as I looked a little further in that folder. It was a manilla envelop with pictures of me and my brother and sister under the Christmas tree in Sumter in 1960; my kindergarten pictures and one of me in second grade; and a picture of me and my brother with Santa Claus, circa 1956 (I had a worried look on my face, but my brother was very placidly skeptical).
But what amazed me, too, in that little collection of photos, was a picture of my grandfather, taken when he was a young man in his early 20s. I am looking at that picture now and staring in amazement at his facial features. I am looking at myself in that picutre, the resemblance is so striking. My relatives always told me I looked like him. I think my aunt gave me that picture years ago. It was preserved in that plastic filebox that I carted with me everywhere I moved in the days when I moved a lot, from one part of the country to the next.
So, to have lost those things forever would have been to have lost a part of me. I couldn’t reclaim my past as readily. I’d have only my limited memories, becoming more unreliable with time and more selective and subjective.
Certain possessions are replaceable, such as furniture and even houses, and there’s no sense of deep loss ultimately. But the loss of those things we hold onto and cherish deeply, and which record our passage through life, are irreplaceable. We would recover if they were lost or destroyed, but there would be such terrible sadness. Our belongings, ourselves.
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