[Posted in honor of the great service Ronni Bennett does at Time Goes By.]
My parents are clearing out the Chicago apartment they've rented for the last three decades, ever since the last great clearing-out, when -- four of six kids out of the nest -- they sold their house and took my brothers to Mexico for a year.
No sad reason for doing it now. Once again, a kid -- their grandchild Molly -- has flown the nest, and her mom, my sister Martha, who'd lived in the apartment for several years and shared it with our parents when they returned from Florida for the summers, has remarried and moved to her own place. Rather than return to the dreadful hassle of locking everything away and renting the place to strangers for the academic year (it's near the University of Chicago), my parents decided to let it go and rent something transient and furnished for their summer months back north.
There is a whole wall of books, and more, some of them first editions and banned books by Henry Miller and Frank Harris collected in Paris in the ''30s by my father's mother, a bookseller and all-around book freak. There are boxes and file cabinets bursting with letters from ancestors, grandparents, my father's brother who died in WWII, all of us, and our generation's kids. There are camp and high school yearbooks, memorabilia and memorial announcements from departed friends, and, not least, tchotchkes. Faced with the monumental task of disposing of all this -- sorting, distributing, discarding -- my parents hired a pro, a "personal organizer" found through my sister's yoga teacher. That has left them lighthearted and even enthusiastic about the task.
Well, I'll tell you. Everybody should do this -- distribute their stuff while they're still alive! Another sister, who's flying into Chicago tomorrow, asked me whether it wasn't sad and heavy and momentous, dismantling that apartment. I told her, on the contrary. My mom (83) is filled with effervescent zest, seeming to grow lighter and stronger with each object she gives or throws away. (I hope I'm able to do that someday. I am very far from it now. In fact, age-appropriately, I was growing heavier, taking on five boxes of the stuff she was unburdening herself of.) My job was to go through the books and choose from them first, since I'm designated heir to the book lust of my grandmother. I got to take books to the table, ask and talk about them with my mom and dad; puzzle over a translated letter by a 19th-century ancestor in Germany petitioning to change his name because Salomon Kupfer was too Jewish and was hurting his fine tailoring trade; marvel at the elegant sentences picked out letter by letter from a Lucite frame with his eyes by my dad's army buddy, silenced thirty-five years ago by Lou Gehrig's disease; retell favorite jokes and memories. So far from being a sad ritual, it was a festive and commemorative one, because we did it together. I can't recommend it strongly enough, if you're lucky enough to have the chance.
Although I've posted some of the rants of comic outrage I wrote about a decade ago, confronted with the rude reality of no longer being young, this weekend drove home to me that I sure as hell wouldn't want to be young again. I couldn't believe the bags full of letters and, later, journals I wrote to relieve the pressure of self-doubt and ambition and longing that fills young people the way juice fills a ripe peach. "No wonder I'm so taciturn now," I laughed to my mom. (I am, believe it or not, in person and on the phone; I mostly listen.) "I have nothing left to say!" Inspired by my grandmother's trove of literary erotica, I coined a term for that sort of awful archives: NEUROTICA. I can't throw it all out -- yet -- and why? Because here and there in the midst of the snoresome obsessing I said something really funny. For the sake of one good joke I shall save the shitty.
What was all that about? What on earth made life and relationships (like, with my parents) so fraught and problematic? I can't even remember! It all seems to have burned off and boiled away, revealing the bonds like bones in their clean white simplicity. Why do we humans create so many problems for ourselves, an obstacle course to clamber over on the way to (if we're lucky) the open, uncluttered space of older age? You have to laugh. It's like a huge joke you played on yourself. Like the Michael Douglas movie "The Game."
It really is better to be older. And looking at my mom and dad, I think that, with a little bit of luck, it will be even better to be even older. Less cartilage, less lung capacity, less hormones -- all worth it: less bullshit!
