#388 Hold On

It probably doesn’t surprise you to find out I’m a packrat. Writer types often tend to be anal retentive and anal-retentive people by definition tend to hold on to things. Especially things no one else would ever want or need. I have friends that say they clear out stuff by periodically going through it, and if they haven’t used it for three years, toss it out or put it in the next garage sale. Kind of a household enema. And garage sales, being as they are kind of neighborhood knick-knack sewers, put the crud back in circulation. One person’s fecal matter is another person’s fertilizer. So the cycle of life goes. But I interrupt that fine process by holding on. And sometimes I hold on too long. Because the problem is that, once you hold on to something past that magic three years, it attains a certain gravitas just by virtue of its age in your life. It’s stay. Like an old watch. Or an old rock sitting on the bookshelf. You’re not absolutely sure where or when you got it but you’ve had it so long now you can’t bear to throw it away. My dear departed mother only threw away two things from my entire childhood, my baseball cards and my comic books. She reasoned, why hold on to these old things, they’ll never be worth anything. So out went my Duke Snyder rookie Brooklyn Dodgers card, my Sandy Kofax Angels card and who knows what else. Original issue of Spiderman? Out in the trash while I was at college. Who’da thunk my mom would go through a “clean out all the old crap and start over” phase. Women in their late forties can do the most unexpected things can’t they? But when I need to put things in perspective I think of the story of the pulley. Sometime during my college years, a roommate left behind a box of tools, screws, bolts and whatnot when he moved back east. You’re welcome to it, he said, it won’t fit in my baggage. As the box contained valuable tools I didn’t have, I took it, miscellaneous stuff and all. Among the items of lesser value in the box was a pulley. You know, a metal housing with a wheel inside that you can string cable or rope through and hook something else to it to slide it along. I carried that pulley with me for 20 years. From state to state and house to house. Finally I got a dog and needed to secure him in a fenceless back yard. I strung up a cable run and thought, hey, I can use that pulley. I dug it out of my now very large miscellaneous box and put it on the cable. Then I hooked up Sparky. He took off to the end of the run and kept on running. The pulley had broken. So much for best laid plans. The real irony was that I went right down to the hardware store and got a brand new pulley for only, get this, a quarter. So the philosophical question is this: Is the value of something because of the time you’ve spent with it, or do you spend more time with something because of it’s value? Got a quarter? I’ll flip a coin.
America, ya gotta love it.