Herb Benham: Purging kids' junk ushers in the possibilities
| Thursday, Sep 03 2009 10:45 AM
Last Updated Thursday, Sep 03 2009 10:47 AM
I'm cleaning out closets. My own. It's tempting to look around the corner at the kids' rooms and imagine that those might be next.
It's been a good run. Four children. Ages 19, 23, 25 and 27.
San Diego, Newport, San Francisco, and Berkeley. All beautiful places. Cool air and sea-gull wise, they've done well.
We're here, they're there. That's how it is supposed to work.
They're not coming back. Thanksgiving, maybe, Christmas, probably, and their mother's birthday, absolutely.
A couple of the biggies and then random visits, which include friends' weddings, funerals and then the obligatory pilgrimages to Luigi's.
I like Bakersfield. We've made some friends, had some laughs, but not all our children are going to settle here. They will always be fond of this place and defend it when people who have not experienced its homespun charms speak ill of it, but they are probably not going to make a life here and their parents are fine with that.
However, their stuff is another story. I don't have the same attachment to clothes of which they've grown out, term papers from Ms. Richards' English class and shoes that are no longer in fashion. Do we have to maintain a shrine or are a bed, clean sheets cold cranberry juice in the fridge sufficient reason to visit?
This is not the costume rack backstage at the school play. You're not going to be wearing the tweed smoking jacket again. Donning the leather pants.
I have a theory. Once someone is separated by a year and 100 miles from a wardrobe item, or their Jimi Hendrix poster, those will never be in play again.
I remember being curious why my mom was in a such a hurry after Courtney, my youngest brother, moved on. She couldn't wait to clean his room. She mowed through the house like a combine through a field of wheat. When Courtney returned, she had moved her sewing machine in and turned his bedroom into a sewing room.
Now I understand. I'm itching to go from my closet to theirs. Empty the house. Let it breathe again.
I'm not sure why this is such a strong desire. Part of it is just the junk. It piles up. Even when you don't remember bringing it in, stuff marches in anyway.
However, I think something else is at work here. Maybe it has to do with curiosity. In this case, curiosity for what is next.
It's easy to see what's behind us. Where we've come from. We lived that. We have the memories, the smile lines and the scars to prove it.
What's next is not so clear, but that doesn't mean we don't want to find out. How can we get there, if we are anchored in the past. In other words, if crocheting or needlepoint is in my future, I'm going to want a room in which to sew my life away and closet space in which to store all the afghans.
I suspect this natural culling is the start of something else. Taking stock. Maybe we don't need all of this room. The next thing you know, we've planted a for-sale sign in the lawn and we're condo shopping.
I'm not sure what's next, but I can tell you it won't involve the mission projects made from toothpicks. Those were wonderful, but now, we're on a different kind of mission.
