The Junk Expands to Fit the Space Available

(~11 minutes to read)

Please indulge me. I wrote this piece on the fortieth anniversary of my mum’s death, and yes, I still miss her. It’s coincided with me trying to cull the “sentimental crap” that Mrs. H. and I have held onto over the years, and the coincidence screamed out for a column on the topic. It’s the cull that’s the focus of the piece, but the indulgence I crave is for the background material that serves as a prologue.

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Hello. My name’s Kelvin and I’m a junk addict.

Perhaps that statement isn’t entirely true—Kelvin is my nom de plume and I’m more of a packrat than a junk addict, but you get the idea.

My parents were packrats, so I come by my hoarding habit honestly. My circa six-hundred-square-foot childhood home was packed. Not with rats, I hasten to add (although mice seemed to abound) but with “stuff”.

Stuff leaned against walls. Stuff surrounded the furniture on at least three of the four sides as well as above and below. Stuff hung from hooks on walls and ceilings. Stuff became storage solutions for other Stuff, and it all contributed to a sense of our home being “well lived-in”. Piles of back issues of women’s, crafts, hobbies, and trades magazines, tools, clothes that need mending or altering, books (fiction and non-fiction), arts and craft materials, potential flower-arrangement accessories, pipe-smoking paraphernalia…

Dad would bring stuff home from building projects he was working on—other people’s junk that might become treasure to my brother and me. For instance, we got hundreds of hours of amusement out of two 1940s-era office telephones Dad brought home when I was around eight years old. They had multiple switches that would have connected one phone to other extensions, and although we never succeeded in speaking telephonically, we played “Offices” or “Detective Agencies” in our shared bedroom with them, moving piles of Stuff off our little top-opening desks (refugees from a school clear-out) in order to do so. A twelve-by-twelve room with a fireplace, bunk beds, two elderly chests of drawers, a built-in wardrobe, a closet, a “g’zunder” (aka chamber pot) and the playthings of two apprentice packrats didn’t leave much space for desks and playing, but we managed it.

In the shed (supposedly a workshop), the flotsam and jetsam of tens of commercial construction projects made it impossible to move let alone work. There were boxes and boxes (and boxes!) of nuts, screws washers and bolts. There were nails of every size, style, purpose and material. There was lumber, strips of steel and aluminium. There were car mechanic’s tools, carpenter’s tools, bricklayer’s tools, plumber’s tools, plasterer’s tools… There were parts from appliances that “might come in handy…” (This was one of my parents’ mantras.) All of this Stuff and more occupied the floors, rafters, walls and workbenches of Dad’s shed/workshop.

Despite the lack of space, it was the site of my first engine strip-down and re-build: I would have been something like ten years old. Given my age and the amount and variety of Stuff surrounding my workspace, I am to this day surprised that a piece of washing machine wasn’t inadvertently assembled into that engine.

You could say we were a Stuffy bunch.

But all of that was long ago. The entire area in which that house stood was demolished in the early 1970s. Hundreds—perhaps as many as two thousand “two-up-two-down” terraced houses (row housing to western Atlanticans) fell victim to the wrecking ball. (Miley Cyrus was nowhere to be seen: but I digress.) The area is now a social nightmare of aging high- and low-rise apartments.

(And for the record, I’m still using some of the nuts, screws, washers and bolts that moved from that childhood home to my teenage-years home and then to our home here in Canada via our pre-emigration house and a cargo container.)

But back to the late 1970s…

When Mrs. H and I first got our own place, I was determined to not be a packrat and to keep a tidy house and “manspace”.

Ha!

Our three-bed-semi was a construction site for most of the eight years we lived there, so any comparison of it with my childhood home would be meaningless. The tools of just about any building trade could be found in one of our habitable(?) rooms at any given time—I’m sure we used a pointing trowel to ice our son’s first birthday cake; several Sunday roasts were carved with the Sawzall that was semi-permanently kept on a kitchen chair; and on at least one occasion we had to explain to guests why there was a pipe wrench and electrician’s tape on the bedside table in their room.

House number two was better-kept—there were far fewer home improvement projects done there. The garden shed actually held yard tools, the garage had a car in it (there wasn’t much room for anything else), and each room in the house was recognizable as a bedroom or living room or whatever. The Stuff was there though—we’d just got better at disguising it.

When we immigrated to Canada in 1994, we purchased an 1800 square foot, two-storey house. We developed the basement and ended up with something near 2500 square feet of living space.

Or storage space, depending on your point of view.

Here, I should pause to reveal one of my dirty little secrets. When my dad died, I held on to a bunch of his tools as well as a very liberal helping of the collective paperwork of both my parents.

And while we’re sharing dirty little secrets, here’s one of my parents’. When their parents died, they held on to some of their paperwork and never threw it away. Result—among the photographs of complete strangers I may or may not be related to, I’ve inherited my paternal grandfather’s First World War army service book, his wife’s national registration papers, my maternal grandfather’s divorce papers from his first marriage (he was cuckolded), and numerous other artifacts that allow at least a glimpse into the childhood lives of my parents.

Put like that, how can you argue against being a packrat?

But it goes further. I have an almost complete record of my parents’ wedding—guest lists, RSVPs, congratulatory messages, invoices for cars, venue, dresses, food, beverages, and entertainment. As well as the official photo album, I have the proofs and a list of who ordered which photos. I have their first Christmas and birthday cards to each other… and I have what is probably every single “Congratulations on the birth of your son” card my parents received, as well as my first birthday cards, baby clinic records, and goodness knows what else.

So now I feel emotional pressure to hang onto this stuff. It’s my past—my history—how can I discard that?

And how could I, with a clear conscience, reminisce over the trappings of my early years if I didn’t afford my own kids the same opportunities?

And so a packrat dynasty (or should that read “disastrophe”?) was created.

Although our living space is relatively clutter-free (compared to my childhood home for sure!), we do have places to squirrel away all kinds of… Stuff.

“Stuff”. That word again.

When something breaks beyond repair, I’m compelled to pull it apart and store all the nuts, screws, washers and bolts. Lumber offcuts line the walls of our garage. Car mechanic’s tools, carpenter’s tools, bricklayer’s tools, and plumber’s tools cover my workbench as well as several shelves. And I have to confess that many of those tools were my dad’s.

In our (developed) basement, we have shelving in our furnace room, and the area housing the stairs is undeveloped. Both are out-of-the-way and of a reasonably high capacity. That makes them prime Stuff places.

And it’s in those areas that we have, over the forty-odd years of our relationship and marriage, deposited Stuff. For example, almost all of our Valentine’s, birthday, anniversary, Christmas, Mothers’ Day, Father’s Day, and other occasional cards—both purchased and hand-made—are there.

There are hundreds and hundreds of the things. Even if you average out at a buck a card (which is absurdly low), you can imagine how much money has been spent by four people (me, Mrs. H. and the two hatchlings) wishing each other Happy [insert_occasion] to each other by handing them a card that they struggled to select and in which they struggled to supplement the pre-printed greeting with something more personal.

No wonder Hallmark and friends is such big business!

Speaking of big, there was a fashion/fad/craze in the 1970s in the UK (and elsewhere?) for giving humungous cards. We have several cards that measure 24 inches by 18. Yes folks; size mattered! (For reference, the tiles those cards are on are 13 inches square)

But we didn’t just keep cards from/to the four of us. We kept every single damned card we received. Thousands of the things!

We have a wedding memorabilia collection that competes with my parents’ for comprehensiveness. But why? We don’t even remember who some of the people are/were who came to our wedding!

Calling “Nita and Alan”. You wished me a happy birthday in the late 70s or early 80s. Who the hell are you? (If you’re reading this, please remind me… and please be gentler with me than I was with you above.)

But although on the surface it seems pointless having kept these cards, they do serve several interesting purposes.

You can chart the hatchings, matchings and dispatchings of your family and friends (and former friends) by seeing who the card’s from. We’ve got cards from one person who’s had no fewer than four separate partners who were permanent enough to have their names on the card.

You can tabulate the people you’ve lost touch with over the years (like “Nita and Alan”) and go on a huge guilt trip when you realize how long the list is.

You can see how the intensity of a relationship changes over the years. Our cards to each other in the early days were huge or handmade (or huge and handmade), and contained all kinds of poems, in-jokes, cartoons and such, whereas recent examples are much more economical, in terms of both size and price as well as personalization. I guess it’s like sitcom scriptwriters; in order to keep the story fresh, they either have to write more and more outrageous stuff (with a small “s”), or they cancel the show. And since cancellation of our marriage ain’t gonna happen, we’ve let the scripts “mellow” to the point where uninvested bystanders would have given the imperial thumbs-down to the whole shebang. Fortunately, our cards are written for each other only (and maybe our kids when we curl up our collective tootsies) so we don’t mind.

And you can see how fashions in cards have changed (or not) over the years. The artwork on cards of the 1970s was so syrupy-sweet that they came with a do-it-yourself pancreas replacement kit. These days, the imagery is generally more generically celebratory (no doubt influenced by our need to express ourselves using emojis) and less likely to exacerbate the diabetes pandemic.

You can also get an idea about political correctness changes over the years—although it may be our maturing tastes in humour rather than a global shift towards more carefully-expressed sentiments. Here are a few samples from our collection of pre-millennium cards.

On front: “Fido here wants to wish you a great day”
Inside: “As soon as he’s done licking his plums!”

On front: “Want to know how elephants make love underwater?”
Inside: “They take off their trunks!”

On front: “Happy birthday to a guy who’s a real music lover…”
Inside: “May your organ never quit when you’re in the middle of your favourite piece!”

On front: “I wanted to make a big sacrifice for your birthday…”
Inside: “But the goat got away and I couldn’t find a virgin anywhere!”

On front: (pictures of sheep with checkboxes under each.) “Which of these sheep is the most attractive? (Please tick box)”
Inside: “So—you thought one of them was attractive…”

I wonder how many of those would make it to the shelves in today’s neo-Victorian society?

So with thousands of cards in boxes and piles all over the basement floor, we’re faced with choices. Do we throw the lot away? Do we select and save? (And if so, what are the selection criteria?) Do we keep them all, organize them and dedicate a storage area to them? (And if we do that, will our kids thank us for it when we’re gone?)

Or do we select the best from our “cards to each other” collections, divvy them out to the senders and start giving them to the recipients again? It’s possible that there might come a time when we could give the same card to each other every year and get away with it.

Although… we’d have to remember where we keep it.