OrpheusAgonistes
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Joined: 3/29/2010
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quote:
One of the things I wanted My son to do before he headed out for Basic Training (military) was to make sure his room was packed up so that it would be easier to transport the things to him when he goes from Basic to AIT. The sorting, packing, keeping, and tossing piles sound very familiar to Me. It was a little strange as his old Mom watched things being carted out. I was reminded several times of the line, "when I became a man, I learned to put away childish things". I thought of the years that some of those things were exactly what he wanted for Christmas or for his birthday, even though he's far outgrown them now.
This passage resonated with me, in part because it reminds me so much of stories my father's mother (not normally a sentimental woman, may she rest in peace) told of cleaning out his childhood room after he enlisted. She spoke of how choked up she got when she put a Lone Ranger wrist watch he'd wanted desperately when he turned 8 into a box with some other trinkets. My father, who tended to deflect sentiment, noted that she'd felt no such sentimental pangs four years earlier when he'd gone off to school and noted "I guess that's why I still have that Lone Ranger watch but Mantle, Maris, and Yogi Berra rookie cards went out with the trash." But he was clearly moved--he made a particular point of passing the watch to me. Sometimes small items can be such a powerful and tangible link back to the people we love. An old watch with a cracked leather band that's in a box next to my bed is a link to my late father as a precocious but still (as old photos and stories bear witness) silly and roguish boy who wanted more than anything to be a cowboy who wore a mask and helped strangers and then rode away.
To the OP: If I could offer you a little advice, it would be to find the things that mean the most to you and hang on to them tenaciously. I can understand that there may be circumstances in which you can't hold on to everything but you can cleave to something, to a few small artifacts. I remember a family friend when I was a kid talking about all that his family left behind when they fled Germany. They left paintings, books, clothes, almost everything. The possessions they grabbed were small and sentimental and usually of value only to the family. I remember he said "We had to take small things, and let those things stand in our hearts for everything else."
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What I cannot create, I do not understand.--Feynman
Every sentence I have written here is the product of some disease.-- Wittgenstein
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