Lost in transit

The Life Laundry

I love the BBC's 'The Life Laundry'. I watch it every week. It probably helps that there is nothing else on TV at the same time except football and I don't want to start watching football. After all, during the big games, some one has to watch the kids, and as the mother, I'm where the buck stops.

I suppose that I like the show so much because I, too, am a pack rat. Do you know that The Life Laundry also seems to categorize pack rats ? I seem to fall under the heading of ' The Sentimental Pack Rat'. I keep my past in bits and pieces in boxes up in our attic.

I have the little lederhousen wallet that I used when I was 8, including a small slip of yellowing paper with my address and telephone number on it, should I ever have gotten lost. I have my Girl Scout sash, with badges going up and down both sides, the T-shirt that Chi Phi gave me during my first year of college and all of my notes for my M.A. thesis, including copies of the drawings for every single sherd that we dug up during the first season. Until a few months ago, I had every single possession that my Mother owned on the day of her death, including Kleenex which had sat rumpled up for 20 years inside her coat pockets.

And my brother is the same way. He has Grateful Dead T-shirts from the '70's, his first G.I.Joe and most likely the can from the first beer that he ever drank. We are kindred souls.

Sometimes I wonder why some people are pack rats and others are not. I sometimes wonder if the way that my brother and I grew up has anything to do with it.

In a valiant attempt to protect their children from America's turbulent 60's, my parents chose exile. They took assignment after assignment in far off, foreign countries, flitting about for a year here, 2 years there, no doubt telling themselves how quickly children adapt to change. I didn't live in America for any great amount of time until I was 15, and being prepared to get into a 'good' college.

It was a few years later, at that very same 'good' college, when I began to question my slobby, messy tendencies. My mind was wandering one day as I sat in an English Class on Henry James, a lecture on 'The Aspern Papers'. As the Professor droned on, I found myself imagining the Venetian home in which the elderly American woman lived, surrounded by furniture and bibelots collected during the centuries by a family not her own. Her possessions were all in trunks, bits and pieces of paper, recording her past. At the time, she struck me as the quintessential expatriate. It was then that I began to wonder if my collection of mementos was a replacement for the ancestral family home. Or at least for some house, some place that we had always lived in.

Can you imagine what 'The Life Laundry' would do with her trunks of memories ( 'Do you really need to hold on to these ancient letters from a man long dead ? Don't you think it's time for a clean start?')? Can you imagine what they would do with mine ? ( ' You saved all of his letters...and his as well ? Maybe the stamps from Rhodesia will bring something in at the boot sale, don't you agree? And this American flag from your Step-Grandfather's coffin...?')

I can't bring myself to believe that my boxes of bits and pieces are junk, dead weight holding me back, preventing me from soaring into a bright , new life. I sometimes think that if I had always been in one place and could look out of a window and see a playground from my youth, a school I once attended, the home of the boy next door, I wouldn't need all of these mementos. But I didn't and I do.

I could never throw away the two pictures of Jeff that I have, the lone one of Carl, the washable note board which hung on my door freshman year, the messages from Bridget and Lauren and Lois still clear and legible.

I am, I fear , incorrigible in my ways and shall never invite 'The Life Laundry' to my home. I might not be able to resist the desire to break some little fingers caught pawing my past.

Posted by sue at October 24, 2003 11:14 AM