Ghosts on a shelf

Managing the stuff they left behind

I was just sitting here too late on Thursday night, still riding a high of stunning competence by the Blue Jays team I had all but added to the list of dead things in my life just two days ago, thinking about what I was going to write for this week’s newsletter. Then I looked up at the view above my two monitors, and the question answered itself.

These are the shelves I see every day as I sit at my computer. The bottom shelf features different pieces of pottery that my son has painted for me each year for my birthday, from when he was about 4 until this year when he was 15 - and hopefully much longer. The newest edition is the axolotl on the right side with ‘70!’ on it’s belly. That was his hilarious attempt to suggest that since I was 50 I was basically 70. I did not laugh.

The top shelf I realize is a bit of a shrine. A lot of one, actually. On the far left side is an old leather football helmet that I bought at an antique store in New Mexico one of the countless times I was trapped on an endless road trip with dad, hitting every frigging antique store in existence. I really don’t miss those damned stores. The two baseballs in front were both caught at Calgary Cannons game way back - one with my dad and one with my grandfather. Grampa caught his barehanded. It was super bad ass - though judging by the number of times he shook that hand the rest of the night I would guess he would rather not have done so. The Janis Joplin poster was something I found when dad died and I was cleaning up his stuff. She was the only musician, for a long time, that he liked that I thought made him cool. The carved purple hippo in front lived on my grandfather’s desk forever, as did the coin display on the far right side that you can only barely see. That one originally came from the desk of my great-grandfather, a longtime mayor in small town Quebec who I never met, before winding up with his son-in-law. The watch was allegedly my dad’s dad’s, though I have no prove of that claim. The T and the O were from an old printing press somewhere. Mom got them at yet another antique store - this time one I mercifully was not at. The horse statue and the cowboy bronze are close to the last example of each I had, but growing up there were countless western bronzes in our house. I spent almost as much time being bored at the studios of bronze artists as I did at antique stores.

And then there is the big wooden urn. That was the home of my mother for about 16 years - which, I just now realized, is longer than she ever lived in any other single place in her life. It’s empty now - at the advice of a wolf, she moved from the wooden house into a stone one on a hill overlooking the mountains last year. But I keep it there, and still find it comforting in some weird way. Or maybe I just still remember how much I paid for the urn at an art gallery when she died, and I am trying to wring out the maximum value. Or, most accurately, I just don’t know what else I would do with it. It would make a great cookie jar if it weren’t for, well, you know.

I think about ‘stuff’ a lot. I used to have a whole lot more of their stuff. When mom died I tried to grab as many mementos as I could. And Dad was what could generously be called a hoarder, so I wound up with far, far more stuff than I could ever have imagined when he passed. For a while I kept lots - some on display, and some stored away. Over time, though, less and less has remained. There was stuff that I didn’t enjoy looking at - too much baggage. I couldn’t think of anymore reasons why I was keeping it, so I didn’t. There were a few things that were just really fucking ugly, and I was at a stage of my life where I would happily have told them that to their face if I could have. And there were things that were redundant - I didn’t need them to remember, and they didn’t bring anything new to the table.

It’s like I started out with a whole army full of stuff, and now I am down to just an all-star team. But each one has a story, and each one brings joy - or something in that family - just from looking at them. Which is probably why I have never gotten blind to the things on that shelf despite staring at them daily for many years now.

It only took 17 years, but I’m now in a specific place - there is nothing that is gone that I have any regrets about, and nothing that remains (aside perhaps from things stored somewhere that I have forgotten about) that I am unsure about keeping. I’m finally surrounded by just enough ghosts.