Rick's August Tirade
Household Relics: An Elegy
About fifteen years ago I had a dream in which my parents,
brother and I had gathered at the top of a hill. The mood was
sweetly melancholy, like an ancient Chinese poem about the parting
of old friends. My parents were taking their leave, heading for an
unknown destination beyond the horizon, and they had some final
words for their two boys.
We had broken off into pairs. On one side of the grassy hilltop,
my mother was revealing to my brother the secrets of succeeding with
women. I could overhear just enough tantalizing snippets to suspect
that I was being deprived of timeless and essential wisdom.
Meanwhile, my father was sifting through a sprawling mound of family
memorabilia -- a disheveled archive full of vanished middle-class
Armenians in faded sepia photographs on crumbling black album pages.
"This was your Great-Uncle Sarkis," my father would tell
me; "He was a dentist in Istanbul." I would nod and feel
the burden of history grow heavy on my shoulders.
No matter that I never had a Great-Uncle Sarkis. The message was
clear: my brother was to be the propagator of the family, and I was
to be custodian of the relics. And so it has come to pass.
Now I find myself surrounded by boxes of sundry artifacts, piled
high and deep, with just enough of a pathway between them to allow
single-file travel from room to room. During the past month, you
see, I've had to empty both my office and my boyhood home --
fifty-nine years of total occupancy reduced to mute and marginally
useless remains, like Lenin's mummified corpse after the collapse of
the Soviet Union. Do you keep the body or put it out with the trash?
As duly appointed custodian of relics, I felt compelled to keep what
I could.
My father died last fall; my mother had gone eight years before
him. With a pang of regret, I decided to let the old homestead pass
from our hands. It was just a regulation split-level of 1950s
vintage, too cramped for comfort and too full of ghosts for me to
think about building a new life there. I loved our back yard and
always would; the jubilant gardens, the lush lawn with its shifting
patches of sunlight, the green groves of pine, birch, rhododendron,
wild cherry and sassafras soothed my soul like no other plot of
earth on the planet. But it was time to move on.
From the house I harvested age-old correspondence and strange
kitchen implements, white elephants and wooden end-tables. I packed
boxes until they were heavy with books and records, files and
photographs, representative specimens of my parents' wardrobes and a
petrified remnant of our original living-room carpet.
I gathered my father's pipes, my mother's paintings, and a
virtual museum of my own Baby Boomer boyhood: a boxful of 3-D View
Master reels... my battered aluminum snow-coaster... our old
Monopoly set, still holding handwritten I.O.U. notes from the
1960s... an original Davy Crockett comic book with Fess Parker on
the cover... a surviving stack of REAL books from my Preliterate
Period, though not as many as I had hoped to find... two dozen
color-by-number Venus Paradise drawings in brilliant unearthly hues
(a kid's glimpse of what heaven must look like)... my own primitive
sketches of birds, castles, cartoon characters and a slightly tipsy
Empire State Building... plus an assortment of models ranging from
the Visible Man (complete with plastic innards meticulously painted
in lifelike colors) to the battle-scarred H.M.S. Victory, which my
mother periodically knocked off the dresser during her daily
dusting. Missing and presumed lost: my official Duke Snider baseball
bat -- a cherished possession, at least until I tied a local record
by going hitless in two consecutive Little League seasons. By now it
was probably part of a landfill in South Amboy, New Jersey.
While we were dismantling the home our parents had built, my
brother and I were struck by the surprising mediocrity of their
material possessions. Our father was a successful industrial
microbiologist and a Cornell graduate; our mother was an artist. So
why did their tastes run to plastic and polyester? Why so much
Tupperware in our midst?
Like most members of the level-headed generation that came of age
during the Depression and World War II, they hankered for all that
was modern, practical and low-maintenance. They put their faith in a
postwar commercial civilization that promised whiter whites and
jumbo-size value. Plastic and polyester therefore loomed large in
their domestic landscapes.
But these products were only a means to an end, and that end was
a clean, cozy, comfortable, carefree suburban nest for themselves
and their exuberant offspring. There was no need to impress the
neighbors, probably because the neighbors never felt the need to
impress us. So my father bought his clothes at Sears even after he
finally had the means to shop at Brooks Brothers, and JC Penney
remained my mother's favorite boutique until the end of her days.
I respect my parents for having avoided the materialist trap of
equating high prices with high self-esteem. They lived simply and
honestly, requiring no validation from the chi-chi crowd. They added
grace to their lives with art and classical music, and enjoyed the
love of a close-knit family. It's no wonder that when the late '60s
rolled around, I couldn't find a single reason to take to the
streets with the scruffy collegiate Marxists of my generation. Their
folks, not mine, had been the ones building gilded swimming pools
and gulping martinis at the club.
The true value of what my parents had left behind became apparent
one day as I dug deeper into the secret recesses of the old house.
My brother had returned to work, leaving me alone with the empty
rooms and benevolent spirits. I was cleaning out my mother's dresser
drawers, one by one, with mixture of tender regret and an
archeologist's fascination with the past. I began to notice that as
I lifted the most recent layers from the top of each drawer, I
uncovered successive strata from earlier decades until, at bottom, I
was staring straight into the 1950s.
Was it possible that these artifacts had lain there undisturbed
since my childhood? I recognized a blouse, black with pale gold
polka dots, that my mother had worn in those days. When I was six I
drew her portrait while she was wearing it, and here it was again,
unseen by me for over forty years. It was like stumbling into King
Tut's tomb, but all the more haunting because I actually KNEW this
King Tut. I had discovered a person I hadn't seen in four decades --
my own mother as a young woman, radiant again, her spirit full of
gentle mirth and melody. And suddenly I was six, and felt again how
it was to be six, before deadlines, self-doubt and the dubious
virtues of sophistication had bleached the brighter colors from my
rainbow. I felt the incomparable contentment of a six-year-old who
knows in his heart that the world is a safe and wonderful place,
despite the dragons under the bed and the witches in the woods,
because his parents are there to protect him. It was a brief return
to Eden.
Suspended in my time-warp all that afternoon, I uncovered relics
in every room of the house. I found our original chrome-trimmed
kitchen table, site of my earliest recollected meals... the very
place where I first tasted liverwurst sandwiches and
cream-of-mushroom soup. My historic Cub Scout uniform turned up at
the bottom of our colossal trunk, looking freshly pressed and ready
for my next pack meeting. The rediscovery of early bedspreads, old
coats and woolen winter pants, paleolithic curtains and slipcovers
activated individual brain cells that had been slumbering for over
forty years. Time was receding to the point of my earliest memories
and wordless sensations: of being dusted with baby powder, of
bedding down in the crib with my small menagerie of stuffed
companions, of hearing soft lullabies and strains of ancient radio
music. My parents were in those primeval memories, just as I
remembered them: those big people with the soothing voices, hovering
benevolently over their dark-haired boy, lulling him to dreamland
then and even now.
When I opened a little oblong cardboard box and came face-to-face
with the twin figures from the top of my parents' wedding cake, it
was more than I could bear. The cynic pinched his nose, sniffled,
and let the tears flow.
All that day, and in the days that followed, I had uncovered
nothing of material value -- just as the relics of a saint have no
material value. And yet these household relics had the power to cure
more than gallstones and lumbago; they were time machines in
disguise. Through their power I had been able to glimpse my parents,
through the layers of decades, as I remembered them when our house
was new. Then, just as I was getting to know them again, it was time
to say goodbye.
When my brother arrived back on the scene, we began to discard
everything we couldn't keep or put into storage. I looked down at
our old crib mattress, stained and splitting after forty years in
the attic, and hesitated. My brother, reading my thoughts, did his
best impersonation of an aged mattress: "Let me go,
Ricky," he said, in a voice wrinkled with weariness and wisdom.
"It's time for me to die."
The wise mattress had a point. Why do some of us hold the past in
such a tenacious grip? Death and the passage of time are facts of
life. The present is always slipping into the past, and the past no
longer exists.
Furthermore, the cherishing of relics is by nature an unrequited
love; the things can't love us back. So why do we bother to keep
them well beyond their allotted spans?
Because we find comfort in them. And in an indifferent world -- a
world without benevolent parents to protect our frazzled souls --
that comfort is worth all manner of riches. My own prized
collections of antique maps and coins, autographs and historic
newspapers, fascinating as they are, provide paltry emotional
returns compared to the worthless scraps of paper, plastic, wood and
cloth that I salvaged from home.
The irony is that the cold-blooded antiques will outlast the
beloved domestic artifacts. Long after I've been lowered into the
ground to become plant food, my collections will still be fetching
money in online auctions and antique shops. But by then the old
household relics will have been consigned to the dumpster -- photos,
letters, baby clothes and all. They hold no meaning for anyone
outside my orbit, and they'll die with me. Like the people who loved
them, they're mortal. It seems ruthless and unjust but somehow
fitting; it's the way of the world.
Anyway, I let the old crib mattress die. It was a hard thing for
a custodian of relics to do, but it had to be done. My parents would
understand; after all, I had to let THEM go when I closed up the
house for the last time and drove away. Besides, I had kept more
than enough relics to comfort me well into the new millennium.
I'm looking at one of those relics now: a photograph taken during
my parents' honeymoon at Lake George, New York, in 1946. Some four
dozen honeymooners, lined up like a baseball team in bobbysocks,
fill the panoramic shot from end to end. My parents are two small
faces in the back row, smiling serenely at the camera, so alike in
their harmony of expression that you'd think they were twins. I like
to believe they're still there, perpetually twenty-five, on a
perpetual honeymoon in a perpetual 1946.
I wonder how the other couples fared, those simple, curly-haired
1940s couples, their minds swimming with healthy hormones and Tommy
Dorsey tunes. I wonder how many of them are gone now, how many are
still married, how many of the marriages ended in grief. It doesn't
matter: in the photograph, all of them are forever frozen in a
moment of bliss, including my parents, so young and full of hope,
dreaming perhaps of the years ahead, of the children they'd come to
know, of the life they'd build together... a life now reduced to
boxes of relics.
You can't dump those dreams into the trash. At least I can't.
After all, I'm the custodian.
Here's the complete archive of Rick Bayan's immortal tirades for your reading pleasure:
December 2002 — Hello, I Must Be Going
November 2002 — A Raving Moderate
August 2002 — Is Western Civilization Worth Saving?
July 2002 — To Scam or Be Scammed
June 2002 — I Read the News Today, Oh Boy
May 2002 — Speechophobia
April 2002 — Fanatics on Parade
March 2002 — The Prestige Gap: A Lament
February 2002 — On Becoming a Dullard
January 2002 — Art for Slackers
December 2001 — An Unsolicited Christmas Card
November 2001 — A Tale of Two Tribes
October 2001 — On the Fallen Towers
August 2001 — Why Do We Bother?
June 2001 — Notes from a Doomed Planet
May 2001 — The Museum of Discarded Names
April 2001 — Indecision
March 2001 — A Slight Case of Insanity
February 2001 — Letter to a Conscientious Critic
January 2001 — The Cynic's Inaugural Address
December 2000 — The 50th Tirade
November 2000 — Travel Advisory
October 2000 — Beyond Work
September 2000 — More Work
August 2000 — Work
July 2000 — The Doves' Nest
June 2000 — Great Affectations
May 2000 — Tale of a Virtual Village
April 2000 — The World Is My Obstacle Course
March 2000 — A Living Heck
February 2000 — On the Treachery
of Time
January 2000 — A Letter to the
Future
December 99 — Rare Bird
November 99 — Not Just Another
Obscure Ethnic Group
October 99 — Extinction Reconsidered
September 99 — Good Life, Bad
Life, Better Life
August 99 — Household Relics:
An Elegy
July 99 — A Meditation on Profanity
June 99 — In Praise of Sloth
May 99 — A Bug's Death
April 99 — Obligations!
March 99 — The Courage to Be Ordinary
February 99 — A Grave Story
January 99 — What's Left for
Men?
December 98 — On the Uses of
Friends
November 98 — A Cynic's Thanksgiving
October 98 — Grand Illusions
September 98 — Filth
August 98 — Will the Real God
Please Stand Up?
July 98 — Adventures in Downsizing
June 98 — Lady Longevity
May 98 — Uniquely Human, Uniquely
Clueless
April 98 — The Mathematics of Excess
March 98 — Humbuggery
February 98 — Love and the Single
Cynic
January 98 — By the Sweat of
Your Brow
December 97 — Is Suffering Unfashionable?
November 97 — The Tao of Housekeeping
October 97 — The Sensory Deprivation
Blues
September 97 — Down with Natural
Selection!
August 97 — Noise
July 97 — On Eating Our Fellow Creatures
June 97 — Trouble in Book-Land
May 97 — Interview with an Unemployable
Man
April 97 — The Cynic's Dream
March 97 — Inequalities
February 97 — Flesh and Mortality
January 97 — How to Be a Success
December 96 — Why I Can't Hate
Christmas
November 96 — How I Became a Cynic
