Microwunderkammer

 Parental artifact #9: a shoebox full of disposable chopsticks from everywhere.

When you go through all your parents’ stuff, you will run into things that just make you stop and scratch your head in puzzlement. Sometimes the puzzle is to identify what the object is or what its provenance may be. Other times, those factors are plain, and the question is simply…why?

A decade ago, as my parents were becoming ever less able to manage their own affairs, and then less able to manage themselves, I and my brothers had to make trips to our hometown and try to help out. We’d stay a few days, do some chores that had been deferred, take care of business that needed attention, and do our best to slow the slide into decay. It became clear, during these visits, that simply dealing with all our parents’ stuff after their death would become an issue, so I would occasionally try to get ahead of things by moving stuff out of the house.

I wasn’t spiriting away valuables. On one visit, I surreptitiously filled a neighbor’s garbage can with yogurt containers and mismatched lids that had filled an entire cupboard. On another visit, I took advantage of my parents naps and stealthily filled three “lawn size” garbage bags with nothing but plastic bags. There was the collection of ketchup packets and coffee-stirring spoons from McDonalds to sneak out of the kitchen drawers, as well as the drawer-full of used plastic forks, a grocery bag of hotel soaps from almost every continent and five decades that had melted into a solid block (not to mention the complementary shower caps), and so on.

I had to do all this furtively, like a thief, because that’s what I was to my parents. They objected bitterly to my earlier efforts at persuading them that there was no benefit to keeping such things, though they could offer no justification for keeping them other than “you can’t throw that away! That’s a perfectly good plastic bag (or fork, or whatever).”

I don’t think my parents were pathological hoarders. But I do think they were “on the spectrum.” They were children of the Great Depression, true, but there is no family lore of privation or struggle during that time. Both my parents’ parents were creatures of the university, stably employed through the worst economic times, as far as I can tell. However, if they were ever offered something free, they took it, no matter its worth or utility. Why? I do not know.

So, many years after the plastic bag purge, and after my parents’ death, my brothers and I set to trying to divide up the material residue of their lives. There were many amazing, valuable, sentimental, prized things, some of which I’ve written about; there was also a lot of stuff that made me wonder…why? There were boxes of swag—keychains and buttons and desk-toys and other baubles that sales representatives showered them with, branded with VWR and Fisher Scientific and Genentech and Calbiochem and USC. There was a trunk in the garage that was half full of plastic shopping bags from all of their considerable travels, going around the world twice and over five decades. There was a shoebox full of disposable chopsticks, of which this is only a portion. The Singapore Airlines and Osaka sticks are from a trip through Asia in 1981.

The chopsticks, the bags, the hotel shower caps—they were not souvenirs or keepsakes as far as I can tell. They were never looked at to evoke specific memories, and they were no more symbolic of, or unique to, their countries of origin than paper napkins (and yes, there were stacks of paper napkins too). They were not framed or displayed on shelves, where they could catch a glance and inspire reverie about a pleasant vacation, or even a sweaty, turbulent day of shopping for necessities in a foreign land. The chopsticks were in a box shoved in the back of a drawer, the bags in a trunk in the garage, the soaps behind the towels in a bathroom cupboard. They couldn’t be thrown out, but they were never used.

Why? Why were they kept? It wasn’t some evidence of mental decline with aging, as the accumulation (I don’t call it a collection) goes back to the 1970’s, and my entire life I don’t think I ever saw my dad throw away a plastic bag. There’s things in my parents’ minds and habits that I’ll never understand, and as long as they didn’t cause harm, I guess it’s no big deal; just an eccentricity of theirs that I can wonder about, and hope that I didn’t inherit.

I did inherit the chopsticks, though. Chopsticks are useful, even if they are 40 years old and came from halfway around the world. As I sample some pad Thai from the local restaurant, I’ll get a brief reminder that I also had okonomiyaki in Osaka; and after dinner, well, chopsticks make decent kindling. Maybe, as I sit by the fire and digest, I’ll look back at my old pictures and remember a meal with my family and my dad’s former student at a swanky restaurant in Japan.

Wait…is that why they saved them?