Clearing Away Childhood
Ministerial Meandering
Clearing away childhood
“Seriously? - you want to keep that?”
There is nothing frivolous about moving house, especially when you are past your mid-70’s. What you have to go through is nothing short of a ‘renaissance’ in its original meaning. Believe it or not, I have stuffies from my childhood - some probably beyond repair, which still bring back visions and memories from over six decades ago. I confess I even sniff them, to see if they still retain that familiar odour that made them so much part of my small life. Usually, they just smell of dusty drawer or old trunk.
Of course, I’m far too mature and sensible to try and hang on to relics of such ridiculous sentimental value, but when I come across a matchbox (remember them?) containing baby teeth and a lock of baby hair from our girls - well, then it’s not just my own reluctance I have to deal with, but Sheila’s as well.
I ask myself whether the girls (now in their 40’s) would think that this adherence to the past was ‘sweet’ - or rather pathetic. I’m not sure that I want to know, actually.
Getting past the emotional traps that one finds in ‘rarely’, to ‘never-opened’ drawers and cupboards, one still has to deal with bookshelves. Some of you may think that bookshelves should contain books - and I’d be forced to agree with you there. But bookshelves in our house also contain vast collection of DVDs. I can proudly tell you that we finally got rid of our videotape collection of movies about 2 years ago - about a decade after you could no longer buy a device on which to play them.
But the DVDs - now, there are some treasures there, are there not? ‘The Little Princess’, ‘The Secret Garden’, Anne of Green Gables’, The Railway Children’…God forbid I put a hand on those! And for me - ‘Lassie’, ‘Big Red’, ‘Marmaduke’, ‘The Incredible Journey’, ‘Marley and Me’, ‘White Fang’, ‘Turner and Hooch’…touch my dog movies - and you’re toast!
However, just when I think I’m making progress, I find that my childhood hasn’t slipped away into the past as much as I thought it had. Reminded the other day by my wife of nearly five decades, I asked my adult girls for some DVDs for a birthday or Christmas present not so long ago. What erudite and mind-stretching epics did I request? ‘The Harry Potter Series’…and ‘The Chronicles of Narnia’.
Sure - our bookcases also groan and bleed under the weight of classic ‘shit-kickers’, like all of Bruce Lee’s movies, all of the Lethal Weapon series, and ‘The Godfather’ movies, but I hasten to add that we do have all of ‘Morse’ and ‘Foyle’s War’ - to keep the ‘little grey cells’ (of which Hercule Piorot was so fond) from atrophying.
And now, of course, we come to the books themselves. These fall into five categories for me; i) I have read it; ii) I am going to read it; iii) I will never read it; iv) I can’t possibly throw that away; v) how the hell did that get onto my bookshelf? Categories i), iii), and v) are reasonably easy to dispense with. Category ii) is also fairly straightforward - but requires me to stop lying to myself about how many more decades of life I still have to achieve this monumental task; and category iv) takes me back to my matchbox, with Sheila and I asking each other, “Really? - that was what we read to the girls when they were aged ‘x’! Don’t you remember - that was her favourite story?” The book itself is well-loved, battered, and out of print; the stains on the pages are probably from spilt bedtime milk or dribble. The corners are bent, and some of the pages got between the jaws of an earlier dog - how can you hurl such an icon of familial heartbeats into the rubbish pile?
Decluttering childhood isn’t as easy as you might think.
Philip+