Have you ever noticed that human beings of all ages can get incredibly attached to the strangest darn things? For instance, one December when I was in my 20s and living in an apartment, I purchased the most perfect Christmas tree God ever created, decorated it with loving care, and bragged about it to anyone who would listen. Much to my surprise, when the holiday season was over, I simply could not bring myself to throw it away. I finally just stuck it in a closet and for months I got immense pleasure out of coming home from work, hanging up my coat, and experiencing a little bit of Christmas all over again. It was late summer before my landlady finally discovered my little secret, angrily classified it as a fire hazard, and informed me in writing that either I or it had to go. Although it was pretty droopy by then and had lost most of its needles, I still found it very difficult to toss that wonderful tree into the dumpster.
In Vietnam, I was the only guy I knew in the entire First Infantry Division who carried his old high school baseball glove with him on every mission. It probably would have been of little help to me in an extended fire fight, but it somehow made me feel a little bit safer and closer to home. I can still remember how depressed I was when it finally just more or less rotted away from all the heat and humidity.
For years, I had these gaudy tie-dye shirts (same pattern, different colors) which I had bought in the late 60s and wore for approximately a decade too long, after they had gone out of style. They finally got so threadbare I had to stop wearing them, but I still haven’t completely forgiven my wife for secretly removing them from my closet in the dead of night and throwing them away.
All my kids are extremely attached to the old stuffed animals which relatives and friends had given to them over the years. My daughter must have at least two dozen of them all by herself, and my youngest son isn’t very far behind. They were often strewn all over the house and even when somebody made an effort to pick them up, their final resting place still took up a good portion of two closets. Worse than that, it’s almost psychologically impossible to gather the darn things up and take them to the goodwill store, much less the dump. You see, just like real people they all have their own names, Grover, Rocket, Michelangelo, Furry, Leonardo, Dino, and Cruiser, just to mention a few. And apparently only the most hardest of the hardest would even think of getting rid of them. The last time I tried to pawn a few of them off on my mother to sell at one of her garage sales, my kids almost disowned me.
“How could you possibly sell Binky for 50 cents?” my daughter screamed at me. Then she dramatically added, “What am I worth, two bucks?”
Anyway, I think I’ve probably inherited most of my weird attachments from my mother’s side of the family. Granny used to pile her house high with jars of assorted canned vegetables, fruits, and jams. Someone could have eaten around the clock for decades and never made a dent in all of her canned goods. My mother, on the other hand, has taken a slightly different direction. She likes to use any spare closet space she has to collect rolls and rolls of toilet paper. She apparently buys them by the carload when they are on sale, ever fearful that one of the stores might run out. I’m not sure, but I think this behavior goes all the way back to her days of growing up in the Great Depression when every home in her little farming community had its own outhouse and one got his or her TP by tearing out the pages of a Sears and Roebuck catalog.
The family gold medal for irrational attachments, however, goes to my wife. No matter how hard she tries, she simply cannot bring herself to part with used boxes. That’s right, old boxes. She diligently collects everyone in sight under the guise that she will someday use them to send people Christmas and birthday presents. Big and small, long and short, fat and skinny, they’re everywhere I look. In the closets, under all the beds, out in the backyard shed, and even in countless lawn bags stacked up in the garage.
And when I finally started gathering some of them up and hauling them away, you should have seen the scene she made. In fact, it was almost as bad as the one I made when that old witch of a landlady of mine tried to drag my beloved nine-month-old Christmas tree out of the closet on a 105-degree August day in 1973.