MMs - 6.3.2019 - Stuff

So Neale, our financial advisor and part-time Walmart greeter,  has been gently but firmly moving the conversation toward stuff. Specifically our stuff, and what to do with it.

Now my take on the accumulated flotsam and jetsam that fills our closets and shelves and drawers and cabinets and attic and garage and auto glove boxes is that eventually it becomes someone else's problem. I figure it's my role to hoard it and my kids role to dispose of it.

Neale, bless his heart, is doing his best to persuade us that's not the best course.  His take is that there's not going to be much room at the Casa Pequeno Home for Assisted Living, so we ought to give some thought to winnowing the detritus. He assures us, often, "Your kids don't want your stuff!"

He's persistent, I'll give him that. So Barb and I are taking a long look at the stuff that we have accumulated in our 57 years (Saturday, thank you very much) together. Our own collection is bad enough, but when you add in all the things that we have inherited/acquired from our own parents, we have a museum here.

I have, on a shelf above me, among other things, a non-working crystal radio that my father built as a boy, three glass insulators that were acquired during his 45 years as a telephone lineman, a clay piggy bank that my mother painted, a crystal paper weight globe from our son-in-law, a porcelain figure of a graduate in cap and gown that Burnell Knight made for me upon my graduation from high school, a class ring from that self-same high school - dated 1959 - and 9 VHS video tapes that are unlabeled so I have no idea what's on them - but I have an old VHS player on the shelf in the closet so I could check them out. Or not.

On a nearby shelf  is a (large) glass egg that a teacher gave my father when he was a boy,  a complete set of silverware that belonged to Grandmother Anderson, 7 large binders of genealogy records that my mother painstakingly assembled (contents transferred to digital media long ago), 6 archival boxes of genealogical papers, certificates and historical brick-abrac, assorted books on the history of Johnson County, and.... You get the picture. Oh yeah, there's a couple of bankers boxes of those. Pictures, that is. I just hope Rob doesn't return the grocery sack of 35mm slides he carried off. Did I mention the dozen photo albums? Or the framed photos on the walls and scattered on most flat surfaces throughout the house?

And then there's the books.

We have, at this moment in time, 34 linear feet of books taking up space on shelves throughout the house. And those are the "keepers." At any given time there is a stack of books on the way back to the library or to Half-Price books. Those don't count. We have books on gardening, travel, home repair, medical help and diet. I have nearly 3 linear feet of reference books, such as biographical dictionaries, geographical dictionaries, and foreign language dictionaries.  We have yards of fiction books "because we like that writer."

We have Junior High, High School and College Yearbooks (in duplicates). We have books on becoming a US Citizen (in multiple languages), a dozen antique to contemporary hymn and song books. And then there are the commentaries, Bibles and Bible study books. Any one need a complete set of commentaries by Adam Clark? He wrote them in the late 1800's; they are so old they don't even have a copyright or publication date in them.  How about 14 linear feet of binders containing transcripts of every sermon on Romans that John Allen Chalk preached at Highland in Abilene in the 60's, as well as notes from BSF, and classes attended at Austin Grad?

And I can't even begin to get my head around all the odd stuff piled on the shelves and in the closet in my "office." Need the installation diskettes for Windows 95? How about 3 surplus keyboards? Three monitors? Two obsolete computers?

And did I mention the garage?


I wonder if Neale has any room at his house?