March 24, 2005 – A Few of My Favorite Things

March 24, 2005 – A Few of My Favorite Things

I spoke with my Dad this week and found that his last duty to his lifelong friend who had passed away over a year had finally been completed. My Dad’s friend Charles Upton was an unrestrained collector, never throwing anything away. When Mr. Upton died, my Father could not bring himself to discard the belongings the old man had collected. His remedy was to construct a large metal storage building on a piece of property Mr. Upton sold my dad many years earlier. He would store all those belongings in that building, where they would remain as long as my dad was alive. “After I’m gone, you guys can do whatever you want with it all,” my father says, the words of a man aware that his wishes only remain in force as long as he is alive.

The move had gone off with only one major hitch. Among the stuff Charles Upton collected was garbage that he had neglected to discard and had been piled in among the collection: stacks of odd shaped pieces of wood—the discards of a carpentry project, stacks of paper bags from many now forgotten El Paso stores—Furrs Grocery, Franklin 5 and 10, among the countless numbers of brown paper bags, torn clothes obviously stored as rags, bits and pieces of metal—extra pieces of a toilet repair kit or discarded door locks replaced but not discarded. These my brother D piled into a truck and haul off to a recycling center only to find the center closed when he turned up with his load. The truck sits in D’s parking lot—he owns a fleet of short haul trucks—waiting for an opportunity to unload. When I call next time, I’m expecting to hear the truck had been emptied.

My father's collection bears much in common with that of Mr. Upton’s. His is stored in a basement constructed between the end of the 1950s and the beginning of the 1960s. It was to serve many purposes, one of which was to survive the blast of an atomic bomb. They created and tested the first such weapon not far from El Paso. The basement was the most difficult of the larger construction projects my dad had commissioned which was to ring a small one-room adobe house and create a larger home comprising three bedrooms, two baths, and a living room. The original adobe became the kitchen. Looking at the house from the front, the basement was underneath the right third of the house, running from the front of the building all the way to be the back. Being in that basement, we would survive atomic blast, a tornado, a hurricane, nearly anything nature or man could throw at us. It was also remarkably cool in summer, when outside temperatures soared into the high 90s and warm in winter when the temperature could dip into the teens.

The second purpose of that basement was to store all our possessions collected over the years of our lives. There is an Emerson black and white television set down there. All my schoolwork and that of my three sisters along with every school yearbook can be found down there. It also holds bits and pieces of cars my dad has rebuilt—starter motors, generators, odd pieces of tailpipe, and jars and jars of odd size nuts, screws and bolts. My dad nailed the lids of old mayonnaise jars to the ceiling and screwed the jars to the lids. They appear to be hanging by their own accord defying gravity. There is a complete collection black-bound books comprising a complete course in electronics by Lee DeForrest. Oddly enough the collection was there all the time I was growing up yet I learned everything I know about electronics from a 48 week course taught at the U.S. Naval Electronics School on Treasure Island—in San Francisco Bay halfway to Oakland. And there are tools, every conceivable tool a handy man or mechanic would need to fix just about anything can be found in that basement.

That basement is a journal recorded in things of our lives. If you compared it to a work of art, it would be a mixed media collage within a box. Each piece of the artwork has a significance of its own placed in that part of the basement by each of us collectively creating the work. But, it was my dad who would rearrange the order to suit his sense of esthetics. Every time I go home to visit my folks, I always go down into the basement looking for lost pieces of my past, trying to find that younger person hiding behind a stack of books, stuck away in a box. One time, as I was looking about the basement, I came upon a box that contained all my navy uniforms, my dress blue wool jumper, and thirteen-button, bell-bottom pants. I also found a couple of sets of dress white uniforms, a white jumper with white bell-bottom pants—these had button fly front. I took them with me when I left and they are still in one of my dresser drawers. I look at them occasionally and longingly wish I could fit into them again, but my 31-in waist would damage the 29-in waist of all the pants and I would be hard pressed to get into that very young man’s jumper. Still I keep them in my dresser, my younger self kept close by to help me grow old gracefully.

The more I contemplate my dad’s and Mr. Upton’s fascination with their material possessions, the more I learn about myself.