Scraps. The oldest stratum in the geology of my parents' basement dates back a century and more. When my grandparents died—my mother's parents—and my great-aunt, my grandfather's sister, in the last few years of the eighties, what was salvaged from their houses on Carrie Ave. in the old, working-class St. Louis neighborhood of Baden joined the growing sedimentation downstairs: and stayed there, unrevisited, silted over. They were all born in the years around 1910, and some of what they had kept from their own parents, my great-grandparents, Irish and German laborers, survived their passing. Ceremonial old photographs and tintypes, ancient property records, the Mass cards of forgotten turn-of-the-century funerals. Much of it probably beyond the reach of living memory.

It's easy to get lost among such obscure stuff, and for all the hours I spent excavating over the weekend I did relatively little good in the actual, relevant task of freeing up space. We're maybe a couple of large trash bags and a few relocated boxes closer to a clear basement for my efforts, no better. So many scraps, and all of them have to be sifted for their significance, or lack of it: old tax records, old pharmacy receipts, valueless, unredeemed green stamp collections and expired Christmas club books. Stuff that someone, some decades past, wasn't for whatever reason quite ready to throw away, now long past expiration; small enough, any item of it, but in bulk an encumbrance.

And any item of it a piece of someone's, some loved one's, vanished life. Every item a small but possibly readable pattern of a world. The house has to be sold, for my Mom's sake, and to be sold has to be disencumbered, and this chaff has to go: but all weekend long I felt that I was consigning my grandparents, my aunts, in the material fragments of their memories and actions, to a second and more permanent oblivion. A deeper oblivion in its way than burial—every scrap let go was a lost knowing, a thought released that could never quite be thought again.

A shoebox full of matchbooks and B&W coupons left by my aunt, for decades until her death at 81 a two-to-three pack-a-day smoker. An insurance card clipped to a car-repair record: from the day in July, 1974 when a new driver made a bad, head-on left turn into my grandparents' car, while I rode in the backseat with them from Sunday dinner at the smorgasbord place on Halls Ferry. A receipt for a trolling motor my Grampa, a fisherman as long as I knew him, bought that same year with some of his retirement money. A warranty card from his police-band scanner: he'd been a fireman thirty years, and at night he'd park in his armchair and listen to the fire calls, like a man in some ill-understood limbo catching at echoes of his real life.

As much a presence as these people had been in my life, I felt that I had never known them well enough, never tried enough to learn what they knew. And yet what would it have done for them, even if it were possible, to have kept hold of these scraps? I came to see, as the weekend went on, that what I had to do now after all was the best thing I could do. I was taking however uncertain hold of what they had left after them—not deliberately but out of weariness or inattention—and calling them to mind as I passed it through my hands: honoring their castoffs by letting them say as much to me as they would, and no more. My imperfect understanding would be enough, because it had to be. I came to think of it, in a way, as a form of Zen practice. (However much the notion would have mystified those hard-nosed Catholic old-timers.)

Someday, the people I've left behind will have to deal with my scraps: my unconsciously assembled, haphazard second body. Things will get meaning from my absence that had no particular meaning to me. They'll think of me, and let go, as we all have to. What better respect is there to be paid to the dead?

posted by michael  10:50:56 PM  
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