Possessions Lost, Possessions Found

I just spent the last half hour taking a tour of my house.

Perhaps ‘tour’ isn’t the right word.  It was more of an inventory.  And I gotta say, I was surprised at the results.

Tasked by my good friend and loyal reader, Staci, to write about “a physical possession that you would be heartbroken to lose,” I set about identifying the thing or things that, if lost, would break my heart.  I browsed through book shelves and stared at pictures on the wall.  I dug through desk and dresser drawers and opened every closet door in the house.

After a while, I felt like a stranger in my own home, as I transitioned from ‘resident’ to ‘explorer.’  It was odd to regard, as if for the first time, the hundreds of wall hangings and photo albums and trophies and refrigerator art and souvenirs and report cards and scraps and relics and endless evidence of the lives being lived inside these walls.

I spent a minute – okay, several minutes – considering my vinyl record collection.  It’s not huge, maybe 150 albums, but almost all of them have an individual and special meaning to me.  I would hate to lose any of them.  But the fact is, I have lost a few of them over the years, most recently when Bruce the Beagle made off with a 30-year-old Stevie Wonder album in his teeth, irreparably gouging more than half the tracks on each side.  At the moment it happened, I thought I would, literally, throw up.  But, the loss of the vintage record prompted me to go on iTunes in search of its digital analog and, thirty minutes later, I’d not only replaced the Stevie Wonder album, but had found an Otis Redding collection I’d also been looking for.  Score!

Last year, a software-removal task inadvertently deleted several gigs of photos and videos from my laptop.  Again, nausea.  But, again, it passed.

Truth is, I’ve suffered through many material losses and many of them were painful, perhaps even heartbreaking – at the time.  But passing time takes care of hard times.

My tour also took me into the kids’ rooms.  And while I encountered countless possessions of theirs I’d happily lose – candy wrappers, ancient dishes, organic substances of unknown origin – I also noted the many toys and artifacts and doodads they cling to for god-only-knows what reasons.  Their shelves and nightstands and dressers were lined with tiny collectible football helmets, rocks they found on vacation, plastic jewelry, journals and, literally, thousands of pieces of their nonstop lives.  Losing any of these seemingly trivial items would be a crushing experience, an experience that I would share with them.  They would recover from it, perhaps even forget about it entirely, but it’s not so easy for the parent.

I don’t mean to suggest that I would carry the loss of my daughter’s Silly Bandz with me to the grave, but it’s a different kind of suffering to see your child unhappy.   Part of me (kind of) cheers these experiences, for they are an important part of growing up.  But they are more likely to leave a tiny, but permanent, scar on the parent than on the child.

So, Staci, to answer your question, I don’t think I have a single possession that the loss of which would break my heart; I have a thousand, perhaps thousands, that would leave a temporary mark.

And I have four irreplaceable possessions – their names are Margaret, Mary, Harper and Jack – whose losses, large and small, are the kinds that stick with me forever.