a family burden

Yesterday I wrote to my step-brother who lives the closest to my HP and who sees my dad and step-mom the most often, just to let him know I’m aware of the problem and available even though far away. We have not been close, ever really, but I feel it’s unfair for him and his wife to bear the burden of what my father has brought to the table, so to speak. My brother, on the other hand, claims to be committed to cleaning up the hoard because he wants to see what’s inside. I think he underestimates what the time commitment would be. I think he also wants to find buried treasure. That desire runs deep in my genealogy.

For the moment, all is calm on the hoarding front. I think this is the right time to prepare. I tried to express to my step-brother, in a very neutral tone, that I feel comfort he is nearby but by no means expect him to deal with it. I also simply stated that I do not feel attached to anything in the home. I hope he can read between the lines and understand that if they are stuck disposing of the mess, they can dispose of the mess without my interference. Perhaps what I will best be able to offer is financial help if it comes to that.

The house is dilapidated. Carpet has never been changed. The house was constructed in the late 1970s and the only major renovations that have occurred were when my father and I moved in c. 1990. He finished the basement. That same basement is now 80% inaccessible because of the hoard.

It makes me sad for my step-brother(s). This was their childhood home. It has been the same home in the backdrop of almost every memory growing up. This is where they still celebrate most major holidays. I haven’t been there for over a year already and I don’t expect to go back until 2013. Expect it to get worse, I flatly expressed. Maybe much worse.

reunion and recollection

While I classify the bulk of my research as part of Memory Studies, I am the first to admit I have memory trouble. Sometimes I have crystal clear precision of words or events, especially of places, but I can forget something you told me five minutes ago, I forget what I’m doing while I’m doing it, and I sometimes jumble things together.

My high school class(es) are getting ready for our (gasp) 20th year reunions this year, and in preparation, one of the classes is compiling images and video to show at the party. Someone just posted our Senior Class Video,  I’m three minutes in, and I have only recognized four or five people. These were our teachers and staff that we saw every day for years. Of all those who impacted me, I can give you the names of my French teacher, my psychology teacher, my calculus teacher, my American Literature teacher and my very favorite Physics teacher. Four of the five were my teachers for at least two years.

I’m dumbfounded. I feel like a stranger looking at someone else’s documented past. Is it because I only lived in that town for two and a half years? Or have I really erased so much of those mostly happy years in my life?

you can never go home

I wrote the following blogpost on March 10, 2009 for my research-related blog (which incidentally has seen less action over 5 years than this one saw in its first 6 months). Likely because of our recent move, this has been weighing on my mind, and I think the content much more appropriate to readers here. (Reposted with my own permission).

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I received this message from a childhood friend yesterday on facebook, “My parents were just visiting and told me your old house has been razed….new home coming up. This follows a kitchen fire last year but I didn’t think they’d take the whole house down!”

I have known for years now that you can never really go home, but now that I know I can never revisit the place, I am pondering what that means. I can’t think of one reason I would want to return there. To remember the address, however, I typed in “Meadowview Ln” into Google Maps which suggested Meadow View Dr, and led me to click on a picture. When I turned just one click to the right, there before me was my house.

When I lived there the road wasn’t paved and cattle were kept in the field on “the hill” behind us. So now, I see the house for the first time in ages on the web, and it really no longer exists. I click up and down the street and remember Kory’s house and Kristen’s house and see a lot of houses that weren’t there before.

I told my mom the house was gone and she asked, “OK, so where’s the picture??? That is crazy and I think the kitchen is the only part we remodeled!!! Well, it has been a few years, hasn’t it.” It’s funny to think of asking for a picture of something no longer there. Proof that it’s gone? An empty lot? We can never go back. Not if we wanted, not if we had to.

Many Pieds-Noirs have been returning to Algeria in recent years. They bring back film that recaptures their homes and they play it for those who cannot physically return. When Jacques Derrida saw his homeland played back for him by Safaa Fathy, he found the past unrecognizable (see Tourner les mots), and Hélène Cixous traveled to Derrida’s Algeria with photos of his past, trying to make sense of what she was witnessing for the first time (Si près). But many Pieds-Noirs do not even see the present when they return. They only see what used to be.

In my case, this picture triggers memories of the dirt road and how big that hill to the right seemed when I rode my bike down it, and many of those houses now there were once just fields and empty lots. I see my past transposed onto the new siding and attempting to erase that ugly truck. But can I see an empty lot?

soliciting input on hoarding output

For those of you readers who are or have been personally impacted by hoarding, I would love your input on some questions I’m teasing out in my research.

I’m working on “Hoarding Memory” as a manifestation of loss in autobiography, but right now my questions are specifically related to the consequences of hoarding. It seems to me that hoarders hoard because they want to hold on to things, can’t bear to part with them, and then the accumulation over time becomes a sort of comforting nest, even if an isolating one. Although the intention is to save or salvage scraps,the sheer quantity of items quickly creates a storage problem. Consequently, the hoarded things that are meant to be preserved instead become inaccessible, forgotten, lost, and many times destroyed.

From your perspective, what are the other consequences of hoarding either on the objects accumulated or on the person who has accumulated them? Those of us who are in someway related to the hoarder are obviously impacted to varying degrees, so I welcome that insight as well.

Many thanks in advance for sharing.

conversations with an HP

Monday, September 11, was my dad’s birthday. As per my usual, I festively celebrated by calling him with Google Voice. My parents are old enough that a call from Australia seems amazing, never mind that it was totally free for me and they can also call me on a local number whenever they want. It was the first time we had talked in months.

It was 6 a.m., Sunday morning, in Missouri and my dad was getting ready for church. According to him, though, he was really answering peoples’ birthday wishes on Facebook. Our conversation wound around and around and around onto one odd topic after another until it finally digressed into an overly detailed description of a cyst he had removed. This is the hoarded detail of every day disgusting grit that my father clings to: the microscopic memory that will get in the way every time of a normal exchange and fill his mind up with so much useless clutter that he cannot properly talk to me.

On the one hand, I appreciate that ability that I’ve inherited to be completely distracted by something others would find banal but I see as amazingly beautiful. On the other, it’s painfully annoying to be flipped around in such a conversation that very abruptly ends with, “talk to your step-mother, bye.”

more pieces of me

Yesterday the people staying in our house found a new home for our kitties. I’m not sure why that would or should make me sad, but it really still does. I lived with those cats for nearly six years, even though they came from Canada with D. It took a long time for us to grow close, but I have fond memories of Kiwi climbing on my belly while I was pregnant and perching there while I wrote emails. And in the last year after the dogs had found new homes, Crystal and I became very attached to each other. I’d go out at 11 every night looking for her and then she’d sleep by my hip until morning. Both good cats, gone to a very good farm where they will be very happy hunters (at least that’s the story I’m telling myself – please don’t alter it for me).

On the positive side of finding new homes for pets, and this goes for my cat that went with my ex during our divorce as well, you never have to think about that pet dying from whatever natural or unnatural causes. I had a cat that I adopted in 2001 from a colleague who had to move. After a long unexplicable illness and over $1000 in vet bills, I had to put Balu to sleep in 2004 because he just struggled too much to breathe. I still get choked up thinking about that horrible decision.

And so I’m grateful to you new pet owners who are willing to care for our animals. May our beloved animals bring you much joy, and may they reciprocate for many healthy years to come.

postcards from the edge, of reason

before

I’ve been considering selling my postcard collection on Craigslist for some time now, but the thought that some personal information might get misused has always interrupted my plan. I then offered the collection to a friend who has an affinity for postcards (and probably hoarding) and she smartly declined.

I finally tackled the box a few days ago, sorting the cards into four categories: received from someone, free cards, art cards, and cards from places I’ve been. I started collecting when I was about 15 years old and stopped not too long ago. I still have a habit of visiting art exhibits and picking one or two cards of the pieces that most affected me. As I was sorting, I fairly easily tossed the “free-card” pile with the exception of two or three cards I have often displayed in my office over the past 15 years. What surprised me most about the “places I’ve been pile,” though, was the careful chronicling of my travels. Places I have long since forgotten were documented there in pictures. Some of the most generic images (i.e. “Arizona Coyote”), I tossed willingly into the recycle bin, but I ended up keeping the majority. I stumbled across a few duplicates from Paris, and yet I couldn’t let go of the second copies. I feel compelled to find them a home.

Finally, I went through some of the “received” cards and was a bit dumbfounded. Some were cards that I had written home, but many were from people I no longer remember. I had a card, for example, from someone named Anastassia, and I have no recollection of ever meeting this person. Nonetheless, the card looked vaguely familiar. It somehow remains in the “keep” pile.

after

In the end, because I took the time to confront the memories in the card pile, I wasn’t able to let go of the bulk. I took too much pleasure in seeing my travels plainly documented in such a compact space. I do not have all the other souvenirs, because those did go onto Craigslist. Instead, I keep a condensed box of postcards without knowing if I’ll ever look inside it again.

childhood memories

S. is now two and a half, and as we sat on the front steps this morning while I was drinking my coffee, she asked me where her pumpkins went. October was a long time ago, yet she remembered that one pumpkin had lost its stem and one had fallen down the steps when she accidentally pushed it, and it cracked. How long does such a memory last without photos or other support to trigger it in our minds? Will all of that evaporate when we move, or will it stay with her?

personal nostalgia

My research has long focused on nostalgia. When I consider nostalgia in my personal life, however, this photo sums it up. I lived in this building behind the “Lausanne” sign, behind the train tracks, with a sweeping view down to Lac Léman and over to Evian, France, for almost a year. I loved walking through the train station every day, always imagining I could hop on any one of those trains and disappear somewhere into Europe, effortlessly. I stared at the lake for hours every day while writing the beginning of my dissertation, and I dreamed of what was at the end, just beyond what I could see. My nostalgia for that year, which was important to me for many reasons, is bound up in this view.

I returned to Lausanne last week after a six year absence, and my entire life has changed since then. I have a happy marriage, a beautiful daughter, a home, confidence in my career. I no longer need to hold on to nostalgic images of the past. I was somewhat afraid to confront this place again – afraid that I would see Switzerland for what it is and not for what it meant to me ten years ago or even five years ago. I know my idea of Lausanne is ridiculously romantic, yet somehow my nostalgia was not shaken.

Last Sunday was packed with coffees, teas, and meals with old colleagues and friends, each facing the lake. The weather was hopefully sunny in the morning, melancholic with drizzle at lunch, and joyfully light over tea. I’m projecting my encounters onto the lake and mountains, like I always do, but somehow my emotion was also always dictated by the light cast over Lausanne.

I realize now very clearly what I do and do not like about the unchanging nature of both the Swiss people and culture, but I’m grateful for that unchanging view and the sense of longing that it always culls inside of me. Were I to live there again and confront reality, my perspective may change, but for now I’m glad my nostalgia still has a home.

 

 

carrying memory

We all carry around memory with us everywhere we go… Active or passive, it helps us navigate, not trip, predict outcomes, reason, form relationships and live.

Saturday night at dinner with old friends in Switzerland who really haven’t changed much from the way I remember them in 2001, 2002 and 2005, V. got up to go outside for a cigarette. We were in an old country manor being renovated by our host. V. stopped suddenly and told A. (our host) that she loved the red tiles. Where did he find them? Suddenly she was swept up in a memory from her early adolescent years in which she was waxing the tile with a machine in her Brazilian home. She physically reenacted the scene, recounting how lazy she was to let the machine roar around by itself while she leaned against the wall yanking on the electrical cord occasionally. But suddenly she found herself pinned against the kitchen sink which was wet, being shocked by a short in the waxing machine’s circuitry. She screamed for help but her mother didn’t hear… And her life flashed before her eyes until the machine shook itself loose from the wall socket, saving her life.

The weight of memory wrapped up in an object is powerful, even in another country, another time. Those tiles in A.’s house had been salvaged from the attic of the early 18th century home, yet they resonated strongly in someone from another continent and another generation.