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What do you do with a coconut shell carved to be a monkey’s head?
Or a half-dozen crystal-footed cake plates? Or a scale model of Da Vinci’s giant crossbow?
It’s true that, in the end, you can’t take it with you. But for those of us left behind, it would be so much easier if you could.
Maybe the old Egyptians were on to something when they filled the tomb with the treasures of the departed and sealed the door for all time. For if it was sent along to the afterlife, its fate didn’t need to be decided in the here and now.
Much as some folks pride themselves on keeping a clean desk and uncluttered life, there’s a bit of packrat in all of us. What we get, we’re inclined to keep — the difference merely lies in how much and how long. But in the end, at the end, there is stuff, and when two people live in the same house for nearly half a century — they can leave an awful lot of stuff.
For six months we’ve been sort of nibbling around the edges — looking in boxes, filling bags, moving this, that and another thing from room to room; preliminary triage before the final choices need to be made — before Gayle and her brother needed to empty out the family home, put a sign in the yard and close the door on life that would never be what it had been.
But first there was that coconut shell and 10,000 other things like it … and what do you do with a coconut shell carved to be a monkey’s head?
For that matter, why would anybody want a coconut shell carved to be a monkey’s head? All I can suppose is that it seemed a good idea at the time.
And now? I guess it depends. Not on the coconut shell — it depends on who-ever is holding it. Whoever is deciding.
I was just a kid when I overheard my dad describe a guy in town as somebody who “knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.”
The phrase stuck with me, mostly because my uncles and grandpa nodded and chuckled with as much enthusiastic agreement as you’ll ever hear at a Norwegian family picnic.
But last week, that was the struggle — to know the value of things — and with a room-sized rolloff Dumpster in the driveway, the deciding would not be put off.
Price … that’s easy. Get the Blue Book on a car, an appraisal on the real estate. Haul the TV to the pawnshop. Pile the shiny good stuff on a table by the street and see what the passing public will pay. Price … that’s easy.
But we don’t just keep the good stuff.
None of us.
There it is … at the back of the closets, the bottom of the drawers. Stashed in the attic, piled up on the garage rafters, stored under the bed, behind the furnace, in the storage shed in the backyard. Looking sort of tired and the worst for wear; a bit dusty, a bit musty — a quirky collection of what-nots and who-knows-its accumulated over years and maybe a lifetime. Some we’ve kept for a reason; some we never got around to throwing out, and some we simply forgot we ever owned.
And, truth be told, if we’re judged by the things we’re keeping, we’re all likely to come off more or less weird — for the most of us, more.
But there at the end, faced with a house that needs selling, a Dumpster that needs filling and houses of our own, already full or nearly so with the accumulation of our own lifetimes, what do we do with the monkey head? Dad’s dress blues? Mom’s wedding veil? The blue flowered dishes? The prayer cards from Grandpa Howard’s funeral? The Christmas bells that hung in the bedroom window?
In the end, the coconut shell hangs from a new nail in the porch wall, next to
the St. Francis sampler, over the souvenir teddy bears wearing funny hats and sunglasses.
But why would anybody want a coconut shell carved to be a monkey’s head? It seemed a good idea at the time.
I guess time will tell …
Contact Jerome Christenson at (507) 453-3500 or jchristenson@winonadailynews.com. For Jerome’s comments on this, that and something else check out “Up on the wrong side of the bed” at www.rivervalleyblogs.com/jerome or go to www.winonadailynews.com.
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