The Things We Keep

  Behind the checkout counter of my used bookstore is a large bulletin board overflowing with things I've found in books. Most people don't notice it  because the store is also overflowing. There are books on the floor, books stacked precariously on top of every empty space, and books two rows deep on most shelves. 

  Although I love all the books, it's the things that I find inside them, added by the owners and not the authors, that really intrigue me: the ten-your old payroll check that made it inside of a book instead of the bank, the picture of the mom hugging her two young sons, which she'll someday remember taking, but not be able to find, the note from Richard Nixon on White House card stock, a coupon for 10 free condoms, a wedding snapshot.  Stories within stories.

  I think of them as a type of inscription--giving me a hint of the person who owned the book, but not coming close to telling the whole story.

  I like the actual inscriptions even better, but I can't make a bulletin board with them because I can't bring myself to tear out the page or to separate the inscription from the book that inspired it.  Instead, I keep these books intact and price them a little higher than I should.

  A few I don't price at all, but keep for myself on my desk until the day comes that I forget why they're there, and put them on the shelf by mistake.  When that happens, I always hope that someone else will read the inscription and give some more life to it.

  There is one book that I've never mixed with the others.  It's an ordinary book--a ninth printing of an anthology of short essays about living in the United States.  It has no monetary value and no markings other than an inscription on the first blank page that says simply, “For Bob K., When I die. Betsy.”  Whenever I look at the inscription, I am reminded of Tim O'Brien's book, "The Things They Carried."

  Except that I always think, "The things we keep."  

  When my parents died several years ago, it was left to my sister and me to empty their house of all its contents.  There were no directions--no inscriptions in books-- just a modest six room house full of  the things that Mom and Dad had kept for over 50 years. To Ellen and me, that house with all its contents was "home," even after all this time. 

  We had spent our entire childhoods there, and had returned for birthdays, weekends, and nearly every Christmas for over thirty years.  Mom's clothes had expanded into our closets, but our rooms still bore our signatures. The focal point of Ellen's room remained a large painting of a megaphone and a Marshall Lion, our high school mascot.   The bottom drawer of my closet remained filled with my high school papers, the upper shelf with college and law school textbooks.  We both knew in which drawer Mom kept her recipes, where Dad kept his change, and how each scratch got on the dining room table. 

  But this would be the first time we knew the house without Mom and Dad.

  As we turned into the driveway, we pulled behind the maroon Impala with expired plates that had only been moved once in the the four years that Mom and Dad had been in the nursing home.  That one occasion was when we brought Dad back to the house not long after he had suffered his stroke.  He had been through months of rehab but had only gained limited use of his right side and almost no speech.  Evidencing the mysteries and perplexities of the brain, he was able to sing whole songs, but spoke only the words "Yes, ma'am" and "No, ma'am," both with almost complete randomness.  Whatever damage the stroke had caused, it had left him in an odd state of benign contentment, where he was never fully engaged with the world around him, but always able to find ESPN on his TV.

  Because he could shuffle along slowly but couldn't do steps, we moved the Impala so we could drive him right up to the back door that had only one low step. Dad seemed content to be going on an outing, but showed no interest in, or recognition of, where we were going until we walked across the back porch and through the door into the kitchen.  Suddenly I heard a soft guttural, "Oh, my," and, as I looked at Dad, I saw tears running down his cheeks. I immediately turned him around and headed back to the car.  By the time we got outside he was fine.  It was as if a switch had been turned on at the site of the kitchen table where he had eaten a thousand breakfasts, and turned off as soon as he couldn't see it. 

  The day Ellen and I returned to pack up the house, the Impala was again parked near the front on a slab of concrete where Dad had helped me carve my initials and make a handprint in 1958.  As I stepped out of the car, I saw the indentation of that tiny hand and heard the same guttural "Oh, my," escape my lips.

  We walked across the yard and onto the sidewalk where Mom used to bring out pitchers of Kool-Aid for our lemonade stands. The crumbling concrete of the front steps that served as the tiers for every birthday party photo led us to the porch where all day monopoly games were regularly played with neighboring kids in the heat of summer vacations.

  After I fumbled with Dad's keys and opened the front door, Ellen and I were met with the chill of a house unlived in.   We had come armed with trash bags and cleaning supplies, but set them down as we entered.  We both turned to the front room as if we announcing our safe return from a late night date and saw Dad and Mom's recliners sitting empty across from the plaid couch and the consoleTV.  The end tables that we had bought and hauled home from a Tennessee vacation forty years ago still held the candy dish that was brought out once grandkids started coming.   

  We wandered from room to room coming face to face with different and overlapping memories.  Neither of us knew how or where to start. There was both too much and too little.  Too much to keep.  Too little to show for the actual lives of the people who lived here. Too much to remember.  Too little that we had forgotten.

  We ended up in the back bedroom which still held the bedroom set that was the first furniture bought by Mom and Dad after they married. Unlike sets of today, it had a vanity where we both had spent hours trying on Mom's make-up and the clip on earrings that still sat in the recessed compartments of an old candy box.  It was here that Ellen and I crept when we woke up with bad dreams and  where Dad slept during the day every third week, after working the midnight shift at the local chemical factory. It was during those weeks that the Monopoly games were played since we had to be quiet and stay away from the open windows of the back bedroom.

  It was also the room that held the chest with the letters that we had never been allowed to read as children.  They were letters that Dad had written to Mom during the war before they had even met.   We knew right where the chest was kept and went to the back of  the long walk-in closet and brought it out.  As we opened the lid, we found that the contents had grown to include various records and reports from our earlier years. I found a college report card with a “C” in English that I didn't remember getting. Ellen found a report card with all “A's” and gloated.

  We are good friends now, but growing up we led mainly parallel lives.  I was the pesky younger sister and she was the obnoxious older one.  In a small rural community in the '50's, where we had a neighborhood full of kids and an almost unfettered freedom to roam the whole town, we simply didn't need each other.  Now we do.

  When we got down to the letters, we spread them out on the olive green bedspread that matched the olive green shag carpet and started reading. There was nothing in any of them that a nine year old could not have read. They were sweet innocent letters with references to bowling scores and army rations, and only subtle hints of a growing affection between two people during a time that we didn't fully understand.  Other than sending each other "kisses to the stars,"  there was little to suggest that this was the start of a life long love affair. Yet Mom had kept all the letters without knowing the ending.

  By the time Ellen and I had finished reading the letters, it was getting dark and we had accomplished nothing. We gathered up the chest, photo albums, and a popcorn tin filled with photographs, and called it a day.  We both promised to come back the next weeked, but ended up putting it off as too soon.   

  Eventually we filled up numerous trash bags, gave away the clothes to a soup kitchen and the car and furniture to a young couple that could use them.  We let the six grandchildren who served as the pallbearers for their grandparents choose the things they wanted, and then we let them share the earnings from an "estate sale" of what was left.  It turned out to be an inheritance for each of them of seventy- eight dollars in small bills that was probably spent on CD's and take out pizza.

  Like Betsy and her book, my tendency is to keep things, and I had predicted that most of the contents of Mom and Dad's  house would end up being transferred to mine.   But leaving the house that first day, I knew that it wasn't the things that remained inside that I wanted to keep.

  I did take a few things-- the candy dish, a ledger with page after page of Dad's handwriting, and an address book with pages of Mom's.  But mainly what I kept  were things I didn't have to carry.  I had found that I didn't need very much.  I already had the stories.