We hosted Thanksgiving this year, and by that, I mean extended family stayed in our guest room and I made a dinner reservation. My kids protested the lack of home-made cooking though, so I agreed to bake the pies and read up on our four selections–apple, cherry, pumpkin, and pecan. (I wanted a chocolate pie but failed to rally enough support.)
A few weeks before I accepted this serious responsibility, my mom dropped off a box filled with paper–a ream of professional stationary my dad used when he practiced medicine. He’d probably been about my age when he ordered it. I wanted to protest. What was I going to do with all this paper, stamped with my dad’s name, our old address? Keep it and kick that can down the road until I could offload it on my own kids? Make them do the dirty work of figuring it out? I set the box on a shelf in our dining room, hoping inspiration for the perfect use would strike later.
My husband and I sometimes feel like we’re running a storage center for the dead. When my dad passed, my mom downsized and did much of the arduous work sifting through all their life accumulations. We accepted many items and for most of them we are quite grateful. But we did say no to many things as well.
I have a harder time managing offers from my in-laws who seem to have an infinite storage space full of dead relatives’ possessions. We just received twelve-that’s correct, twelve–boxes of books we don’t have space for. My daughter received her great grandfather’s extensive kaleidoscope collection for her ninth birthday. (And a cookie extruder in a box that looks like it survived about forty years of moving but that’s a whole other post.) We have coin collections and hand-carved mallards, beautiful and bountiful watercolor paintings and rugs crafted by various relatives. It’s a lot of stuff.
Anyway, I say all this so you can feel more compassion toward me about my lack of enthusiasm for this ream of my dead father’s personalized stationery that’d come into my possession. And you’ll forgive me for what I’m about to tell you: when I went hunting for paper to list the items I needed for our pies–sour cherries, pumpkin puree, seven tart apples, a bag of pecans–I lingered over the box of my dad’s paper, hesitating only slightly before I grabbed a piece and scribbled down my ingredients.
And you know what? It felt good. The paper wasn’t a stagnant piece of the past. It was actively participating in the present. Afterall, my dad was no longer a living radiologist in his forties, and this paper could not (should NOT) be used in a professional capacity.
My dad was always the Thanksgiving cook. He directed things, planned meticulously. I will never forget that vegetables should be roasted in a monolayer because he adopted this almost like a mantra each year: monolayer, monolayer, monolayer. I can clearly see this scene: the two of us in my parents’ kitchen, slicing brussel sprouts, peeling pearled onions, frying bacon, and picking apart the dill. So, in a way, his name there in the kitchen, covered in flour, made a lot of sense.
Maggie Smith writes this gorgeous passage in her memoir, We Could Make This Place Beautiful:
“How I picture it: we are nesting dolls, carrying all of our earlier selves inside us. I feel so full of the life I had before–the life I have already lived–how is there room for anything new?
We feel and feel, and live and live, but somehow we’re never full. This life is elastic, impossibly elastic. There is always room for more experience. Our lives expand to accommodate anything.”
And she’s right: there is always room for more living.
My girls and I prepared the pie doughs together (one kid at a time because sibling rivalry, man!) and slid them into the fridge. We stocked up on favorite drinks and breakfast foods and supplies for charcuterie boards that inspire dreams. All these vittles vibrated in anticipation of their future forms. So much potential.
When I visited with my childhood friends last month, I marveled both at who we’ve each become and also how much we’re the same as we’d been. We spent some time talking about the present–dating, marriage, kids, jobs. But we directed a lot of energy to a glorious excavation of the past. Always the life of the party, I asked my friends where they saw themselves in five years. (I don’t know, maybe I blacked out and thought I was conducting a corporate interview.) No one really had an answer. Myself included.
I confess I’m sometimes afflicted with a case of looking backward. As in, back then, so much potential. Back then, so much energy. Back then, so many living family members. Reflecting on turning forty, author Stephanie Danler recently wrote about this tendency: “I just can’t imagine spending the rest of my days looking backward at some imaginary pinnacle of physical beauty.” Amen.
I started letting my kids color on my dad’s stationary. Sometimes we talk about my dad, sometimes we don’t. I think he’d appreciate the way we’re using up his paper. I keep reminding myself we are unbounded, we are “yes, and,” we have so much living left to do.
We go between‘I need to let this go’ and ‘I want to know this will be used when I’m gone’ with parents. They are such difficult conversations!
Beautiful reflections Cate! I’m also surrounded by family ‘stuff’, some I love and some I struggle to make use of. I love this repurposing!