An End to Wanting Things

“A true Southern Belle, she would not consider divorce. And so, retreating into her pain, she began to surround herself, more and more, with ‘things.’ Like a bird nesting amongst monstrous thorns, living with a monstrous man, she feathered her cell with clothes and shoes she would never wear; diamonds, furs, ‘collectibles’—objets, objets, objets trouvés.” Elizabeth Boleman-Herring

Ruminant With A View

by Elizabeth Boleman-Herring

TEANECK New Jersey—(Weekly Hubris)—5/21/12—My parents were married 36 happy years and, but for all the oils (painted by friends in Greece) and books (he, psychiatry; she, cooking), their possessions were few.

No grand furnishings. Well-kept but uncluttered clothes closets. A single, always-old car. And yes, near the end, a second home (made possible due to a generous gift of land made by my mother’s oldest sister): a simple, Japanese tea-house built by my father, by hand, assisted by my mother—all glass and empty space, in the-middle-of-the-South-Carolina-nowhere.

My parents were a matched pair of minimalists when it came to “things.” My father, a lay analyst, used to say: “Little minds focus on objects; larger minds, on people; the largest, on abstractions.” In this Century of The Ideologue, I might challenge the “order of magnitude in his maxim,” but focusing on things, when you have quite enough things? Surely, that is a waste?

When my father died, my mother married—to put it bluntly and honestly—a sociopath. She’d suddenly come into money, and he wanted it.

On the heels of her first idyllic marriage, she dived into the toxic well of her second. Her and my father’s homes had always been full of graduate students, alive with dinner guests, crowded with my own school friends.

For the entire second half of her life, however, she lived in a kind of purdah, alone. From 1972 until 1992, there were no dinner parties, no friends at the kitchen table, no audible, tangible joy surrounding this woman who had thrived on all those “abstract” riches.

Her “friends” became the sales-people at Nieman Marcus and Saks.

A true Southern Belle, she would not consider divorce. And so, retreating into her pain, she began to surround herself, more and more, with “things.” Like a bird nesting amongst monstrous thorns, living with a monstrous man, she feathered her cell with clothes and shoes she would never wear; diamonds, furs, “collectibles”—objets, objets, objets trouvés.

A daughter of the Great Depression, who’d never owned a new dress till, at 19, she eloped with my father, my mother became a hoarder.

She was a tidy hoarder, however. No immense Reality TV plastic bins for Mother. When she ran out of closet space, she simply built more closets.

And, when she died, and I finally went through it all, I found I had enough clothes-still-bearing-their-tags to clothe an entire family. Literally. The woman who cleaned for us had an extended tribe of some 25 souls: I filled the trunks of several SUVs with my mother’s beautiful plunder, and watched that sad collection roll right on out my driveway.

Recently, I, too, have observed myself “padding my cell.”

Living in a state and sub-culture I truly abhor (suburban New Jersey), unemployable due to age and America’s Second Great Depression, and most certainly embarked upon my life’s final trimester, I have noted with horror the accumulation about me of more and more objects.

About a year ago, determined to reverse this trend, I began ruthlessly purging. Anything I was not wearing went to someone who might wear it.

Jewelry and a coin collection inherited from my mother were liquidated to fund travel and creative projects. (With no parents, no siblings, no children, what was the point of keeping all this . . . stuff . . . in a safe?)

Treasured crèches went to a cousin, and a friend’s children. My mother’s cookbook collection went to a cook; my father’s psychiatric library went to . . . my psychiatrist.

And today, to assuage in some small way a friend’s pain—a year ago this week, her house burned to the ground—I went through my library, and shared with her a portion of what I treasure most: my books. I will never read these books again, so why have them sitting about so smug and unopened? Many are first editions; many are quirky (well, she and I both are quirky); and there will, Jeannie, be more to come, I am sure.

My so-called “Greek Library” stays. I use it for reference. But, when I go, it goes, too. To Princeton.

I suppose, when my mother died, I first made the connection between hoarding, collecting, acquiring so, so, so much more than one needs, and acute psychic pain. But it is a lesson one must keep firmly in the forefront of one’s mind.

In my culture, we overeat to mute our pain and sense of alienation, and we collect, we hoard, also to mute our suffering.

But it’s no solution at all. The thorns in the nest remain, and covering them over with possessions does nothing to eradicate them. The thorns poke right through all that satin and lace, and pairs and pairs and pairs of shoes.

Sometimes, emptying out the nest and flying are the only solution.