By John McDonnell
I grew up in a family of eight, and we lived in a three bedroom house. These were not bedrooms as we think of them today, however. Three of my brothers shared a bedroom that was the size of a walk-in closet in a modern house. My sister actually did live in a closet -- her bedroom had been used as one by the previous owners.
Downstairs, there was a living room, dining room, a half-bathroom the size of a telephone booth, and a modest kitchen. After a few years we converted the garage into a TV room, but by today’s standards it was a tiny house for eight people.
And yet, it never seemed cluttered.
My mother liked things neat, and she trained the children to pick up after themselves. We had no multi-purpose furniture: e.g., the kitchen table had nothing on it except food. The flat surfaces in the house were always visible and uncluttered. There were no areas that looked like the back room in a junk shop.
Then why do I live in such a cluttered house?
My house has three times the space of the one I grew up in, and yet all that space is taken. There are stacks of mail on the dining room table. Sports equipment, lawn furniture, and power tools litter my garage. I haven’t seen the surface of my desk in years. And you don’t want to go down in my basement. That’s the place where old computers, toys, and furniture go to die.
How did this happen?
I like to tell myself that it’s because I’m a creative person and we creative types are not orderly or fussy about small details like having space on the kitchen table.
That could be true, but it’s also probably because my family has more of the detritus of modern life, more stuff than I had as a child.
How did I get all this stuff? I was raised in a family where my father grew up poor in the Depression, and he always acted as if he thought he was going to wake up one day and it would be 1933 again. He thought the world was crawling with people out to take his money, and by God he wasn’t going to let them have it. If my Dad spent money on something there had to be a dire need for it, and you were expected to use it till it wore out.
These days, when I’m looking for a book or a user’s manual or a gadget and I’m searching through all the clutter, I often find things that mystify me. “When did we buy this?” I ask. Or, “I didn’t know we had one of these,” or, “What is this thing?” Even, at times: “Did we actually spend money on this?”
I try not to be a sucker for every sales pitch that comes along, but my resistance breaks down more than I realize. You can’t get me to buy a pair of pants I don’t need, but for computers, gadgets, gardening tools or books I’m an easy touch. The rest of my family has different buying weaknesses, but what it all adds up to is that we play a vital part in the economic well-being of several Chinese villages.
Combine that mentality with a reluctance to throw things out -- in my family, if we own something, it’s understood that we keep it till the sun burns itself into a cold, dark cinder and the universe implodes -- and you can see why there is so much clutter.
I know you’re saying there’s always eBay or a yard sale to get rid of the stuff, but that involves making multiple trips to the dark corners of the basement, organizing, collating, and actually looking at things like those Sesame Street sing-along videos we kept for 20 years since our kids outgrew them, and once that happens we get teary-eyed and decide we can’t part with them, so they go back in the box for another 20 years.
Maybe that’s what clutter is, the accumulation of sentiment. It’s the souvenirs we pick up along the way, and no matter how trivial they seem, they all have meaning. Even that electric bill I found in the back of my desk drawer, the one from the first apartment my wife and I lived in, is hard to throw away because it has meaning to me (“Honey, do you believe how little they charged per kilowatt hour back then?”). I can’t part with the stuff I’ve been dragging along, no matter how much it’s slowing me down.
Someday all this clutter will be thrown away, or it’s going to end up in the closets and desk drawers of my children, just like clutter has been passed down to me from my dead relatives. It goes on forever, does clutter.
Maybe that will be my ultimate legacy, my gift to future generations. My great-grandchildren will have things like restaurant receipts and old magazines and the model airplane I built in 4th grade to remember me by.
That will probably give them a more accurate picture of my life than anything else, because what is life all about anyway, if not clutter?
THE END
Showing posts with label memory. Show all posts
Showing posts with label memory. Show all posts
Tuesday, October 26, 2010
Tuesday, October 19, 2010
The Lost Art Of Conversation
By John McDonnell
My wife has cousins in Ireland, and they came to visit last week. We did some sightseeing, went out to a few restaurants, took them shopping.
Mostly, though, we just talked.
The Irish have a gift for talking. Words flow out of them with the ease of a river flowing downhill, and if you stop and ask directions of a stranger in Dublin, like we did last April when we visited, you’ll probably get a story along with the directions. Indeed, the cab driver who took us to the airport was as glib and expansive as a standup comedian.
Last week we spent a lot of time with the Irish relatives just sitting around the kitchen table, drinking tea and talking.
It reminded me of how little we do that in America these days. I don’t remember the last time my family sat around the kitchen table with anyone and just chatted. We’re always too busy to sit down, there are too many deadlines to meet, schedules to keep. My children don’t know what it’s like to talk without purpose, to simply talk for the sake of talking.
It wasn’t always this way. When I was a child in the 1950s and 60s my grandparents, aunts and uncles would regularly stop by our house and visit for awhile.
They would sit in the kitchen or the living room and talk. Conversation was something that was valued. The children sometimes took part, sometimes not. Even if we were too busy to sit and talk, we could still hear the conversation from wherever we were in the house. I remember many times being sent upstairs to do my homework, but instead sitting on the floor in the hallway listening to my aunt tell stories about her pals in the Notre Dame Subway Alumni, or my uncle and father talking about playing stickball in the street in South Philadelphia when they were boys during the 1930s.
There were arguments, too -- during the Vietnam War years there were raging arguments about whether we should be involved in that war, and during the Watergate years there were many heated discussions about Nixon’s crooked machinations. When John F. Kennedy died there was anger and sadness, but the conversation was a way for them to vent their feelings at a time of tragedy.
I learned a lot listening to those conversations. I learned about history, I learned about morality, I heard a few secrets that I wasn’t supposed to, I learned how to be part of a family, a community, how to be a human being.
I worry that my children are not learning those things.
Where is the art of conversation today? Is it flourishing through text-messaging, Facebook postings, e-mail, instant messaging? Technology lovers will tell you these social networking tools are a good thing, that they’re helping people to make connections, to stay in touch with folks who live far away, to reestablish ties with friends from long ago.
In a way that’s true; through Facebook and e-mail I’m reconnected with high school friends I lost touch with 25 years ago. It’s nice to chat with them online, but these short, truncated messages, a few sentences on a screen, are not the same as sitting down across from someone and talking with them for an hour or two. Social networking is good for short bursts of information, quick hits, an update or two. An in-person visit with someone is different. When you have time to relax and just chew the fat you never know where the conversation will lead. It can twist and turn, loop back on itself, strike off in new directions. You have time to tell a story that everyone’s heard before, without the fear of someone impatiently looking at his or her watch.
The Irish know this. They pay no attention to the world and its busy rush when they have a chance to talk. A story or an anecdote is worth taking time out of your day for. A visit and a chat are important things. Talking, just talking with no particular point or sales pitch or punch line to deliver, is a good thing in itself.
I miss those days in America.
My wife has cousins in Ireland, and they came to visit last week. We did some sightseeing, went out to a few restaurants, took them shopping.
Mostly, though, we just talked.
The Irish have a gift for talking. Words flow out of them with the ease of a river flowing downhill, and if you stop and ask directions of a stranger in Dublin, like we did last April when we visited, you’ll probably get a story along with the directions. Indeed, the cab driver who took us to the airport was as glib and expansive as a standup comedian.
Last week we spent a lot of time with the Irish relatives just sitting around the kitchen table, drinking tea and talking.
It reminded me of how little we do that in America these days. I don’t remember the last time my family sat around the kitchen table with anyone and just chatted. We’re always too busy to sit down, there are too many deadlines to meet, schedules to keep. My children don’t know what it’s like to talk without purpose, to simply talk for the sake of talking.
It wasn’t always this way. When I was a child in the 1950s and 60s my grandparents, aunts and uncles would regularly stop by our house and visit for awhile.
They would sit in the kitchen or the living room and talk. Conversation was something that was valued. The children sometimes took part, sometimes not. Even if we were too busy to sit and talk, we could still hear the conversation from wherever we were in the house. I remember many times being sent upstairs to do my homework, but instead sitting on the floor in the hallway listening to my aunt tell stories about her pals in the Notre Dame Subway Alumni, or my uncle and father talking about playing stickball in the street in South Philadelphia when they were boys during the 1930s.
There were arguments, too -- during the Vietnam War years there were raging arguments about whether we should be involved in that war, and during the Watergate years there were many heated discussions about Nixon’s crooked machinations. When John F. Kennedy died there was anger and sadness, but the conversation was a way for them to vent their feelings at a time of tragedy.
I learned a lot listening to those conversations. I learned about history, I learned about morality, I heard a few secrets that I wasn’t supposed to, I learned how to be part of a family, a community, how to be a human being.
I worry that my children are not learning those things.
Where is the art of conversation today? Is it flourishing through text-messaging, Facebook postings, e-mail, instant messaging? Technology lovers will tell you these social networking tools are a good thing, that they’re helping people to make connections, to stay in touch with folks who live far away, to reestablish ties with friends from long ago.
In a way that’s true; through Facebook and e-mail I’m reconnected with high school friends I lost touch with 25 years ago. It’s nice to chat with them online, but these short, truncated messages, a few sentences on a screen, are not the same as sitting down across from someone and talking with them for an hour or two. Social networking is good for short bursts of information, quick hits, an update or two. An in-person visit with someone is different. When you have time to relax and just chew the fat you never know where the conversation will lead. It can twist and turn, loop back on itself, strike off in new directions. You have time to tell a story that everyone’s heard before, without the fear of someone impatiently looking at his or her watch.
The Irish know this. They pay no attention to the world and its busy rush when they have a chance to talk. A story or an anecdote is worth taking time out of your day for. A visit and a chat are important things. Talking, just talking with no particular point or sales pitch or punch line to deliver, is a good thing in itself.
I miss those days in America.
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