One Thing or Another: All Boxed Up
It’s always One Thing or Another … a lighthearted look at aging, life, and the absurdities of it all.
By Mark McNease
Who doesn’t want to gaze at a baseball cap or coffee cup forty years after buying it and remember that special vacation?
How many boxes does it take to hold a life? It’s a question many of us ask when we find ourselves moving from one home to another. A home is in many ways who we are: that place where we’ve spent most of our time, where we’ve created identities linked to the rooms in which we sleep, eat and bathe, and where we contemplate our daily existence. Then a new phase beckons, a new adventure, and we see it all in front of us, boxed and packed to be taken by car, truck or hand cart to the next phase, the next identity with a few revisions.
I’ve made four big moves since settling into adulthood. My previous moves were easy and detached: the decision had been made and I was not going to be slowed by belongings. Whatever the opposite of a hoarder is, that’s me. I hate clutter, whether it’s paper or objects I’d thought I would cherish forever. Who doesn’t want to gaze at a baseball cap or coffee cup forty years after buying it and remember that special vacation? Then you realize that if you don’t get rid of this stuff, someone else will have to, and it’s not such a nice thing to do to people you love the most. Better to start early, so when I left, I left it all. I prefer to live the way I travel—as lightly as possible.
That wasn’t an option this time. When you share your life with someone, you become de facto owners of everything they possess. While you can quibble about what belongs to whom, you cannot unilaterally decide to throw anything out. What had once been a quick decision is now a negotiation. Which has all conspired to make this move long, slow and hazardous. We’ve promised ourselves it will end sometime in the next month, after taking a year to accomplish what I’ve done myself in two weeks. Then we’ll just have the storage space where we’ve parked a lot of these things, and the house that doesn’t have room for them. I’ll take whatever progress I can get.
Someday I’ll make that final move, as we all do. I’ll exchange humor columns, novels and whatever ragged dreams I have left for an urn on a shelf, with some of me reserved for spreading in a garden. All the boxes from all the moves will be empty, and I’ll travel as lightly as I’d always wanted to—as lightly as air moving from one room to another. That wind you felt blow against you will be me, and everything will be perfect. Until then, it’s time to unpack. There’s work to do.
Mark McNease is the author of eight novels, two short story collections and miscellaneous fiction. He’s the co-editor of the anthology Outer Voices Inner Lives (Lambda Literary Award finalist), the publisher and editor of LGBTSr.org, as well as the co-creator of the Emmy and Telly winning children’s program Into the Outdoors.