Objects of My Affection

I said goodbye to Old Blue yesterday. We’d been together since 1998. I know what you must be thinking: seven-year itch. But Blue and I fell out of touch long ago. I think it was around my sophomore year of college; maybe sooner. Any good doctor could’ve predicted it -- quick flame, quick burn. Sleeping together every night; living in the same room each day....As the Cole Porter song goes, our affair was “too hot not to cool down.”

Or, in the words of wise men: “A geek and her retainer are soon parted.”

Blue is the latest casualty in my “stuff massacre.” Also bound for the Murfreesboro city dump: four or five stamps from an ill-fated childhood collection; Mickey Mouse underwear circa ?; photos of my sixth-grade pen pal and of my college graduation (great occasion, bad skin); and a plastic thumb from a misplaced magic kit. I’m hoping that one of our local sanitation workers will rescue the thumb -- it must have some practical use.

If it isn’t obvious: I hate throwing things away. Candy, socks, birthday cards, mascara tubes....you might call me a “pack rat” or perhaps just “ew, gross,” but I prefer to think of myself as “attached.” I love my stuff. It has history. Blue stayed with me through a 1,000-mile move and Calculus AB. When’s the last time you had a relationship that solid?

But here’s the problem with stuff -- it takes up space. Not just emotional space. After almost 25 years of stuff-attachment, I’m running out of room. Sign #1 that an affair is spiraling toward disaster: “I’m beginning to feel stifled.”

This week I finally admitted that my stuff and I need to see other people. The first “other person” on my list is the trash collector.

Not coincidentally, today I resurrected an embarrassing addiction. Call it a coping mechanism. In order to toss Old Blue, I absolutely must scrapbook.

Scrapbooking. I can’t look at the word without imagining myself in bifocals. Scrapbooking, the bastion of overpermed septaugenarians. People who scrapbook shop at those cutesy alliterative, rhyming places. Kountry Krafts. Hobby Lobby. I’m a Hobby Lobbyist. S.O.S. Send the special spinster squadron! Snap, snap!

As it turns out, this madness runs in the family. While digging through a bin of stuff, I found a scrapbook belonging to my biological father. Awkward phrase, “biological father.” You can probably tell he isn’t in the next room. There’s no delicate way of saying it: he died of cancer at age 30, two months before I was born. I think if blogs had been around in the 1970s, when he was a 20-something, he would’ve signed up. He kept journals, too. Retainers....I’m not sure.

My latest scrapbook contains, well, stuff. Ticket stubs from a June 2004 Harry Connick Jr. concert. SpongeBob and Barbie valentines from my miscreant fourth graders. A Helena Community Theater playbill. Postcards of Honesdale that I forgot to send.

I’m not fooling myself -- I know that my leather-bound Ode to Stuff has very little, if any, long-term significance. Subtract the emotion, sentimentality, nostalgia....whatever....it’s just stuff. It gets yellowed and crusty; the words fade, before or after the meaning. It’s perishable. I guess everything is -- perishable, I mean -- whether or not we care to admit it.

So I’m not going to pull a reverse-Siddhartha and glorify the power of petroleum- and carbon-based things. Instead, I’ll wrap this slightly cluttered post with an observation:

Among my father’s scrapbook keepsakes (newspaper clippings, prom photos, band seating charts) is a playbill: “Night of January 16th” by the Central High School Players.

“Night of January 16th” is a courtroom drama written by Ayn Rand. In the program, my father is listed as playing District Attorney Flint, prosecutor of Rand’s heroine Karen Andre.

Flint is a pretty juicy role. I know this because I performed as the “grieving” widow Nancy Lee Faulkner in my high school’s production of “Night of January 16th.” Hillary was Karen Andre. Note to KA: you may have been exonerated, but watch out. I know where you live.

It’s safe to guarantee that I’m the only person who retains this Central High playbill. Even Central High itself isn’t around anymore. To whatever intangible power who united me with this flimsy blue sheet: thanks for the stuff.