Silk Roads: China, The Middle East, and The New World

The price for the house, rounded up to the nearest dollar, came to one hundred-thirty three dollars per square foot. The laundry-room with the kitchen was in the hallway to my bedroom. Everything about the house except the bathroom was small. There were six light fixtures, six windows and three exterior doors. In order to permit a bed and a closet in the bedroom the third exterior door was walled over. Shortly after I moved in stuff followed. All the things buried in the basement of my parent’s house came to my house and the main room became a triage of junk. My mother’s twin helped me sort through the things that were mine from when I was twelve and the things my parents were sure that I would want. We spread everything into piles through the front door and down the driveway. I regretfully took stuff to the Goodwill. Soon packages arrived from Michigan. Large boxes covered in stamps from my U.S. post-service aunt in Flint. Crafts made by my namesake eighty years earlier, uncle Paul’s drinking paraphernalia, decorative dishes, ancient books and a three hundred year old clock – which I believe is haunted. When my grandmother moved to an apartment the size of my bathroom I gained more stuff. We have sorted through my grandparents things and spread them out. My grandfather was an ardent pack rat and every little thing carried with it a story or a burden. No one is willing to throw anything away, but no one wants it either – the burden or the story. I remember he made a big deal out of the fishing pole, but I cannot remember what the big deal was. When it landed on a pile that came to my house I was worried that now I was faced with the burden of preserving the big-deal fishing pole, like the seventeenth century chair that can’t be sat in or the haunted seventeenth century clock. Thank the graces I have not yet inherit the seventeenth century hatchet and unfinished shoes (another story). The big deal about the fishing pole, I think, was that my grandfather got it for his twelfth birthday in the early thirties. He grew up on N.E. 97th Avenue just a sled hill off Lake City Way in Seattle, before it was in the city limits. Today you might cross some small bridges on Lake City Way or Roosevelt Way without a thought about the creek underneath. Grandpa knew that creek like Samuel Clemens knew the Mississippi. I remember the story as he got the fishing pole in the morning and vanished with it. He cut school to go fishing frequently, but this time he spent the whole day at the creek and even fell asleep. I think there was a nap once where a mouse ran up his pant leg, but I doubt that was all on the same day. My Great Grandma Dee was a bitter secretly German woman who never let a fault slide. She never forgave Grandpa for going fishing, falling asleep and missing his birthday party. That is the story that I believe goes with the pole on the pile on top of the pile of stuff in my house. A collection begins once you acquire three things. One porcelain frog is a knick-knack, two frogs is a pair, and three tells your friend that you collect them and that they should get you frogs for your birthday. Into the house came eight finials, four coconuts, countless Coca-Cola and Mickey Mouse collectibles, two button collections (from both sides of the family), several goose and duck decoys, three birdhouses, antlers, kokeishi dolls, two dining room tables, several dining chairs that do not match each other or the tables, three TVs, Christmas ornaments and garlands ( I do not celebrate Christmas), photo equipment, golf clubs, golf shoes, dad’s shoes for mowing the lawn, a water feature in a box, teacups and saucers, antique dolls, antique American flags, second-generation hand-me-down souvenirs from Japan, Saigon, Korea, and Hawaii mixed in with my own souvenirs from Europe. My parents sold their house and before they moved to Florida, they tried to load everything into a U-haul truck. They needed to make several trips using my truck. They filled the bottom floor of my newly expanded house and the driveway with their things. Their intent was to sort out everything and take what they really wanted with them, and leave me the rest. Before they began this task, they ran to Phyl’s, bought twin beds, and made themselves a little bedroom in my new house – while I was at work. They did not go to the dump, or the Goodwill, because the stuff was too good. The chairs that my aunt asked that I store for my cousins’ were stacked onto the boxes of china that my mom thought my cousins might like, packed in the closet to the ceiling in the back room of my house. Things spilled out into the hall. My parents, bless their hearts, buy hooks every time they visit because they cannot find anywhere to hang anything up, but no one hangs up the hooks. I am suffocating in a house full of good intentions. Some of the stuff is words. Words are some of the stuff. It will take years to empty the room. My first idea is to make it the guest room where my parents could stay with a path cut through the stuff to their beds. The room is so small that the two beds do not fit except stacked against the wall. Recently my mother came for a visit. There were rules she had to follow. She had to sort through the stuff and take her things, she must not complain if something was missing, and she absolutely did not have permission to rearrange anything anywhere else in the house. She is certain that she knows better than I do. Which stories should come out and which stories should remain hidden. But, she does not stop there; she also knows exactly where all the stories should hang, and how I should hang them. She will not stop at telling me what color of wall to hang them on, and in some cases, which season to hang them. I called my cousin and asked him if he wanted the Xmas ornaments. He was interested in looking at them. My mom’s response was, “if he wants one he has to take them all.” That was the string of words that brought me the seven finials, the two boxes of buttons, and the thousand photos of Grandpa and every fish he got since he got his first camera. I calmly pointed the words out to my mother, but she stared blankly through me. The phrase was such a part of her that she could not hear what she said. She tried to say she was joking. “Mom, you said that to me when you brought all my stuff from your basement with the things that were too good to go to the dump or the goodwill, and you said it again when you sold your house in Tacoma.” She started getting angry. I think she thought I was picking a fight. I asked her, “Mom, you need to think about where you got those words, where did you get them?” She insisted that it was just a joke. I told her, “No mom, it isn’t a joke; they are in you, a part of you. You are trying to give them to me and I am not taking any more stuff. These are the things you have to keep.” Instead, she walks through my house thoughtfully and asks, “Do you still have some of that holy water from Europe?” I walked all over Western Europe with my friend Garth eighteen years ago. The things I collected there; sand from the Normandy beaches, Lourdes water in plastic Virgin Maries, and a glow in the dark crucifix. I earned these pieces of stuff like I earned the cramps in my legs and the blisters on my feet. I suffered my friends company so that my mother could give my holy water to her friends instead of the brass candlesticks, the dented silver tea set, or my brother’s unfinished baby book with his own violent scribbles that are still in the back room closet. Slowly, I will continue to unload the room and purge my house of the stuff. I will build the character of my house, starting with the Lourdes water and the portrait of Jesus on the cross with the winking eyes in the medicine cabinet. The coconut and the button collection, the haunted heirlooms and many of the stories will remain, but one of the beds will go to a baby cousin or to the Goodwill. Boxes of things will spread out among the cousins, satellites of stuff that they can suffer from or throw away. There is no such thing as a pack rat gene; I did not inherit that, but I will accept the thousands of photographs of my granddad and every fish he caught since he got a camera, and the camera, and the pole, and maybe the haunted clock.