Depending on your point of view, I may either be the best or the worst person to call, though likely the worst, if you need help cleaning out a storage locker. That was the challenge I faced in recent weeks when I visited a friend’s locker on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. He’s, sadly, in hospice and hasn’t stopped by the place in years. Yet he was paying close to $500 a month for the privilege. Providing storage is apparently a lucrative enterprise in space-starved New York City.
The mission started with getting someone to break the locks since he’d lost the keys. Once inside I found a bunch of neatly arranged boxes, clothes, and a dog crate that belonged to my friend, his deceased wife and, I suppose, their expired pooch. I’d obviously gotten his blessing in advance — I’m also his executor — but all that he, a talented amateur photographer, seemed interested in preserving were his cameras and photographic slides.
That left it to me to dispose of the rest of the stuff or to decide whether to dispose of it at all. That’s why I say I may not be the best person for such an assignment. As my frustrated family can tell you, and our crowded basement attest, I can find a good excuse for keeping just about anything. I suspect the impulse came from my father. I don’t know whether it was a Depression era mentality or a character flaw but he was of the belief that just about anything might find a purpose in some murky future.
My own concerns were less practical than philosophical. That part probably comes from my mother. She never threw anything away either. “Everything passes so quickly and one can hardly remember after a while,” she wrote apropos of why she kept a diary for almost forty years; though her reasoning applied to everything else she never threw away. “This way,” she went on, “there remains something.”
The storage facility offered carts that, for a small fee, you could load with as much stuff as they’d hold. They’d do the honors of disposing of it. Some of the stuff was easy to let go. The dog crate and bags of old clothes, for instance. But it’s hard to undertake such an assignment and not pause to contemplate life’s evanescence.
My mother’s diaries are filled with the all-consuming details of everyday life: friendships, gossip, births, deaths, parties, personal finances, Presidential elections. Most of the people she mentions, herself included, are now gone. So are their dreams, their talents, prejudices, successes and failures. Did any of it matter in the end?
That’s the question I considered, though it frankly didn’t slow me down. It turns out that it’s possible to juggle philosophical questions while engaging in manual labor. In fact, I find that chores, such as raking the leaves, lend themselves to contemplation if only because chores are boring and the mind needs to be occupied.
I could have enlisted friends to help clean out the locker but I thought the process would be faster if I did so alone. It would have slowed things down if everybody had an opinion about what to save; though my experience is that I’m often alone in wanting to keep stuff. I’m flummoxed by the average person’s lack of sentimentality.
Working alone posed certain challenges. I was ignorant of how heavy slides can be, not single slides, but thousands of them in small plastic containers, until I attempted to load a cart filled with them into the trunk of my car. I eventually succeeded but not before dozens of the little boxes filled with images of my friend’s travels from Japan to the New Orleans Jazz Festival tumbled to the ground. I feared I might have permanently damaged important muscle groups. But dinner at a steak house that night accompanied by a couple of cocktails miraculously made the pain go away.
But that left the question about what to do with all the stuff I couldn’t bear to discard; taken together it helped tell the story of a life. Rather two lives. Am I wrong in believing that managing them rose to a scared obligation? If my friend saw photography as his ticket to immortality, I’m not sure what his wife would have considered hers. She did a lot of writing — most of the boxes contained her journals, of which I saved a bunch from across the years — but she earned her living reading tarot cards.
I pored through the contents of every box before deciding whether or not to abandon it — I’m hopeful the storage facility engages in sound recycling practices — and in one I found decks of intriguing homemade tarot cards. I don’t know what prompted Carole to make her own — perhaps they added a personal touch to her readings or more quickly connected her to supernatural forces — but it seemed obvious to me that they constituted art of a sort.
I saved all of them. Now remains the task of finding them a good home. I console myself that she would be pleased that I’ll try.
Ralph Gardner, Jr. is a journalist who divides his time between New York City and Columbia County. More of his work can be found be found on Substack.
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