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To be sold eventually to strangers, 4
The house was a time capsule, much of it frozen in place the day my mom died in 2005. The level of housekeeping fell off, the amount of space that was lived in decreased. A few things, though, kept progressing onward. Like wall calendars. My dad has a strong fondness for calendars (they are his go-to Christmas gift for the sons-in-law and grandsons – trains, airplanes, beer, or other special-interest topics chosen specifically for the recipient) and he always treated himself to one or two while he was placing the order. His own choices ran to steam locomotives and scenery from England. For as long as I can remember, a calendar has hung on the left side of the back door, swinging from a nail he pounded into the maple paneling decades ago.
I’m not sure I would have ever decided to hang a calender in the bathroom, but he did: a calendar from the Texas Tech alumni association is there on the wall. (Don’t get the wrong impression: he’s a proud TTU graduate.)
These two calendars – the train one by the back door and the college one above the toilet – are frozen in a different time capsule: August 2012. One morning in the third week of that month, he failed to show up at my husband’s office, as had been his daily habit for the nineteen years since his retirement. My son, who works at the same office, went to look for him, and found him on the floor, under the train calendar. He’d been there all night.
An ambulance came, against his wishes, and took him to the hospital. He’s not been home since. In the intervening months, he’s been in the hospital two times, had a pacemaker implanted, been in one facility we came to refer to as a “skilled” nursing facility, and been in another one that really did have skilled and caring staff; currently lives in an assisted living center. There were times early on when we were all pretty sure he wasn’t going to make it, and times when we thought he’d be able to live at at home again. We were wrong on both.
Cleaning out his house wasn’t as emotional as I had thought it would be. I think I somehow compartmentalized it as just some old, fairly interesting stuff I happened to be sorting through, instead of letting myself think of it as his stuff. Stuff I was deciding to keep, or throw away, or put into the estate sale.
Most of the time, I was able to maintain this false front. I was an archeologist, working in a still-standing relic! I was an historian, looking at interesting artifacts! I was researching interesting names from long-ago family members! (Lulu Green – what a fantastic name!)
But I didn’t let myself become The Oldest Daughter, working at her grim task.
Until the bathroom.
That’s when the ephemera of an old man’s life got to me. The drawer full of disposal razors. The half-used tube of toothpaste and the barely-worn toothbrush. The black plastic comb. Hand lotion tipped up to get the last bits out of the bottle. A metal nail file. And the padded toilet seat. His walker parked there, because he needed help getting up from the toilet. The unstrung role of toilet paper. A completed crossword puzzle book in the wastebasket. And the calendar, turned to August 2012.
Lubbock, Texas
photographed 9.1.2013
To be sold eventually to strangers, 3
My parents were good at keeping things, but really bad at keeping things organized.
My blue footlocker, that I took to Girl Scout camp, was in the garage storeroom, which also had old camping equipment and a case of motor oil and some tools. And dust. Plenty of it, making a thick coat on everything.
The very first thing I saw when I opened the trunk was this doll, whose head had somehow become detached from the rest of her. I remember this doll – it’s a Madame Alexander doll, and it was for Looking At, not Playing With. She was well-dressed, with that fetching off-the-shoulder dress, trimmed with a velvet ribbon. She has stockings, too, and a lace petticoat, and fancy panties. (In all categories, she’s better dressed than I am.)
I don’t know why this doll was saved. None of our other toys were anywhere around.
I had a Barbie and a Ken. My sister had Midge and Skipper (Barbie’s often-overlooked little sister). My best friend down the street (also named Melinda!) had a Barbie with a large wardrobe of store-bought clothes. At our house, though, our mom made Barbie clothes from Barbie-specific patterns, with scraps from her other sewing projects. I wished my Barbie had a fancy wardrobe – specifically the strapless evening dress in silver lame with a mermaid hem made from tulle and matching plastic high-heeled mules. But my doll wore dresses with set-in sleeves, tiny swing jackets, or cotton sheaths in fabrics that matched the clothes my mom wore.
We didn’t find Barbie, or her extended family, when we cleaned out the house. No hand-made clothes, no patterns. That was a little bit of a disappointment: I wanted to look at those tiny pattern pieces with the holes from the pins that would have been used to secure them to the fabric.
Our parents were remarkably (and surprisingly) progressive when it came to our toys. Sure, we had Barbies. But we also had building blocks, made from corrugated cardboard printed to look like red bricks. And a woodburning set (which one of my boy cousins used to burn a tiny line in the wood floor in my bedroom, and which I never mentioned to anyone until now). And cars and trucks. And books. And a sandbox in the yard.
But back to the footlocker. It held a eclectic mix of things that will be headed to the estate sale. Like the doll and her head. Old pictures of people I don’t recognize. (Oddly enough notes that say “Mama” or “summer” on the backs of photos are not all that helpful.) A white baby dress with pink smocking. A box of pocket watch chains. And the thing is none of this stuff has any meaning to me. There’s no way to know why it was important enough to be kept, or who it belonged to, or why I ought to care. And so it seems like the right thing is to let it go. And hope I don’t regret not keeping any of it.
Lubbock, Texas
photographed 8.23.2013
To be sold eventually to strangers, 2
My dad was a civil engineer. He started his career in San Angelo, Texas, working for the highway department. He says he thought he’d spend his career there, until his boss told him it was “too bad” that his degree was from the “wrong” school. It seems that back the the big guys at the highway department went to Texas A&M and he’d gotten his degree from Texas Technological College (now Texas Tech University).
He stuck around long enough, though, to meet my mom in Sonora, Texas. According to an entry in their wedding album, he proposed to her in the car, while they were parked along the Ozona Highway. Sounds about right, I guess, for an engineer to take his beloved out to look at a road before he popped the question.
He left the highway department, and went to work for Phillis Petroleum, in Borger, Texas, and then moved to Lubbock in 1956 and went to work at Parkhill, Smith, and Cooper, where he worked until he retired. He did well there, working on a variety of big projects across the country. His particular area of expertise was water- and sewage-treatment facilities. I can remember on many (most, actually) family vacations we’d stop along the way to look at sewage plants. Nothing says “vacation” like the smell of effluent, that’s for sure!
After he retired from working, he mostly retired from wearing neckties. He’d wear one if he had to, but would complain about it. But he kept some, neatly hanging on their rack, just inside the left-hand side of the closet.
We are cleaning out the house now, and I guess someone will be happy to take over the neckties.
Lubbock, Texas
photographed 8.13.2013
To be sold eventually to strangers: 1
My dad’s dresser, top drawer on the left. Camera body, a couple of watches, several lens filters, his Tau Beta Pi key from 1947, batteries, instruction manuals. And a tiny white envelope with, in his engineer’s printing, the words GOLD CROWN, that contains a gold crown.
This house was new when we moved in, over Christmas 1964. And now it’s time to clean it out, to let it – and all the stuff – find new owners. The state of that drawer is indicative of every drawer, cabinet, shelf in the house. All full, all a jumble of crap and stuff that may not be crap, things I ought to be sentimental about and things I’m not.
How am I going to decide what to keep? What to throw out? What to leave for the estate sale?
But before that, how will I even know where to start?
And how can I dispose of everything my dad accumulated for his whole life, and still look him in the eye when I visit him at the assisted living center?
Lubbock, Texas
photographed 8.13.2013
Many horizontals
When I took photography in college (which was a LONG time ago!), my professor didn’t permit us to crop our shots: everything had to be printed full-frame. I’ve long-since abandoned most of what I learned in that class (Zone System, anyone?) but for some reason the Do Not Crop rule is nearly always in play.
But this shot – I cropped this one. It felt daring, like I was really getting away with something. But mostly it felt like I was improving the shot: I wanted to emphasize all those horizontal lines and the original version, which had the entire building elevation, wasn’t doing that.
Know the rules, so you can break them, right?
Lubbock, Texas
photographed 4.28.2013
One Day | One Image 