Saving Makes Sense When You’ve Lived True Lack

Dear Dad,

I’m covered in dust and memories right now. I’ve been cleaning out your garage – your workshop, your respite care center, your old thinking-and-a-cigarette retreat back in your two-packs-a-day days. Your home away from the house and its insanity – us kids being, well, kids.

Dad, we always figured you had a ton of stuff out here when you were alive. We were even aware that this was probably a literal statement. But my God, Dad. We had no idea. None. Zero. One ton?! We wildly underestimated you.

How the hell did you even get all that rafter crap into the rafters? Seriously, Dad. Windows? Doors? Our old metal crib? Golf carts? The entire metal ventilation system for the old furnace? Hub caps? Bike wheels and tires? Inner tubes? A hang glider frame, for God’s sake? End tables? Storage chests? Tool cases? Toolboxes? And, speaking of boxes, two boxes of some ghastly, cat litter-like substance that I’m afraid to even touch?

And this is just the beginning, Dad. Like I’m telling you anything. Dad, there was paint in the cupboard that you must have bought during the Johnson administration. Andrew, not Lyndon. It’s not even liquid anymore, Dad. It’s toxic Play-Doh. I’m tempted to dump it out and sculpt it. But I want to live.

Each time I think I’ve gotten to everything in here, Dad, I look around and see something I’ve missed. No wonder Joel called this place your store, with all items always in stock.

I’ve got to hand it to you, though, Dad: You were well organized. Everything is nicely labeled in your own handwriting, and each thing has its place. You could have been a librarian.

But still, Dad. Did you really think you were going to someday reinstall that olive-green linoleum in the kitchen, or the vomit-colored shag carpeting in the living room? That stuff was awful back then, Dad, in the 1970s when awful was above and beyond the call of awful. Geez.

Why did you save all this junk, Dad? Why?

I know the answer, actually: To you, it wasn’t junk. It was potential. A potential fix to a problem. A potential idea turned into reality. And, most poignantly of all, a potential solution to lack.

The people in my generation sometimes make fun of the people in your generation, Dad, often behind your back. “You save everything!” we tease. And we’re often right. That’s why I found several hundred bread tie-twisties in one of the drawers inside the house, Dad. Because you never know: You might need 300 bread tie-twisties at once someday, right?

Here’s the thing, though: We – my generation of forty- and fifty-somethings – don’t have a clue about lack. No credibility at all, relatively speaking. To us, lack is not having access to Peanut Butter Cap’n Crunch during Saturday morning cartoon time.

Your generation is completely different, Dad, and for good reason. You were all born during the 1930s, and you grew up during the Great Depression and World War II. You saved everything then because there was lack – some of it purposeful (for the war effort), some of it most certainly not. You kept things around just in case. And not just in case you’d “starve” during Bugs Bunny, but in case you’d really starve as the economy tanked and the war raged on and money became tighter and tighter for everyone.

You didn’t buy stuff back then. You made it. And I have to say, Dad: You made a lot of cool stuff with the stuff you saved over the decades. I just found the little grabber thingy you made to retrieve golf balls out of the water. And I was always impressed by how you glued little wooden handles onto old Café Vienna tins to create drawers (again, nicely labeled) for your eighth-inch lag bolts and your quarter-inch wood screws. And inside the house earlier I stumbled upon your pride and joy: That little contraption you created out of the bottom of a 16-ounce plastic pop bottle so that you could change the light bulb outside the front door despite having an enormous hand that couldn’t fit into the lamp to unscrew the bulb manually.

So I’m sorry, Dad. I’m sorry for all the jabs, to your face and out of earshot. It actually makes total sense that you saved so much. You and your fellow seventy- and eighty-somethings have always known what it’s like to be genuinely at risk of having nothing. I don’t. So I should keep my mouth shut.

Especially if it will prevent dust from constantly pouring into my respiratory system! Dad, did you ever think about sweeping up around here?! I just blew my nose and my snot was black, Dad. Black.

Wait a minute: Here’s a thousand old dish towels in a box. An endless supply of Kleenex. Thanks.

Miss you, Dad. Love you.

Pete

Peter Vogt

I’m a writer. An essayist, to be more exact. I tell stories here—true stories, from my own life, in hopes they will make a positive difference in yours.

I share laughs and tears, insights and observations, frustrations and realizations, relying all the while on the storytelling wisdom of Julia Cameron, author of The Right to Write.

It is a great paradox that the more personal, focused, and specific your writing becomes, the more universally it communicates.