Giving Thanks

Giving Thanks
I am tempted to write a Thanksgiving post in the usual manner all about counting our blessings and remembering all that we have versus most other people. I sort of thread that theme through my normal writing anyway, so I am inclined to take a very different tack today. I am sitting in an office overlooking New York Harbor with all its splendor of the Statue of Liberty and the Verrazano Bridge. It is 55 degrees and grey with a chance of rain later. Much of the country is getting hit by a messy snowstorm, screwing up the holiday travel (think Planes, Trains and Automobiles). The northwest has a bit of the same, and only southern Florida seems to be nice and sunny as we go into the long weekend. In other words, it’s pretty normal Thanksgiving weather. There’s no one else in the office yet and given that it is now mid-morning, I doubt there will be many, if any, in today. That’s what happens on the “worst travel day of the year” for the most part.
On my home front we have a low-key day with literally nothing planned. We have plans tomorrow and Friday, but it’s mostly a stay-at-home holiday for us this year. I will write a few blogs and see a few movies. I may sit in the hot tub and catch up on some Audiobook listening. Since I have already written all my holiday cards and stamped them (compliments of an early rise yesterday), that leaves me looking for a project to keep myself busy.
Last weekend I heard from a visiting friend that he has catalogued all his miscellaneous junk, collected over a lifetime, and put it all into a three-ring binder for review and selection by his various loved ones who may covet his stuff. He said he did this to shed himself of excess belongings before he sizes down for that inevitable slide into the unknown. It may seem like a morbid task and a bit of a cross-the-days-off approach to life, but I think there is a gem of an idea in that. I plan to start on this project this weekend and will probably use either an Excel spreadsheet or Word format to record all my junk on my iPad (taking pictures as I go). Obviously there are limits to what I want to keep on record, but I figure that will naturally occur as I go. I will start with artwork and curios of significant value to me and then I will just let this project run as it wants to from there. What I will not do is put anything into any three-ring binders…that’s going the wrong way. I will stay totally digital in this project.
The idea may be to simply create a catalogue of my stuff, which is always useful for insurance purposes, but which may also serve to give my kids and other loved ones a chance to claim certain prized possessions well in advance of any shedding exercise I may want to go through. I figure the advantages range from having a basis to reduce my junk by whatever is in demand, to giving me a record of who took or got what, all the way to just giving me a sense of awe at what one person can accumulate over time and thereby reduce my desire to add to the collection as I go forward. This alone has lots to be thankful for. I can be thankful that I have loved ones who want remembrances of me and our lives together. I can be thankful that I have been so fortunate to have lived the life I lived and accumulated all the junk I have accumulated. The memories alone are a powerful inducement for the task. But there is also the thankfulness of being able to recognize the value in self-awareness and having the presence to stop accumulating stuff and to start focusing on gathering more experiences instead.
Some of that happens or has been happening naturally anyway. This should spur that initiative along even more. Funny thing though, my friend said he was disappointed that so few of his things were of particular interest to his family. Perhaps they didn’t want to appear greedy or presumptuous. Perhaps they thought it was all a lot of junk and they had no use for more junk. My mother lived to 100 years old. During her last fifteen years she regularly and unexpectedly packaged stuff up and sent it to me. I presume she did some version of this for my sisters as well, though they hovered around her more and perhaps snatched up enough of my mother’s stuff that my mother felt she needed to preserve some things for me. I like to think that she was far more thoughtful than that and cherry-picked things she knew or thought we would each particularly appreciate or treasure. I know that when I go through my own junk triage efforts around this cataloguing exercise I will stumble across some of those motherly objects and I will feel prone to highlight the ancestral value they have. I already have my coin collection, which are coins saved by my mother and her father. I will give those to my sons in hopes that they will again hold and pass along those mementos through the generations. I’m not sure to what end that matters, but it feels right to do it.
Two years ago I wrote a biography of my mother, which I titles Mater Gladiatrix (Mother Gladiator). It was a very cathartic experience writing it and reliving my mother’s live through that process, filling in the blanks I could and imagining those which I could not. My children and grandchildren have the benefit of that biography forever and I am proud to have done that. I guess I am hoping that my stuff catalogue (for which I will need to find a creative title of reference) will have a similar lasting value to my kids and grandkids.
My pleasure of writing is the greatest gift I have to give. I gave it to my mother and sisters by writing Mater Gladiatrix. I gave it to my friends and colleagues in the writing of Gulag 401(k). I also gave it to my professional life and academic colleagues by writing Global Pension Crisis. Soon I will finish my book about my motorcycle club and I’m titling it High Mileage / Low Expectations: Freedom on Two Wheels. It will be my gift to my great group of motorcycling pals when we meet for our Silver Anniversary this coming May in southern Utah. And then, my gift to myself and anyone who wants to follow the wanderings of my daily mind are the posts I put every day into The Old Lone Ranger.
I didn’t start this piece thinking I would write about my writing, but here I am. That is one of the things I like most about writing this blog. It takes me where it takes me and the only constraint I put on myself is that it has to fit more or less into 1,200 words. Had I stopped at the last period, it would have been exactly 1,200 words.