Jettisoning Junk
This summer when I travel to the old homestead in Ithaca, which I even call Homeward Bound, I will take on the task of depersonalizing the house of all the memorabilia that I will want to keep once the University takes over the house for good at the end of the year. Several people have called this the end of an era and they are not wrong in characterizing it as such, but it should be much less that than not. Nothing about my love of the Finger Lakes region of New York or my fond memories of my college days or reunions need to go into the trash along with the junk that I choose not to keep. I can, should and probably will keep all of that and more tucked away in my memory. Ithaca is a profoundly important place to me for many reasons stemming from my mother’s heritage, my youth as a global vagabond trailing behind that same mother, my coming of age as a man during college and my growth into a man with some sense of roots in his own history. I have often said that Ithaca is a very special vortex for me and I really must stop thinking of this summer as “my last Ithaca summer”. That is far more final in its sentiment than it needs to be or should be. Ithaca and especially the soft summer nights there will always be a big part of who I am and who I want to be.
I focus on summer in Ithaca for several reasons. During college, as an internationally-based student, I tended to spend my summers and even my other holidays for the most part, in Ithaca. It really was my home for those five years more than anywhere else. Since I had and still have relatives in that area, that made the logic of thinking of it as home seem quite appropriate, whether I was spending time with them during those times or not. Those summers in Ithaca may well have been the most magical moments of my college life and are certainly among my best memories. I spent most of them living at my fraternity house at 40 Ridgewood Road, but that particular locale doesn’t hold special significance to me as much as the general Ithaca environs do. In fact, it is the warm summer evening and the fireflies playing along the grass and the lapping of Lake Cayuga or the gushing of Fall Creek that bring back the most special moments of recollection. The other reason I cannot ignore is that while I have owned Homeward Bound over the past twenty-six years, I have spent many a summer week there, enjoying those same environs and that same Ithaca summer feeling. It has only heightened my feelings that my daughter and her family have made Ithaca their base of operation for the last several summers. It has caused me to relive my love of Ithaca summers through the eyes and hearts of my beloved granddaughters.
It would be so very wrong to assume that because of a dispute with the administrative side of Cornell University, that all has to or should end with an aggrieved slam of the door to my fond Ithaca memories. I just communicated by email with my local Ithaca landscaper. He was seeking my approval for an increase in the cost of his maintenance services this year and I took it as an opportunity to update him about my status with Homeward Bound. I will not say that he was either surprised or upset by it all, but he almost had a degree of resignation that he has seen this all before in some form or another. He too is a Cornell graduate and he says that it is not the first or last time the University would take a bad short-sighted decision of this kind. He offered to intercede with the Provost and I declined on the theory that this was a closed book and that I did not want to reopen it with a sour grapes attitude. He seemed to understand and said he would make the property look great for my last summer there. His attitude has helped me to soften my views about the whole affair and to swallow it back into some semblance of perspective. That seems like an important step to me.
This summer I will arrive in Ithaca in the third week of June with my motorcycle trailer. This is a strategic inclusion that will serve several purposes, not the least of which is as a vehicle for the quiet removal of whatever memorabilia I think needs to be saved and moved out here to my hilltop. I am beginning to think that I can repurpose some of that junk to help me keep my positive memories about Ithaca while satisfying my creative hillside beast that burns in me on my spare days out here (which get more and more of my time and attention). There is something uplifting to me to think that I can fashion all the good junk and the good memories into art that I can incorporate into the hillside in some manner. In some ways, that seems like the most positive step I can take, making the proverbial lemonade out of whatever lemons I choose to take away from the experience.
That may summarize my favorite personal philosophy, which is all about finding the positive in every situation. And today, my darling daughter gave me the opening to turn my Ithaca situation into some family lemonade. Next year will be our first year without Homeward Bound and she called to discuss plans to come out here for an extended stay to do more Disneyland and more Western adventures that we didn’t have time for this past visit. It is exactly what I would have wanted for her to do and now all that remains is for me to plan our time next summer and between now and then, to deal with all the memorabilia of Ithaca.
I don’t really know all of the junk I have in Ithaca that I will feel the need to keep and drag back here in that trailer and how much of it I will just want to jettison. As an example, there is a three-foot high rock at the front of the driveway that has a brass plaque on it that says Homeward Bound. I can’t leave the name on a house I no longer can call mine, so that has to come off, and yet I don’t have it in me to throw it away. So that will go in the trailer. What will become of it when it gets back here will be the key to this process. My mistake has been in thinking that my problems are solved by simply jettisoning junk when I should have been thinking about how to repurpose it. Now I have the perfect place and the time to do just that.
I will be starting to learn about carving stone and carving wood as my next form of artistic expression. The materials and tools are in transit as I write. I will be using those skills, whatever they become, to find new homes in my art for all that junk. Let’s see what comes of it, but I’m sure of one thing and that’s that it needs and deserves a home and that I need to stop thinking that jettisoning junk is the answer.