Cartons full of Casey’s high-school books, university essays, sketches, journals; metal filing cabinets full of Brian’s interviews with Madonna and Mick Jagger and Michael J. Fox. Stars in the cellar.
The bothersome part was that none of this—the letters, the drill bits, the bolts of Chinese silk, and lumpy pillows—was accounted for. It represented both the worthless things we hadn’t bothered to throw out along with the treasures that we have not treasured. In Burlington, the basement was where the family imagination held sway,where my mother painted or fired pottery. Our basement, for all its evidence of diligence, had become the graveyard of our carelessness. Every now and then I would try to take a stab at it, carting garbage bags of clothing to the Goodwill, throwing out the talk-show mugs and the posters for long-forgotten events. But this is not a one-person job, and Brian is less haunted by the basement than I am. To put it in a positive light, he is better at archiving. In his line of work, he is also the recipient of a steady stream of film-industry swag that walks the line between hopeless junk and stuff I can’t bring myself to throw out. His passions come with many material objects attached to them,too: conga drums, a 30-pound bag of percussion instruments, camera tripods, computer drives. Gear. Stuff.
On the other hand, the obsessively rewritten lost novels and the rolling racks of clothing in the basement are mostly mine. The other day I pulled out a 1980s pair of knee-high suede boots whose time had come round again. If only novels were like boots.
If Brian catches me making a pile of stuff to throw out, he will go through it and reclaim things.
“Why are you keeping your press pass from the Cannes Film Festival of eight years ago?” I will ask.
“I collect my press passes.”
For the last two years, Casey had been eyeing the items he had inherited from us. The useful things (the silver family flask, his grandfather’s three-piece suit,my old Pentax), the pointless things (a microwave omelette maker), and the junk (thousands of paper drink umbrellas).
Now it was time to get rid of it.
Down in the basement, we began sorting. He held up a strange garden implement, a long metal pole with a spidery set of prongs on one end.
“What is this?”
“It’s for twisting out weeds,” I said defensively. “It’s so I don’t have to bend over.”Casey does not have to point out how unweeded the garden remains.
“This is the kind of stuff we have a million of,” he said.
He finds my chromatic harmonica,which I never use, and plays a tune on it.
“How’s it going with this?”
I take it away and put it on the “keep” pile. I plan to play the harmonica when I am old and bedridden. Casey rummages on.
“Dad would never do this, you know.”
“He doesn’t have the time.”
“Anyway he’d just want to pay someone to do it, and nobody but me could sort all this out,what’s valuable,what’s not.”
“That’s true. But if we’d been more organized, we would have thrown out our old vinyl.”
“What about this?” He held up a chipped china baby’s plate.
“That’s my great-grandmother’s baby plate; that stays,” I said. I pulled out an oil painting my mother had done, yet another still life with flowers. Maybe reframed? I didn’t have the heart to throw it out. This was, I realized, how people ended up on reality TV shows about compulsive hoarding.
We began to paw through a dreadful dark space under the stairs, the Swag Hole, where we tossed the cheap bags and satchels that Brian brings home from the film festival circuit.
“There must be over 20 in here,” said Casey, pulling out a tangle of logo-festooned items. “Talk about baggage.”
We looked into the maw, where one last suitcase lurked. An old-fashioned hard-shell one. I clicked it open to find a nest of mould and my first bits of published work. Yellow carbon copies of book reviews I had written in my twenties, when carbon copies still existed. Letters from my high-school boyfriend. Some were too damp to salvage, but most were fine. I sat down in a broken chair and began reading one.
“See, if you just keep plowing through it, valuable things turn up,” said Casey the archivist.
“We have to stop doing this,” I finally said,“or we’ll get sick. The mould is bad.” It was hard to make him stop, though. He was on a dumpster bender.
Then we began The Removal, hauling up lumber, cobwebby baseboards, defunct sewing machines, and roof racks. The front yard filled up. Soon there was a small ski hill of matter.
“Take a picture,”Casey said. “We need to document this.”I stood on the sidewalk to get a long shot of the heap with Casey posing on top, like a climber summiting.
“Sure you don’t want this lovely batik from Bali?” I said, waving a wall hanging at him. He looked at me to make sure I was kidding.
“And I guess you don’t want a sink shaped like a seashell,” I said, admiring the dainty model we had ripped out of the bathroom when we moved in. He got into the cab of the truck.
“It’s time to hit the dump.”
On the way down Parliament Street in the truck, we rolled open the windows. The breeze felt good, drying the sweat we had worked up. The truck engine was gratifyingly loud, a workhorse of an engine. We stopped at the lights, glanced sideways, and met the eyes of a row of people.
“Hey,we’re on the same level as the streetcar,”Casey said approvingly. I began to see the appeal of driving your own U-Haul.
The city dump is down by the lake, in an unkempt industrial area on Commissioners Street. I’ve always had a secret affection for the street, an under-travelled straightaway in an area of scrap metal yards and cavernous film studios, alternating with fields of wildflowers and weeds. I used to come down here with a college flame in his father’s car. He’d drive right out into the middle of one of these fields of Queen Anne’s lace and ragweed, tilt the front seat back as far as it would go, and we’d make out with Toronto’s skyline sparkling ahead of us, like the screen of a drive-in movie. It was an ungroomed part of town, the place where freighters come to anchor and then rust for years. The place where things wind up.
We spotted a tall brick building with a concrete ramp leading up into it. It was ominous, that entrance, faintly evocative of gas chambers or something furtive and dire. In one corner of the parking lot, a man in a jumpsuit and a mask was sorting out Hazardous Wastes. He invited us to unload our paint cans. There was a pyramid of shrink-wrapped TVs near him,metal drums full of discarded paint, and a tower of dead car batteries.
The dozen half-empty cans of paint lurking at the back of our basement had been lightly but persistently on my mind ever since we’d moved in. Now we handed them over, and the young man in the gas mask poured some of the citrus colour from our living-room walls into a metal drum. It swirled in with the residue of other houses.
Casey lugged the Selectric out of the truck. I realized that I missed my old typewriter, the loud hum of it and the absolutely committed thwack of its keys. It throbbed like a beast and you really felt you were getting down to work when you typed on it. But away it went, to machine heaven.
“So where do we go for lumber and where for straight garbage?” Casey asked.
“Around the back for recycling, and straight up the ramp for things you’re just throwing away. But you have to weigh in first. It’s the next turn up the road.”
At the weighing station, they gave us a “before”weight so that when we checked out they would know how much to charge us for the load. Ten bucks per 50 kilos of junk. This faintly thrilled me; in a very small way,we were becoming accountable.
An incongruously well-tended garden flanked the bottom of the ramp to the dump. With the engine gunning, we shot to the top.
“Why do we have to go up so high just to throw things away?” I asked. There was a sensation of motoring toward the end of a long dock, like the last scene in Jules et Jim, where the three of them drive off into the pier into the water.
&
nbsp; “I don’t know. Maybe it’s about using gravity to get stuff into the incinerator.” A long white tube angled down from the side of the dump to the place where things were burnt.
A man in a construction hat and a flare-orange vest took our receipt at the entrance. We inched into the dumpsite, a vast chamber with a great multicoloured cliff of garbage bulldozed against one corner and a fresh, uncompressed boreal forest of debris in the other.
“Just back up to the active pile and unload,” the worker told us. Wow, I thought, I didn’t realize we could play such a personal role in the disposal process. There were no intermediaries or agreeable facades here, just a cascade of discarded crap,onto which you hurled your stuff. The pile was the opposite of possessions, with which we insulate ourselves from unpleasant realities, like rot and death. We go to so much trouble, installing lengths of quarter round to cover up the unseemly seam in our houses,where the floors meet the walls. But in the end, it all goes on the slag heap. There was something exhilarating in being at the bedside, as it were, of all the objects we were ready to leave behind.
A brown station wagon full of old fencing pulled up beside us, and a middle-aged man got out with a springy step to pop the trunk. He glanced our way.
“We have to stop meeting like this,” I said as a joke. Luckily, he laughed.
“Yeah, but who would guess, eh?”
Casey and I got into the back of the U-Haul and began hurling objects onto the loose scree of garbage. Old mops, a bristle-less broom, bent curtain rods, the worn Turkish rug I had bought for our first apartment.
I threw the curtain rods in a high arc, like javelins. They pierced a gutted mattress. Casey tossed a box full of mouldy paperbacks onto the pile.
“This is fun, isn’t it?” I said, putting my arm into it.
We were making more noise than was strictly necessary. The man in the station wagon began to chuck his lumber, and a rhythm sprang up between the three of us. After all the hemming and hawing, the careful evaluation of what should stay or go, this fiesta of letting go felt good.
I turned to admire the more processed slope of debris in the other corner,impressionist in its flecks of colour. The pile was intricate and beautiful; it had broken down the identity of the individual objects but not their detail, their thingness. The rampart had a human presence.
When the truck was empty of everything except wood,we drove down the sloping exit and past the boat-sized recycling containers. We visited the graveyard of spavined appliances and old slack-jawed refrigerators. There was a pile of white ash inside a garage that rose to a delicate tip, like a heap of salt. The residue from the incinerator, probably. Ramp, dump, tunnel, flames—so many stages before the garbage disappeared, and even then it fanned out into the air, not yet invisible.
The stubbornness of our stuff.
We drove through the weighing station where we were asked to pay $31. I was euphoric and had to restrain myself from tipping.
It was almost six o’clock, with that late-August slant of light that means fall and getting down to business. We rolled open the windows; the air felt cooler here down by the lake. Brian was at the office, finishing up a story. I phoned to tell him the good news about our defoliated basement and how much work we’d done. Luckily he didn’t ask whether we’d thrown out his goat-claw percussion shakers. After 30 years of living together and 26 years of parenthood, our roles had become well defined; it was his job to hang onto things (including me), my job to feel oppressed by the basement, and it fell to Casey to tell us what was worth keeping and what we should discard.
We ate at the pub on Parliament, raising a glass of beer to our labours. We’d worked well together, perhaps because he was in the driver’s seat this time. And when I had taken my mother’s painting back inside the house, he hadn’t argued.
I set off to visit my mother in Burlington. Every time I saw her now she came swimming back from a more distant shore, but she was still hanging in there. I found new pleasure in these last visits, so shorn of everything unnecessary from the past. Just the two of us, talking and not always making sense.
Casey went to drop the truck off. Then he and some friends were going to down to the spit, a long peninsula of land that juts out into the lake. It was still warm enough for bonfires on the beach. Brian was up in the goth-castle of the Rogers building, waiting for his story to be edited and put to bed. The city was more than big enough for all of us.
The Future
ALTHOUGH I KNEW I could always count on my parents to bail me out financially, I never had to ask them; a benign economy shone down on the young, and life was easy— perhaps easier than it ever will be again. In 1971, I could get by (and travel for months at a time) on the money I earned writing a freelance book-review column for a newspaper. Quaint skills! Roughly the equivalent of working as a blacksmith today. Or . . . being a narwhal impersonator. I can’t think of anything that’s arcane enough to convey just how obsolete my first job has become.
Astutely, my parents saw writing as an insecure pursuit. But what did they know? Our parents didn’t share our music or our values. Many of us mistrusted the very concept of family, a bourgeois institution (we said) created to oppress women and shore up the patriarchy. “They fuck you up, your mum and dad” begins the famous poem from that year, by Philip Larkin.
Hmmm. There’s still some truth in this, but nobody seems to have come up with a better arrangement than “family,”regardless of the genders or sexual persuasions involved, for raising children, tolerating our fellow human beings, and helping each other through life. Family is a jalopy, not a Porsche, but it takes us down the road.
I saw an article in the real estate section of the paper the other day about a mother who was building an adorable little cabin, 10 by 12 feet square, on the property behind her house, where her 24-year-old college-student daughter could live rent-free. In Italy, this is nothing new; a study published by the London Centre for Economics reported that a mind-boggling 85 percent of Italian men aged 18 to 34 still live with their parents. Even when the daughters are factored in, the percentage of grown kids living with their parents in Italy is still over 50 per cent. According to a recent Guardian article, one minister has called for a new law forcing “bamboc-cioni” (mummies’ boys and girls) to leave home at 18. And when they leave, the maternal ties often remain. One bachelor in Rome ships his laundry to his mother in Bari on Friday and gets his shirts back ironed perfectly by Monday.
Does this protracted family life undermine our kids’ independence, or are we just helping them tackle a much tougher world than the one we grew up in?
Now that my son and I have met on the other side of the leaving-home dramas, I’ve come to the conclusion that these lingering familial bonds might be a good thing: signs of a return to normal clannishness after an era of hard-core individualism. The deal used to be that kids left home at 18 to “find themselves.” Then the day they turned 21 they magically became adults. Many of our parents did just that, putting on shirts and ties, getting married, having babies at an age when today’s kids are still binge-drinking or applying to business schools.
But what if this pattern—leaving home at the end of adolescence— is the real historical aberration, and the current tendency of sticking closer to home for longer periods marks a return to normal? This is what crossed Casey’s mind when he first travelled in Mexico, where everyone he met asked, “Where is your family?”
“Delayed transition” is the sociological term for this new tendency in families. In previous centuries, children rarely left the shade of the family tree; sons grew up to work alongside their fathers in the family business or girls married the boy from two farms over. Then the industrial revolution arrived, driving workers into urban areas, and the era of modern travel began. Children who left home had to go farther afield, sans cellphone. Corporations transferred employees and scattered families all over the globe, in the hard-to-fathom days before the communications revolution.
But email and Sk
ype have made geographical separation almost a non-issue. Everyone is more often in touch with everyone, including parents and their kids.
If we think of grown children staying close to the family (not necessarily under the same roof, but looped in) as normal rather than a sign of arrested adolescence, then where did we get the idea that kids should leave home at 18?
I think it may have arisen from circumstances that have nothing to do with the natural curve of childhood development: the spread of post-secondary education from the rich to the middle class; and the outbreak of two world wars. At 18, children (mostly boys) either left home to go off to college or to fight in wars. And because these teenagers undertook the responsibilities of fighting in a war,we assumed they came back home as grown men.
But ask any mother who has lost a son in combat: a 19-year-old is a boy. War may prematurely age (or kill) its young soldiers but it doesn’t necessarily turn them into adults. Leaving home and growing up are separate enterprises.
Part of the problem when I try to imagine the future is this: I can’t. The future used to be so easy to visualize, a Jetsons landscape of housecleaning robots and mono-cars that glide along on elevated rails. Life in this cartoon world-to-come where everyone wears jumpsuits is zippy and homogeneous. Now it feels as if the very concept of The Future belongs to the past. Whenever I try to envision my son embedded in some future landscape, there’s a mist around it (or a pall). The details won’t come into focus. It’s not that I lack faith in him—it’s the things I can’t imagine that lie ahead. Forty years ago, political issues were more circumscribed, wars had clear boundaries, and Canada was the ho-hum country where nothing bad could happen. Now pandemics, environmental dramas, and terrorism are a potential threat to even the most sheltered child.
With good reason, parents see the future as an edgy, competitive, unforgiving place, and we want our kids to have what it takes to cope with it. But you never know which qualities will equip your child for the world, in ways his parents can’t understand. The DIY kid might be more nimble than the deep and narrow PhD. We need to have faith in our kids’ sometimes wacky instincts about how to navigate the future.
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