Crack The Whip
By Brendan Moss

 

Little pieces of my past lead to my doorstep. They compose my breadcrumb trail leading to the place that I am from, gobbled up by thrift store vultures and garage sale junkies only a few steps out the door. If I ever tried to follow the trail they mark back to my origins, on a quest to fit into a culture, I would likely lose my way. I am sure that some essential memory is lost; some artifact of great importance, unacknowledged and unappreciated, must have been left by the wayside and consumed. And if I should later find that I let an opportunity slip through my hands, shouldn’t I be devastated? Antiques Roadshow. Like a nagging voice, at once a plea and a warning, the American dream (prosperity is quality) subtly implores among a myriad of whispering voices, “Don’t forget. Don’t let go. Take everything with you, leave nothing behind. If you miss this chance, you will not get another. This could be the supreme regret of your life.” This old watch, this broken compass, pointing nowhere, this portrait photograph, some long forgotten relative or friend I never knew: these could be the means by which I make my way into the world. Who knows what they could be worth? I will take them up, put them away, into a closet or an attic, until the day I find some use for them, until I discover that they are, as I hope, worth saving.
I used to save everything. I wanted to preserve the value of all my toys and baseball cards, but quickly discovered that using my toys resulted in them breaking, and looking at my baseball cards made them worthless. I tried to take good care of my cars because when it came time to sell them I would want to get the best price, but they never made it through the gauntlet of the road long enough for me to consider selling them. The victims of countless random accidents, my cars quickly disintegrated. I carried files of old papers and notebooks around for years, thinking I might someday need them for some unimaginable reason. It only takes one or two moves to realize how impractical and pointless such behavior is, even if it is theoretically appealling.
One of the best pieces of advice I have ever received came from a waitress at a Waffle House. She said, “If ya keep movin’, and you find that there’s some boxes you’re luggin’ ‘round that you jus’ ain’t openin’, ma’ advice tuh you is: jus throw ‘em away. Don’t even look in’em, just toss ‘em in the garbage and go.” The Buddha works at Waffle House. I have tried to practice this, but curiosity gets the better of me and I look into the box. I always regret it. Useless crap! My mind invents afresh countless improbable reasons to save the contents of the box. It plays out every scenario to the end, always supposing that someone will say “thank God you had all those spools of dental floss, the typewriter with no ink ribbon that you were going to fix some day, all those Wheaties boxes (unopened!) from the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, the broken Ninja Turtle, and the Certificate Of Completion from 3rd Grade with you, Brendan! We never could have done it without that!” (My mind apparently considers a chance meeting with McGuyver to be likely). But the simplicity of the advice I was given sometimes empowers me to throw it away.
I was born the second child out of five. Until I started highschool we lived in the same two bedroom house my parents bought when they first moved to Ohio in 1982. My dad, a former construction worker, added an addition for every child until the house and property burst at the seams. He turned the garage into a bedroom, building an additional three car garage in the backyard with a storage loft above it to absorb the displaced boxes, tools, and cars. He then added a recreation room and dining room onto the back of the house. After my final sister was born, he was torn between adding a second storey or moving out of the house. We had a garage sale and moved.
We had scarcely unpacked before my dad lost his job. He found a small church in Michigan that was looking for a pastor and we had another garage sale. Meanwhile, my grandpa sold his house in Georgia and called everyone in the family, pleading with them to find a home for all his heirlooms. “The rocking chair your mother used to rock you in, the wardrobe where you hid playing hide-and-go-seek, the three-tiered knick-knack shelf where your mother displayed all your awards, the two-thousand square foot roll of genuine wool carpet, the last order off the mill before the plant shut down (you can install it in your new house), doesn’t anybody want something to remember us by when we are gone?” Everything we owned had to fit into a single moving truck. These new posessions took up twice as much space as the things we had sold in the garage sale, and we had actually wanted them.
The house in Michigan did at least have room for everything, but after my brother and I had both moved out, it was too big for the family. I was soon receiving the calls myself. “Brendan, we’re moving. Do you want the rocking chair? The wardrobe? The three-tiered knick-knack shelf with all the clay sculptures you made in elementary school? Do you need some carpet? Don’t you have room for any of it?” The answer has always been “no.”
My family left the five bedroom house in Michigan with a four-car garage and storage barn for a two bedroom condo in southern Florida. My grandpa moved off the farm and gave most of what he collected over his life to my parents. They moved and sold it off, little by little. They didn’t mean to, didn’t want to; it just happened. So most of it is gone. And I have been so wild and uncontained, uncontrollable. Can I keep the antique wardrobe in my VW Rabbit? No (it would ruin the gas mileage). There never was room. Can I keep the three-tiered knicknack shelf my grandmother used? I’m sorry. It is round. It does not fit in the corner. It was made to display things of the sort I do not own in room dedicated to that purpose, with a couch and matching loveseat (not for sitting) and a perfect little coffeetable (not for coffee) upon which sit magazines (not for reading); it is part of a parlor set, and I without a parlor (Je ne parle jamais) have no use for it.
Perhaps when I become an old man I shall buy a house and fill it with furniture I never use and things I do not need, and when my family comes to visit I will let them look at it and I will tell them “all this will be yours when I die. You must have some things to remember me by. This was a nice visit. It is time for you to leave.” I think that I shall secretly desire them to want those things, the way I wish that I wanted them myself.
I have my grandpa’s broken compass from World War II, when he was a flight navigator on a B-17 in Africa, transporting goods and people and bombs. It does not point to north anymore, but I assume it did when he was navigator. It is small; it fits into a pocket; it hangs upon a string. So, when a compass no longer points north, why do I keep it? Probably for the same reason my mom has tried to keep so much of the furniture that she readily admits is ugly and takes up too much room. They are a reminder of a time when such a things were appropriate. The furniture talks to my mom about the farmhouse they used to own, where there was plenty of room for irrational furnishings, where there were entire rooms dedicated to impracticality: a den, a parlor, a study, a library, an office, all of which required couches and tables and mirrors and precarious three-tiered knick-knack shelving. It makes her feel guilty for having considered giving them to Goodwill. It’s silly, really. They were once symbols of higher status; their function was simply to waste space with abandon. Status having been adjusted somewhat, they are now a waste of space that cannot be abandoned. I keep the compass out of loyalty to how much my grandpa thought it would mean to me. I wish it did mean something to me, but I have moved so often, my family has moved so often, that I see it as just another thing I have to remember not to forget. We cannot bear the burden of the past everywhere we go. We lighten the load on each new journey, leaving this or that behind, saying goodbye but not really missing any of it. We still remember the things we leave behind with each new move, and that was always the point anyway.
There is a game called Crack The Whip. A group of people on roller skates hold hands and go around in a circle. As they come around the curve, the people on the outer edge absorb the momentum of the rest of the group and go flying off the end of the line, careening to the other end of the rink with a speed they could not otherwise have achieved. My grandpa is the son of Irish immigrants who fled to America during the potato famine. He grew up in Brooklyn. He moved to Georgia and started a carpet factory. His wife taught Latin. My mother was their daughter. She grew up an educated northerner in a rural southern town. My dad was the black sheep of his middle class New England family (failing to adopt the hereditary anti-semitism, joining the Army, and going to seminary amounted to rebellion in that culture). I am the product of these incremental separations from society, part ot the diaspora of the distorted American dream. I was catapulted headlong into freedom in reaction to the smothering prosperity of my grandparents. I am the one on the end of the line, flying with impossible speed away from the center. I bring nothing else with me. My momentum is my sole inheritance, widening the gap between myself and the past. I am the past, but I am also the future. I can neither touch the things passed down to me over the generations nor see the need to. I have room for memories, not memorebilia. My ancestors worked hard and suffered much to give my parents every opportunity (and make them feel guilty if they ever missed one). My parents in turn gave me the freedom to live a small, unencumbered life if I so desired. They took upon themselves the guilt of selling the amassed wealth of generations (which I think was always meant to be more of an anchor than a blessing), and cut me loose from a long line of people whom I remember and to whom I am indebted, but who are dead.
I think life might not be about what you gain, or even what you give away. It’s about movement. What I lack in lineage, history, boxes of artifacts, furniture, and photo albums, I make up for in living. I feel like I have lived twice my years. Maybe I will have nothing to give my children, but what I don’t have to give can’t slow them down.