On Tuesday of this week, my son and I drove to Jericho, New York and finally emptied out and closed down the storage unit that had been acquired don’t ask me how long ago, because no one in my husband’s family was willing to part with the fifty years of paintings, letters, notebooks, and the rest of the detritus of my father and mother-in-law’s apartment on West 77th street following her death.
What is it about old crap that reaches out its dusty moldy fingers and puts the vice grip on the sense of reason? I must have that ugly old photograph. I cannot live without that business letter from 1957. The trips people could have taken for what we spent! The fabulous clothes, the wonderful dinners!
The massages, the Italian leather shoes, the cashmere! What might have been and what have been point to one end: what idiots we were. My son and I, however now have the moral high ground: we did it! We closed down the money pit.
As recently as last summer, my husband and I had set forth with a rented truck and a firm resolve and left Uncle Bob’s Storage Unit facility with an empty truck and mutual anxiety attacks. These old possessions and the memories they elicit are so debilitating.
My son had warned me on the morning we set out: “We might not get it done today, and you can’t just throw away something without vetting it with me! Otherwise, I’m not driving you there!”
“Okay,” I said. And I wondered if this was going to be A Visit to Uncle Bob’s Redux, but at least we had not rented a truck. We were driving in my son’s great big Toyota four-wheel drive. And I hope, since he had at least some of my genetic code, he might be a little more sensible than his father but of course they weren’t my parents. Or Grandparents.
Ghosts and spirits linger around the possessions of the dead. I had found that out when I was elected to clean out my mother and father-in-law’s apartment all those years ago—years I measure, not in coffee spoons like Eliot, but in monthly fees to the storage unit.
My husband’s family and I are not alone in this madness.
Consider the following:
1 in 10 US households have a unit.
Of the 58,00 storage facilities world wide, 46,000 of them dwell in the U.S. (The U.S., birthplace of the Big Mac and the Mac mansion, the California Closet Industry and indeed the California King itself, apparently is fonder of its clutter than anyplace else on the globe.)
Experts in the field of self- storage would tell you that the 4 D’s dominate the industry. Death, Divorce, Downsizing, Dislocation.
Yes, we in the U.S. use more gasoline than anyplace else in the world by far. And we also use our cars to drive us to our storage units, where we hoard our clutter that we cannot bear to part with.
Myself, though I have no problem parting with clutter, my email inbox contains close to four thousand unread or undeleted emails. I alas, know I am not alone in this accumulation of cyber garbage.
Is there a correlation between how much is in our hard drive? And how much is in our closets and storage units?
Now that space to hold “memories” in the form of images is getting smaller and smaller, is our desire to hold things, growing? Hence our explosion of containers for personal crap?
The interiors of our houses are expressions of who we are. Our storage units by extension tell even more about us. That is to say: What we hide, what we cannot bear to part with. Indeed our true neuroses dwell inside the long aisles of the storage units that dot the US. map, delivering, a 5.1 return on investment to the owner of the unit. Not the possessor of the drek.
In a way, our hidden clutter is more about our subconscious wishes and desires, our primal selves. Our desire to contain our raging IDs.
Out of sight, out of mind? Not so fast.
Yes, here in the good old USA, we have more Donald Trumps, (millions of them) more guns, more cars, more storage units, than anyplace else on the globe. Here we glorify and make a fetish of our clutter—and create a multi billion dollar industry to support it.
My good news is that, Uncle Bob’s in Jericho is gone. Hallelujah.
The bad news is that I have two more storage units to contend with….one three blocks from where we live in LA. And the other one, well, I refuse to even go there…..
by 
