Memory is a crazy woman that hoards colored rags and throws away food.

— Austin O’Malley

The summer after my senior year, we picked up and moved from Chicago to Phoenix.  When we left Chicago, we took a trailer of stuff so that we’d have the “essentials” in our new home, which was a tiny apartment.  Because we had left the non-essentials behind, none of our history came with us.  When the house in Chicago finally sold, it was Dad who went back and organized the move.  And even after everything was out in Phoenix, it was spread throughout various storage units and I’m not sure anyone knew where anything specific was.

My parents had two battles throughout their entire married lives – money and how much to keep of anything.  Because my mother grew up during the depression and because her mother had breast cancer during this difficult time, my mother felt the lack of the things she wanted very dearly.  When she was establishing her own household, she greatly feared that there wouldn’t be enough – enough food, enough money, enough to take care of all of us.  So, she hoarded.  If something that she wanted was on sale, she bought it in quantity.  Over time, we had lots of Coke, candy, toilet paper, as much meat as the freezer would hold, etc.

The other part of this hoarding was that Mom would keep all the grocery bags from when we went shopping.  By the time I was old enough to understand, we had cupboards filled with grocery bags, plastic bags, emptied glass jars that could be used to hold leftovers, and gently used wrapping paper and ribbons.

This made my father CRAZY!

He Got His Chance

What made him especially crazy was the idea that we were moving all these empty bottles and wrapping paper from Chicago to Phoenix.  By that point in her life, my mother was quite irrational about the whole thing and there were knock-down drag-out fights for months.

When Dad went back to Chicago to move what we’d left behind, he threw out box after box of stuff.  Part of what went were all my high school mementos.  Prom pictures, playbills from our high school productions of Wonderful Town, Oklahoma, and Pajama Game were all gone.  None of my dressy dresses survived.  The things which tied me to my roots were all just gone.  And worst of all, he has always denied that he tossed this stuff.  He felt it was silly that I even cared.  But, I did – very much.

So Sad! Too Bad!

When Dad slid into dementia, it was Christmas time.  We were already scheduled to be in Phoenix for the holidays and I left early so that I could work on Dad’s house.  I’ve written before about what a mess we found, but one of the things that I loved was that we found mementos – not the stuff that I’d lost, but stuff I didn’t even know existed.  There were pictures of my parents when they were young and dating.  There were slides of trips that they’d taken.  There were Mother’s Day cards that I’d sent.  Mementos of my life with my parents.

We were desperately looking for financial records, so I would spend all day searching through papers, trying to bring them to some order.  Then, when I just couldn’t sort anything more, I’d sit down with some of these mementos and wallow.  At one point, I went into the garage and found papers from the generation preceding my folks.  But, I didn’t have time to go through what was there and thought that I’d get back to it.

Then the bank foreclosed in error – they don’t dispute that – and the flipper came in and trashed everything that was left, claiming that the property was abandoned, even though my brother was right there telling them that they were wrong – we had not abandoned the house.

We lost everything.  Maybe for some people this wouldn’t make a difference, but for me, it was a link to a past that was always shrouded in lies.  My entire family had lied about most everything – who they were, where our business came from, where they came from – the whole ball of wax.  I had gotten a glimpse into what was real and now, it’s gone.

I can’t really tell you why this is so important to me, and there’s really nothing I can do about it.  Logic says I should just let it go.  But I still mourn it.

Reckless Indifference

And the reckless behavior continues.  Banks continue to foreclose on properties to which they have no right.  And no one stops them.  They are sued time and time again, and they just ignore each of us like so many little fruit flies.  In one case, the injured party sued, won, and the bank ignored them until they came to a branch to take their judgment in bank property.  It makes for a great story.

In another case, an 82 year old man went on vacation and returned to find that the eviction company had emptied his home and padlocked the door.  Who knows how this will be resolved?  These stories of incompetence would be funny if there weren’t such a large human cost to them.

As much as it’s difficult to force the banks to reimburse for the hard assets, furniture, clothing, etc.  It’s impossible to put a price on the photos and other mementos that are lost.  Baby books, First Communion prayer books, all of those things which mark the major milestones of a young and growing family are gone – forever.  And because there is no “economic” value to these things, there is no club to hold over the heads of the organizations that perpetrate this type of destruction.  Oh well!  So sad.  Too bad.

When we were working on Dad’s house, we made a point of removing the “valuables” – china, artwork, some antiques – as soon as we could.  We needed the money.  It never occurred to us that those things that a thief wouldn’t bother with – but had value to us – would be destroyed by a corporation.  Now I know that there is more than one type of valuable.  I wish I had taken the time to go through the papers and history to find the “other” valuables.  Unfortunately, it really is too late.