Can You Take It With You?

I have a photo of a hearse traveling down the highway with a U-Haul hitched behind it. It's not clear whether the hearse belongs to someone who bought it because hearses have lots of storage space, or whether some departed soul is traveling to his final resting place with all his stuff - a latter day Tutenkamen without the gold.

I got to thinking that during the last year, I, like many of my friends, discovered that we don't need the stuff we thought we need. We learned that there's more than enough clothes in our closet to recombine outfits for the next five years. Shoes? We already have pairs for every outfit and occasion. Purses? Ditto. Jewelry? Pouring out of the box.  Kitchen stuff? Drawers and cupboards are filled to the brim with gadgets, pots and dishes. Linens? Colors and patterns  for every occasion. 

Geri, one of my friends, complains that Bill, her husband, is a pack rat who saves everything - even the packaging that everything comes in. Bill is an accountant who likes to know 'where everything is'. They will be selling their home next year and moving to a smaller place. 

Bill is having nightmares of what to keep and what to trash. He wakes up in the midde of the night, worried that he put something from the keep pile into the trash pile. To calm himself, Bill heads for the garage and checks through the piles. 

Geri and Bill went to King Tut exhibit and joked that Tut never had to downsize; he didn't have to get rid of anything. That's true, but inside his gorgeous golden mask, Tut looks like any other 3,300 years old skeleton.

Golden Chariot, previously owned hearse, or ABC storage units, 

Even if you could take it with you, what would you do with it?

His Mother's Secret

When their mother died , it took Mark and Laura a week just to sift through four rows of boxes in the garage. Patricia had kept 65 years worth of letters, receipts, tax returns, warranties, report cards, Valentine, birthday and Mother's day cards. 

One shoebox, tucked inside a carton filled with linen she had never unpacked from her last move, overflowed with envelopes addressed to their mother in old-fashioned script on parchment stationery. The letters bore an unfamiliar address.  

Mark wanted to read them. Laura, sensing the letters might be personal, said, "No, Mom was entitled to her privacy. If she had wanted to share them, she would have done so."

Mark saved the shoebox, planning to sift through the letters another time. That time came six months later when they were vacationing with their families at the house on the lake they had inherited from Patricia. Everyone went fishing and Mark was alone. He pulled the box out from his suitcase. and read each letter, carefully reinserting it into its envelope when he finished it. 

Mark was stunned. His mother had loved his father's brother for forty years. Ashamed of reading the letters when he had agreed not to, Mark decided not to share what he had learned with Laura. It was his turn to bear the burden of his mother's secret. 

Does Mark have the same right to keep a secret that his mother had?

Do you have any secrets you don't want your children to bear?

The Dark Side of Trees

Last weekend, on a warm sunny day, a mother and her baby were having their picture taken under a green leafy tree in New York’s Central Park. A branch snapped off and fell; it killed the baby and seriously injured the mother. 

A few months ago, across the country in California, another tree branch snapped and hit the windshield of a woman merging into freeway traffic. She was killed instantly. Last year, while a friend’s family slept, a tree limb in their front yard toppled, crushed a car in their driveway and fell onto the roof, narrowly missing their own bedroom. 

On warm sunny days, leafy healthy trees don’t drop branches unless you’re filming ‘The Omen’. I’m using these tree examples as a metaphor for things that can’t be explained. We call them acts of God if they’re unexplainable, but bad. They’re called miracles if they’re unexplainable, but good. 


Either way, they’re random events. We can’t predict them or hope they won’t happen because we can’t even imagine that they could. Airplanes as missiles? Unimaginable until 9/11. Oil globules cascading onto hurricane lashed beaches in five states? Unthinkable until last week. 
We still sit under trees but they’re no longer just trees. As they bless us with shade on a hot sunny day, they also show us their kinetic unpredictability. Like people, trees contain the possibility of a dark side unleashed when we least expect it.