It shouldn’t be this way, but a fair part of being a parent is inventory management as you try to work through all of the stuff that comes into the home. You are fortunate if you have links to other families with growing kids and are able to save money by sharing hand-me-down clothing. It’s a great thing but the down side is that you can’t control when it arrives and so you suddenly find yourself working through one or more bags to ascertain what might work. This process also involves corralling a resistant child who would rather have a tooth extracted than try on clothing. Dad, it fits, it fits already! kvetches the youngster as he edges towards the door in the hope of escape. But the process slows as the kids grow and reach their expected height and sense of style and the push to manage the inventory diminishes. There does come a time in middle age however, when the necessity to manage the inventory again grows and you find yourself handling boxes, bags and paperwork except that this time it’s on the other end of the age spectrum.
So precisely what do I mean by the other end? If you have kids when you’re younger, the other end will be the kids as they come and go to college and you suddenly find the living room or garage again full of boxes and bags brought home from school for the summer as they have to vacate dorm rooms and campus apartments. You turn around and Wham!, you’ve got a raft of debris filling the family space. If you’ve had kids when you’re older, then the other end will consist not only of the kids returning but also the elders who are liable to be looking to lighten their own load. About two years ago, my mother-in-law – actually a wonderful woman – showed up to visit and handed me a box of old tupperware containers with the comment This makes me happy, so just say thank you. The saving grace in this little episode is that it was a ripple on the shore compared to the tsunami that arrived years ago when two elderly relatives on both sides of our family entered retirement facilities in the same summer, an event from which my garage has never fully recovered and has led to the requisite rental of a storage unit. That summer’s nadir was the arrival of a one-horse plow fished at the last minute from the suburban backyard shed of an elderly grandmother, who had kept it out of a sentimental attachment to her North Carolinian farmer-father. That it wound up at our house was a testament to the amount of items and the rapidity with which they had to be disposed. My wife’s thought was just bring it north and we’ll figure out what to do with it.
Why go to the effort of trying to sort and manage it instead of just tossing it into a dumpster? First, there is actually an emotional component to some of the items. I began writing this article in my spare time three nights ago and last night, Eldest – now a college graduate – inquired about a half-completed quilt begun for her many years ago by her now-deceased great-grandmother. It is presently wrapped and stored in our basement and I suspect that she’ll pull it and complete it herself. But the other reality is that there are also heirloom and economic issues as well. Our own children will become adults and anything that we can do to help get them established – and providing them with quality furniture checks off that box – is worth the effort. They might not appreciate an heirloom solid cherry desk or bedroom suite now, but I expect that they will when they’re older and don’t have to fork over money for knock-off imported crap. It’s not for nothing that we took in a 75 year old single owner Baldwin baby grand piano from a deceased family friend; Middle already loves the instrument and we’ve all agreed, even his siblings, that it will someday go to him when he is capable of taking it. What that means for us is that we’ve had to rent a storage unit and take care of what and how we place furniture there in order to maintain it and prevent its ruin. It also means an on-going review and debate of what we can and need to keep as we move forward.
What are some of my criteria?
If you sit back and consider them, you’re likely to find that there are other decision criteria than what’s just listed above. But the important thing is to understand that the time is likely to come when you’re going to be involved in helping to manage the inventory of elderly friends and relatives. When it does, determine your criteria and then hew to it as closely as possible.
Just what did happen to the horse-drawn hand plow? After a few weeks sitting in the garage as we worked through the other items, my wife suggested that I contact a local state historical museum that specialized in early American agriculture and I did so, leaving multiple messages over several weeks with the director and receiving no response. Several weeks after the last phone call, the plow went to the curb to the curiosity of neighbors and garbagemen. Two weeks after that, the museum director called me back.
But at least the plow was out of my garage.