Tuesday, November 26, 2013

What's in your closet?

This isn't going to be a post on gay rights.  I'm all for that now, after a few decades of being confused about it all.  Hey, growing up in a very conservative, very traditional mid-century household will make you confused.  But, I've come to embrace equality in marriage.  No, this blog is really about the stuff in my closet.

Broccoli Rob and I recently got back from a trip to Florida, home of the 55-and-over active retirement communities.  Though we're not ready to make any decisions about moving yet, I have in my mind that I'D LIKE TO RETIRE at a relatively early age--62.  Though when we 'crunch the numbers," it really seems unlikely that I can manage this financially, unless I'd like to consider a used trailer home to live out my retirement years.  

But the trip got Broccoli Rob and I thinking.  Of course, he's thinking that the trailer from "Deliverance" is just fine and I'm thinking of a cutely decorated new condo and planning each retirement day with fun things to do.  So we start to think if we should downsize now.  Right now, we're in an adorable condo with lots of stuff in it.  And I'm the type of person who always gets rid of 'stuff.'  Just ask my kids.  "Hey mom, where's my so-and-so?"  "Went to the thrift shop a while ago."  "Figures."  So despite all my round-ups for the thrift shop, there's still a lot of stuff.  

But this morning, I open my big basement closet to start considering clearing out the clutter, and I glance at the packed shelves and racks, and then close the door.  I just wouldn't know where to start.  There's stuff there that I've saved forever and it's starting to hit me, what am I saving this for?  And the next question is, "do I cart this unpacked stuff to the next house, I mean trailer."

I have EVERY Playbill from all the Broadway shows I've ever seen, going back to my first show in 1960-ish.  ("My Fair Lady").  Loads of boxes with Playbills.  I once tried selling some on EBay, but there's really not a market for these.  It's just personal ephemera, useless to anyone else and thrown away by most.  (Sidebar:  I once sold a program on EBay from an early 1970's performance by Bette Midler at the Capitol Theater in Passaic, NJ, and got 20 bucks!)  But I can't- no make that don't- want to get rid of my Playbills.  I've thought of using the covers to wallpaper a basement wall, but then my 50 years of Broadway memories will be in someone else's home if we move.  If they were easily available and organized, I'd love to peruse through them, reminding myself that I saw Bette Midler before she was famous, as one of Tevya's daughters in "Fiddler on the Roof."  But they're not organized and not perused.

Other stuff in that closet too--loads of extra yarn, thousands of family photos, several photo albums I made before I became a wife/mother/dietitian, the kids school supplies (they're now all grown up), prom dresses (kids, not mine, I wasn't asked to the prom, fodder for another blogpost), my mother-in-law's old kitchen stuff and a HUGE piece of framed artwork that my mother-in-law gave to my husband when she downsized and moved to a nursing home.  The picture is a big triangular splash of different colors and I never liked it when it hung in her immaculately decorated condo when she lived there.  I remember one of her friends and I were studying that particular piece of artwork in her apartment and he said that it looked like a vagina to him.  Since that day, I can't look at the picture without wincing.  So that's in my closet too, big and vagina-ey, reminding me that my mother-in-law and I never really had a relationship anyway so why would I want to feature this framed monstrosity in my cute red living room?

So, the closet door is closed for the time being.  Stuff in there I just can't part with and a big picture that Broccoli Rob hopes I'll change my opinion of and hang up in our home.  And it all gets me to think about this possible move to warmer climate.  


Though warmer is better to these aging bones, especially on this cloudy, chilly day, moving out of this area will take me far from The Great White Way, and now I'm thinking I don't want to be so far.  And mazel tov to the state of NJ for allowing marriage to those whom you love.  Oy, what my grandparents would be thinking.