Talk of the Town - A moving experience January 01 2004

“No man,” goes the observation, “is a hero to his valet.”

We have slipped into a severe valet shortage since that bon mot was uttered centuries ago, but it can be spoken with equal vigor by the valet’s modern successor — the moving man.

When all your worldly goods fly around you with the demented abandon of a Monegasque trapeze team, when dust bunnies the size of stevedores leap from dark, dank corners, when you come to the paranoid, pseudoscientific conclusion that your belongings are reproducing behind closet doors, the moving man bears witness.

We had four moving men, which seemed a goodly number until it became clear that Schloss Slattery, a modest two-occupant and three-bedroom McMansion, had secret tchotchke-packed recesses reminiscent of Les Freres Collyer.

Anyone of a certain age knows about the Collyers, a pair of eccentric brothers found dead in a crumbling New York brownstone a half-century ago. The place was so crammed with materiel (136 tons at final count, including 14 grand pianos and medical specimens picked under glass) it took authorities who found the first deceased Collyer three weeks to locate his equally moribund sibling. The two spawned a quasi-medical term, Collyer Brothers Syndrome, to describe those with severe hoarding instincts.

My spouse and I haven’t quite reached Collyer status, but give us time. What’s insidious about our pack rat instinct is the corresponding ability to show a normal face to the world. Friends and relatives who marveled at the order and cleanliness of our daily, functioning home, screamed with terror when they saw its entire contents unleashed from bin, belfry and backwater.

We had multiple layers of primordial debris — including a childhood Etch A Sketch, high school memorabilia, old bell bottoms I couldn’t fit into if you had me shrunk by New Guinean shamen, as well as inherited bric-a-brac representing every defunct form of music storage device from Edison cylinders and 78s to 45s and 8-track tapes — so tightly packed into sundry domestic orifices that they had a definite future as fossil fuel.

The movers, of course, saw it all before.

“Folks sure can accumulate stuff,” one said.

I agreed. At the time I contemplated a massive stack of Depression-era Reader’s Digests passed on from my grandfather, who shared that publication’s general view of Franklin D. Roosevelt as a communistic, socialistic, anarchist plotting to cause both the Dust Bowl and swing music, while destroying American free enterprise on the side.

What do you do with such things? You can’t throw them out. It’s family lore. So you put it in a box — a lot of boxes — and lug it to the next locale.

“Folks sure can accumulate stuff.”

The mover said it again while toting a long, platre de Paris vase belonging to my grandmother. The battered Edwardian artifact, once decorated by a diaphanous nymph that clung to its side, has lost standing in both the vase and nymph departments as chunks give way to time and generations of family butterfingers. At this point, it appears to be decorated by a headless, legless dishtowel.

Again, what to do? Bounce Gram’s favorite object d’art? Impossible.

At one point our soon-to-be vacated living room resembled the penultimate scene of that quintessential American screen classic, Citizen Kane, when a man’s entire existence is seen through the flotsam and jetsam acquired during a lifetime. Except instead of Charles Foster Kane’s “Rosebud,” my dying words would be “Etch A Sketch.”

And there is something very American about this getting and keeping of stuff. Perhaps because so many of us are descended from immigrants who came over with nothing, or little more than what their backs or a steamer trunk could carry. Maybe it’s because we’re a big country, and a law of physics decrees that matter expands to fill a vacuum. (At least I think it’s a law, I got straight D’s in physics.)

Anyway, this moving experience caused me to contemplate my personal value system, as well as a tube of Ben-Gay. Had I become a true bourgeois, one whose possessions, as per a definition by film auteur Rene Clair, were the essence of his very being?

(Actually, old Rene used an earthier, ruder anatomical term to describe this relationship.)

Or how did the moving man put it, for the 57th time that day?

“Folks sure can accumulate stuff.”

“YEAH, THANKS FOR THE NEWSBREAK YOU BIG DOPE! YOU THINK I DON”T KNOW I’VE GOT A LOTTA CRAP HERE?”

Just a momentary loss of cabin pressure, ladies and gentlemen. Please resume your seats, if you can still find them underneath the Mitch Miller LPs.

Because I’m now convinced that the true path to happiness lies in that taken by St. Francis of Assisi. Born into a wealthy mercantile family during the 12th century, Francis decided to lead a life of spiritual contemplation and forego all earthly possessions.

Except that Etch A Sketch.

glen.slattery@creativeloafing.com


Glen Slattery is leading a life of bourgeois contemplation in Alpharetta.