As Boomers unpack their parents’ houses, a question persists: what to do with the National Geographics?
Many of us have borne the responsibility for taking apart the home of a parent, perhaps more than once. The disposition of a collection of keepsakes and trinkets, photographs and furniture, closets filled with clothes from bygone fashions forms the task. Often, the experience is shared, with siblings, a remaining parent, spouses, or special friends. It is bittersweet, though often more bitter than sweet.
Perhaps on the dis-assembly team, there is a pack rat wanting to take anything remotely nostalgic, useful or not. With luck, there is a family historian who can recognize what should remain in the family because it has done for generations, or the photo that will help keep memory alive for descendents. For the sake of balance, having a person involved who can recognize what has value outside the family and no intoxicating memories attached and devise dispositions that will become cash to the benefit of a surviving spouse or the heirs.
A Dumpster Dave or Darla helps, too, providing a base line judgment of what has further utility and what is beyond its useful life or structural integrity.
Whatever the cast of participants, the task is the same; empty a house that has been a home.
Remember when National Geographic was just a magazine, trademark yellow on the edges and spine, decorated with stunning photography on the cover and inside? No TV Channel or “films by,” blog or Twitterfeed. Just a monthly delivery of knowledge and pictures. One could learn geography, anthropology, entomology, astronomy and so on. Medical frontiers might appear if they could be brilliantly illustrated.
A recent issue featured our Prairie Home Companion writing about the geography of his childhood in the twin cities area of Minnesota. We were there with him, just as much as we had been with the writer and photographer in New Guinea or Uganda. The same issue featured brain research, complete with photos of the routes of our neurological highway system, color-coded like any good map.
My wife and I have a National Geographic connection. Her brother’s cover photograph of a Jewel Scarab Beetle in 2001 announced the article inside about collecting and classifying some of Mother Nature’s most dramatic and beautiful creations. For professional photographers, a Geographic cover is the big leagues. This time, an amateur captured an object that reached out to those who saw it and lured them into the magazine’s net.
Growing up, my family subscribed to newspapers, news magazines, Sports Illustrated, and a couple of health publications. And the National Geographic. None of the papers or weeklies stayed in the house beyond the time it took for them to be read, usually by the next edition. A useful article in one of the health magazines might linger longer. The Geographics were piled in the study, in the storage area, in the garage. Tossing a Geographic was unthinkable, like burning a work of art or shredding a completed dissertation.
Which piece of furniture might begin its time as a family heirloom now? How many photographs of her at age six are needed to sustain memory? Which trinket is really an artifact, conveying the nature and personality of the one whose physical possessions are being parsed? How to decide?
Valuable things are easier, if there is a will involved, designating who gets what. Valuable things are harder, in the absence of any designation, and there are heirs particularly attuned to who gets what worth how much. Sometimes unpacking a house leads to unpacking a family.
My wife and I have moved household goods seventeen times in our 47 years of marriage. Seventeen opportunities to cull the collection, and still there is a large household of furniture, keepsakes and knick-knacks. In an ideal world, we will move to smaller digs as we age, maybe to a retirement community where limited space will force difficult choices, like the choices made by so many others before us.
We don’t have kids, so it is unclear to whom would fall the chore of unpacking our house if we were to perish together in a plane crash. In that ideal world, there wouldn’t be much.
We never subscribed to the National Geographic. At least they won’t have to worry over those.