DECLUTTER TOOLS, I: the digital camera

Many of us save what I call "fossils"--objects from our pasts--because we're afraid that once they go, the memories will too.
A digital camera is an elegant way to solve this problem. You can take as many images of the object as you want. You don't have to pay to print them or make room to store them. And you can use them--repeatedly and variously, if you wish--in artwork or legacy projects such as scrapbooks, albums, collages and more.

I began taking digital photos of my parents' odds and ends in the late stages of clearing out their home. The important stuff had been given to one of us kids, a friend or a charity by then. But there was a lot of unimportant stuff left that I found hard to let go of. Shirts or shoes I remembered them wearing. Miscellaneous plates, pots or pans. Cardboard boxes with my mom's handwriting on them. Lots and lots of silly bric-a-brac.

There was no way I could keep all these things, which totalled up to many, many boxes. Yet each had its own memory. Once I realized that I could honor the memory in photographs, the releasing of the actual stuff got easier. Not easy; it never got that. But easier. And in retrospect, I find that the images feel more respectful to my folks than keeping the actual things ever did. They're not stuck away in some box I never look at. They're permanently preserved. I can browse through them whenever I want. I can email them or share them. I can write about them. In other words, the photographs can be changed or used in ways that the things themselves could not.

As I began to realize this, I started taking quick digital photos any time I was decluttering something I knew needed to go but had some emotional hold on me. Projects I had decided I wasn't going to finish, furniture that served its purpose before, clothes I'd loved but no longer fit into. The images are a kind of record of the richness of the tangible mementos of my past...preserved in a way that honors not only my past but my present.

MY FATHER'S BOOKS: a recollection

As part of the book clearing out I spoke of in my last blog post I reluctantly shed some of my late father's books. My dad, Saul Fox, was an avid reader. Indeed, most of the time he put my own more scattered reading habits to shame. Progressive in politics, idealistic in philosophy and eclectic in interests, he regularly took on monumental tomes, reading what seemed like a scant handful of pages on any given day yet finishing even the most demanding volume both quickly and thoughtfully.


He did not like to discard books—as he often admitted, he had a Depression mentality about such things. And so, when he died, his bookshelves held evidence of the reading of many decades. Some of the books I remember from my earliest childhood: To Kill a Mockingbird, Profiles in Courage, not one but two copies of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, a book which I have attempted to read but never made it through.

From a few years later he owned A Thousand Days, The Death of a President, and a variety of other books on the Kennedys, though these were the exception to his usual save-it-forever rule; when John Kennedy's sexual exploits and role in Vietnam became public, Dad would have let those go had it not been for Mom's intercession. The Watergate years added a copy of Woodward and Bernstein's All the President's Men, as well as a variety of the gardening books he bought as he struggled with his first suburban yard (he was an apartment-house child) and built his own small greenhouse.

And so it went, each decade marked with its own thoughtful collection of titles. I'm sorry now that I did not make note of exactly what he was reading when he died in 2006 at the age of 81; that information would be interesting to me today, but it escaped me in the welter of emotions and tasks that follow a parent's death. I do remember that several books on the Iraq war were stacked on his "reading table" at that time, along with Haynes Johnson's The Age of Anxiety: From McCarthyism to Terrorism. I'm pleased to say that unlike The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, I did make it through Johnson's book, the intelligence and searching, almost searing approach of which seem entirely consistent with Dad's preferences and personality.

Dad's books are a deeply personal, deeply soulful part of his legacy, and it wasn't easy to release any of them. But a realistic assessment of space requirements in my home prevailed, shored up in moments of deepest doubt the image of my brother correctly asserting that he did not need physical possessions to remember Dad and Mom. I let go of some twenty books, keeping those titles that seemed most characteristic of his interests and values. It occurs to me, as I write this, that an even more soulful tribute to Dad than keeping his beloved books would be to read as frequently, passionately and persistently as he did...an inspiration from him that may not be a physical legacy, but is somehow an even more meaningful one.