Still nobody understands. These are Pittsburghers – oops, western Pennsylvanians who live in Lawrence County. Everyone has lived in the same home since the Kennedy Administration and everyone has the same PA license plate since Maz hit his walk-off homer in the 1960 World Series.
So I soldier on emptying my boxes of stuff. I set the goal of one box a day, and have been making slow progress. But today, with nothing on my schedule, I stopped “working” (that is, doing ministry) and spent the entire day in my play clothes emptying boxes. As of this writing as the Steelers exhibition game is beginning I’ve gotten rid of about 25 boxes, with maybe another 25 to go. (Yes, I’m thinking the same thing. How does a guy who makes only $2,000 a month, and a lot less in years gone by, accumulate so much stuff?)
This has been a productive day. I am operating in this excavation project with three principles: read everything; throw out as much paper and junk as possible; save every photograph. I’ve whittled it down to five flat plastic containers (like the kind you can shove under the bed) packed with photographs, one with my unfinished cross-stitch projects, and one with some personal papers. Six boxes of paper are waiting to be burned, and another dozen to be thrown in the dumpster. Going through these boxes has been like brief explorations into my history. The past jumps around, since I never organized anything, just accumulated it. This is much like Andy Warhol, who famously kept everything he ever touched or used in cardboard boxes, 610 at the time of his death. Archivists at his museum on the North Side of Pittsburgh have only opened about a third of them. Their findings range from a dried piece of wedding cake (not his), to $17,000 in cash, to $1 million in gemstones. I have no pretensions of being famous like Andy, or even after my death having a team of Vatican priests review my every article and letter for orthodoxy, to prepare for canonization.
Predictably I stumbled on a few surprises. I found several photos of my dad while in the South Pacific as a marine in World War II. There was a montage of his classmates in the Cecil High School class of 1940 (Washington County, PA), that I don’t believe I ever laid eyes on. Dad was easy to pick out. Mom kept all the photos my married brothers sent her of their kids growing up in Florida. I put these aside. In a week or so my brothers will get nice surprise packages. Mom even had lots of candids from their weddings, in 1981 and 1984.
I found the shot we put on the front of the worship aide for mom’s funeral liturgy. In front of our home at 1140 Michael Drive on a sunny day Mom has her arms around dad’s waist. Both are grinning. I’m pretty sure I took the picture when I was in high school, maybe even at the party after my graduation. Photos of all four of us boys are few. One was at Len’s wedding, with his wife in her beautiful white dress, dad and my brothers in tuxedoes, and mom in some kind of fur wrap. Another was from a half century ago, probably at Christmas 1960. Mom is holding baby Martie in her arms, as her mother Theresa sits in a rocker and we three boys look on. Theresa passed away in 1964, I think.
I seem to like to keep seasonal cards. So I had (and have thrown out) rubber-band-bound packs of cards from the last several Christmases, mom’s death in 2006, and even from the party when I got my doctorate in 1990. Names on the cards fly by, some still friends, bishops with their formal notes, parishioners now forgotten, a few who have subsequently died. All loving and caring souls whom I touched at one time or another. The dust of my history in these boxes simultaneously makes me feel so grateful for what God brought me and makes my life so small and insignificant. Food for prayer for sure.
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