started 12/13/2024
Part of the whole process of closing a restaurant I've been running for 15 years is clearing out. I'm losing a lot of storage space that I've taken for granted for quite a while so I now find myself sifting through all the stuff of my life. And that's a real process in and of itself, I'm discovering.
Every object, box, milk crate is being looked at critically. Keep? Dump? Sell?
So, that's meant a lot of Facebook marketplace listings, cleaning out my entire house to make room for whatever incoming unpartables I deem worthy, and even going down the rabbit hole of scanning old family photos into digital format.
This restaurant closure has coincided with a whole bunch of other life-changes for me. My parents just recently moved to a smaller, one-story situation, so they ended up unloading a lot of the "stuff of life" onto me, and that included a few boxes of family photos. Rabbit holes = distraction = not thinking about being unemployed! I'm in!
I take a carload of stuff from the restaurant every day, unload it into my garage, and sift through the stuff in the evenings after work. It's wild how going through the stuff you shoved into a milkcrate decades ago can bring you right back to that moment and how you felt about yourself and your life at that particular time. My high school letters (never got the jacket), a few game balls from little league, weird random highlighted scrawlings I saved from college, zines I bought in Barcelona, handwritten menus from the restaurant I worked at in Bologna....Every single item brings memories, feelings, smells, insecurities, situations flooding back. I can still remember the musty smell of the sub-basement I had to climb a ladder down into to get Francesco the menu paper so he could write the menu for that night's service.
At 55 years old, you start to let go of some of the sentimental attachments to the STUFF. Especially after seeing my parents' accumulation and how hard they ended up working to thin it out when they moved. Can't take it with you, right? Just stuff. So I've been doing a lot of letting go.
And that's hard. Because when you toss certain things into the garbage, it often means letting go of the dream you had around that thing. The potential. The use you could've gotten out of that thing, the cool project you were going to use it for.
Or sometimes, it's the memories around it. As I tossed the last of my bootleg Grateful Dead cassettes with their trippy hand-drawn paper sleeves emblazoned with "Ithaca" or the "Warfield 1980", I felt the sting of letting go of the memories of duping those tapes, drawing those sleeves, and listening to those shows with friends I've slipped out of touch with.
But the cassettes are gone and I still have the memories. I hadn't listened to the tapes for multiple decades. I don't even have a cassette player anymore. They're just chunks of plastic taking up space because of sentimentality.
I took a huge 60-lb bin full of my beloved beat-writer-era books to the used bookstore thinking I was dropping valuable treasures on them and realized halfway through that they were basically doing me a FAVOR by paying me $4.50 for all of it. Including the bin.
Parting with the memories of the time in my life when I read all those books, though, and how it felt to live vicariously through those writers felt almost like abandoning a future potential version of myself. There was a long lost loose dream still kicking around in there where maybe someday I would be the protagonist in a Kerouac novel. An artist. A traveler. Free spirit. A Writer. Someone who does something creative, original, and makes a mark on the world with it. Something that's maybe borderline important, even if the world doesn't fully appreciate it as being that at the time I'm doing it.
Folks who care about me would probably say that's exactly what I did by creating Edzo's and running it with all my heart and soul for 15 years.
That's a comforting thought as I continue to sift, assess, ponder, and go down the rabbit holes of my life, flashing back to my past selves back when I was full of plans, potential and dreams vs. where I find myself at 55. Hopefully I can allow myself to buy into that thought.
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You are amazing Eddie! Life moves on, children grow older, and we move on to our next Acts [~; My best to you and your entire family!!!
Slightly older than you (57) but going through a similar situation. Have to move by spring but accumulated a lot more than I thought I had. Great memories but haven't gone through stuff in at least a decade. "It's just stuff."