There is a short story often taught in writing workshops called “The Things They Carried.” It’s the title story in a book of linked stories by Vietnam veteran Tim O’Brien in which he describes the things his fellow soldiers carried with them onto the battlefield. Some were intangible things (love, guilt, fear) while others were physical (M&Ms, morphine, M-16s).
From the banal to the macabre, the soldiers’ possessions defined them, and it is through these sometimes strange, seemingly impersonal remembrances that the men come to life.
It’s no secret that our possessions define and humanize us. What’s sparked my recall of O’Brien’s story now is that my husband and I are preparing to move and, as such, we are sifting through 50 years’ worth of acquired stuff. There are the obvious things that need weeding, such as Fiestaware plates in numbers so large I once declared they would make even Andy Warhol cry (he was rumored to have thrown dinner parties for 2,000). There are the multiple can openers, the oversized Rand-McNally road maps (these make me want to run out and hug my GPS), and the books I’ve never read and never will until they appear on Kindle.
And then there are the things that we will unquestionably take forward into the next 50 years: shoe boxes full of photographs, my college roommate’s brass menorah, the 20-year-old Sequatchie County newspaper article about a fire scare at the mental health center in which my husband, proud administrator, was misidentified as a “fire victim.”
And diaries. Hundreds of diaries, because what if one day I forget what happened on Oct. 19, 1977? (I bought a black T-shirt — with a V-neck — at Lenox Square Mall in Atlanta and wore it to a midnight showing of “The Rocky Horror Picture Show.”)