Estate Sale

Books and books and more books. Mostly paperbacks. Some quite good texts, but mostly popular, pulp editions, faded, yellowed, moldy. Dishes, dishes, dishes. How many different, partial sets all a clattering? How many cups and mugs does a person need? Bric-a-brac out the wazoo. Vintage Christmas stuff. Twenty plus St. Nicholases, Father Christmases, Santa Clauses. Old vinyl records. Old, but newer CDs. An old woman’s clothes. A 1950s era case of August Schell beer bottles (New Ulm, Minnesota). Why would you hold onto a case of empties for 70 years, beginning almost 50 years before Ebay was even invented—and can now fetch a handsome $50 thereon. All that crap remained, even after it was overheard that half a dozen of her children had already laid their claims.

And in the garage, the walkers, the wheelchair, the plastic mattress, which triggered my sympathy. For an estate sale to happen, someone has to die. An old lady, and here her stuff. My old lady would never permit such accumulation, such a seemingly redundant, indiscriminate congeries of global detritus. She’s rather an avenging angel of minimalism—though she carried off some salad tongs and a pillow. The crap that posthumously becomes someone else’s crap is evidence, I suppose, of having lived and read—and shopped. But it is a melancholy legacy at best. In the basement among the clutter of dingier relics I encountered this timeless wisdom:

 

So true. There’s no room in the afterlife for all that stuff.

 

LXV

As of this November, I’m Medicared for, officially recognized by the government as an old man: 65—and now universally eligible for those senior ticket prices. Woohoo. I do not subscribe to the notion that we are 65 years young, that we are only as old or young as we feel. Happy talk. However our individual circumstances, we are in decline and slouch toward death. Average lifespan of an American male is 77 years and a few months. The Bible allots threescore ten. Family demographics suggest mid-80s; the Old Man lived to 95. So according to various permutations, I could live 5, 12, 20, or 30 years longer. Five, even twelve years, is not a long time. Gives one pause. Or I could throw a clot and fall off a ladder tomorrow (upstairs/outside window sill repair). Better folks have suffered worse. But here, at this moment, I’ve survived the first five years of seniority, advanced beyond the atrium of old age, and move now relatively freely in its chambers.

The outside world in which I dwell as an old man seems, at the moment, in dire straits, seemingly more dire than my own personal straits. Barring some kind of apocalyptic tipping point, the planet should outlive me in spite of our climatological woes and crimes, that is, the biosphere at large. Of civilization as we know it, I’m less sure. AI, pandemics, UAPs, social media and Bigfoot loom and lurk and threaten. Global geopolitics—Russia/Ukraine, China, North Korea, Israel/Gaza—are not encouraging. Thoughtful persons think that we, humanity, are at our most dangerous time in memory. And the future of the American Republic remains a serious question mark, if not a profane abbreviated aberration—WTF. That Donald Trump continues to exasperate the body politic with a singular virulence says much about the immunological state of the union. We are not just old, we are old in troubled times, and weakened.

 

But while we have never been quite here before, we have been here before, or someplace like it—one of the uses of old age: experience. Not that we know what to do in this case, under these circumstances, but that whatever we do, we’ll likely survive, until the day we don’t. Which is a resolution of a sort.

 

Still content to be here. Still curious.