Objects of Affection

searching for signs of meaning

I’m rewatching Sex and the City— a show I used to love— and though I’m stunned into embarrassment by the misogyny and other generally gross affronts— it is an interesting bit of love anthropology none-the-less.

In season three our very minuscule protagonist, Carrie (the beautiful SJP if you have been existing under a rock your entire life), realizes she has left not a single one of her possessions at her significant other—Big’s, apartment. No evidence of their closeness or intimacy or even just of herself— so she leaves a toothbrush, tampons, underwear, make-up. The next time he visits her he has a gift bag returning all of the small traces she left. She is crushed and they breakup (again). It reminds me that things, their presence, accepting their presence, is a form of intimacy. Holding on to them exposes our vulnerabilities, our longings, our loves.

My house brims with relics that of course, represent memories. I can’t get rid of them or I will certainly forget something, sometime, somewhere, which most always involved a someone dear to me. My marriage was a considerable chunk of my life that included two children (the best kind of objects of affection) so I don’t need, or want, things to remember it by. I do have Pablo, a beautiful sepia photograph of a nervous baby hippo glistening in his own oil, and that was a gift from my ex-husband. As far as what Pablo means, that is for only me to know.

From my ex boyfriend (though he called himself my ‘partner’), other than photographs of us and notes and one little craft he made me, I have only one thing, or set of things rather. It is the hardware and wiring necessary to wire an antique pendant that I wanted to hang over my tiny cafe table in my kitchen. The gift came with a promise to teach me how to wire it. But it’s in a grocery bag, in the closet. It’s not a fond memory but I actually still want the pendant.

Since he exited my life with no contact, I sometimes want overt proof that “we” existed. I don’t know how to navigate the strange ambiguous loss, especially while I am awash in other ambiguous loss right now. I want to say “you can’t disappear me,” but I don’t think hiring an electrician to hang my pendant would soothe that ache. If I had his toothbrush, some socks or chonies, if he had had a drawer at my house, I would dump his things on his car. I put the pictures of us, and little craft he made me, in an envelope to mail back to him in a fit of defending my self-worth. I put in in my mailbox on a Sunday morning, and grabbed it out of the box just barely before the mail carrier drove away with it on Monday afternoon. I think maybe because in his act of disappearing, disappearing us and disappearing me, this might feel like the final disappearance. So I decided to leave it in a drawer. Evidence of existence. Maybe for the trash, maybe for a great grandchild.

My daughters recently lost a grandfather and my younger daughter brought home a small pile of his things. Among them, some tiny objects from his own mother’s bedroom. A small snuff box made of amber, still full of tobacco. Maybe her fingerprints still cover the amber of the box. A tiny silver vial of kohl for her eyes, with a little silver wand inside, still able to pull kohl and draw it across my daughter’s eyes. Small, pliable diaries with perfect Arabic script covering the pages. The writer of which probably could have never dreamed Google Translate might one day read what lies within. But I realize that with their grandfather’s passing, their great-grandmother died anew as well. Because they cannot hold her in mind— they never knew her or touched her or heard the sound of her laugh. All of that lived in his mind only. And so the snuff box, the tiny silver vial, the diaries— all still lovely and holding meaning— are no longer memories of her. There is no one to do the act of remembering.

When I was very young I gave my dad a set of small sample cologne bottles that enchanted me. They were lovely— tiny, glass, each it’s own geometric shape, each with a little logo and different type of cap. He set them on a special shelf in his bedroom where they caught the diffuse light from the porch window, with just a smattering of other treasured objects, and they lived there for almost forty years. When I saw them as an adult, they stirred my heart. Real evidence of me. Of the love I had for my dad as a child. Of his affection for the child I once was, and in turn, for me.

Later, his new wife got rid of those bottles. And it is no matter. Because the fact that they caught the light for forty years on that shelf he built with his own hands is enough for me to know how I existed in his mind and in his heart.

My dad has always written notes and he still tries, on days he can still hold a pencil. Maybe one or two days a week he is able to scratch out a word or three. Mostly illegible, sometimes I take them home and leave them around my house. Evidence of him. Of this habit of his that I share.

Last night I sat in memory care for dinner. One of the residents wears what we called “pony beads,” brightly colored plastic children’s beads, in two large strands on his large wrist. I imagine they are from a grandchild but I don’t ask him because I don’t want to embarrass him if he doesn’t remember.

My friend whose husband recently died said the hardest thing to give away were his slippers. She said she hated them. She hated the way they scuffed across the floor and came undone over and over again so much so that she started refastening the velcro by pushing on them with her foot, she got so tired of bending over to close the velcro flaps. But they were bright present memories of him, in the end. Of his aliveness, his scuffing, his feet. And she kept them, and when she told me she cried and she asked “why am I keeping these things that I hated? They were truly the bane of my existence.” And it is because to know him, these past years, to really know him as she did, was to know the slippers he wore everyday.

And I imagine that the fictitious Carrie felt like she could be disappeared with no relics left in her absence. Where was the tender hanging on? And my ex, with so little of him here, I wonder— what of him? What of us? What evidence… what did we mean at all? And the pony beads adorning my friend in memory care—evidence of a beloved grandchild, somewhere, far away I believe. And my children’s grandfather, an almost 90-year-old man with the tender keepsakes of his mother’s daily use—she died when he was in his 20s and for all these decades these small tokens of memory lived with him in his bedroom. And my dad… should you have wandered into his bedroom and found the little shelf of miniature bottles, and should you have known they were from a 7-year-old daughter, long since grown: evidence of a particular kind of care, a particular kind of father and a particular kind of life. If you find these bottles, probably trashed or hopefully donated to Goodwill, I would like them back.