Things

I am a person who tends to see, and sometimes create, connections between things. An object or experience often takes on symbolic meaning for me. What surprised me today is the stubbornness with which I cling to the thing even when I think I've let that meaning go. Even more surprising is that I can appreciate new meaning.

My husband and I have been cleaning out the basement. However, a clean basement is not the goal in itself. Rather, we have been looking for things to sell. For the past eighteen months, we have been on a financial journey together and last month we hit a milestone. With the help of financial guru Dave Ramsey, we went debt-free except for our mortgage. That's a big "except," but we celebrate that we are out from under my student loan, four credit cards, and a bank loan for my husband's Harley-Davidson. One of the ways we achieved this was to sell some of our things. We have said good-bye to an old bicycle, some leftover wood flooring, a bamboo papasan chair, and a pair of winter boots, among other things. It has been easy to relieve ourselves of all of this stuff, largely because we thought these things either had something wrong with them or were somehow used up.

Then we dug deeper into the piles, and I saw the neatly stacked boxes of law school textbooks that have been sitting there quietly since I moved into this house after Matthew and I got married. I have carried these boxes with me from apartment to apartment for ten years. In reality, these books have gone from storage unit to basement to garage to basement, as I have never wanted to live with them out in the open in my home or in my office. They were an important reminder of who I was once, and of something big I felt I had done by going to law school. I knew now that it was a perfect time to finally part with them, because I don't need that particular reminder that I am someone anymore. So I decided to sell them. I placed an ad in Uncle Henry's, our local swap and sell magazine. The first week, no calls. I lowered the price and ran the ad again. This week, I got the call. I felt so excited to free up space downstairs, and to get the books off their slow path to moldy destruction. I was going to set the albatross free, and myself too in the process!

I brought the books upstairs to load into my car, and then it happened. I decided to take a quick look through the boxes one last time. Instantly, they protested, "But you loved Criminal Law - that's what made you go to law school!" "What if you need me when you write your own will!" "You've always wanted to go into mediation and you'll be sorry you kicked me to the curb!" The chatter was loud and took me by surprise. I felt a small panic, because I'd already agreed on a price with the buyer, I knew I didn't want the books, but I suddenly felt I had to keep them - what was going on? If I cared so much about them, why have I always relegated them to the basement? I closed the boxes and stacked them by the basement steps, neither here nor there.

I let the books sit a day, and then went back down the stairs. I looked at each one of them and asked them to help me with my confusion - to tell me why they were so special and why I should still care. They individually made their arguments, and I quickly noticed they all started with "You might..." and "What if..." all except for one. This was a bound packet of course materials created by my most admired professor, Professor Gregory.

Professor Gregory was the one whose thought process was like the system of roads in Washington, DC. Take a wrong turn and you could end up on a dangerous street, a place where no one should go alone. His classes were the reason I persevered through law school. He held a class rapt, some students out of fear or confusion, but not me. I was excited, thrilled by intellectual discovery, which always came as a surprise in his classroom. He walked with us in that he acted the part of the student himself, wild with humor and dry wit and the mannerisms of someone living centuries ago. I loved him and felt he was kindred. He loved the law and all of its strange ways, and he made me unafraid to try and tame the beast too. We stayed in touch after I graduated, and when the news of his death came a few years later, I cried for the loss to the planet of this special man. I did not attend his memorial service, but instead prayed and thanked him when I went to Mass that week.

Flipping through the collection of his materials, I said outloud, "They aren't making books like this any more." They aren't making people like him either. The other old textbooks now showed themselves to be ballast, a layer of nothingness around this thing that is still worth keeping. And it's coming upstairs with me.