• They came on a truck

    A few months ago life presented us with a rare opportunity. My aunt was moving to a smaller place and couldn’t keep all of her furniture. We got a call, asking us if we wanted it – otherwise she would have to sell it or give it away. Normally Cheryl would answer a question like this with an unqualified and unequivocal: “No, we’ve already got too much stuff.”

    It became my mission in life to change her mind.

    It was my aunt’s furniture, but she wasn’t the original owner. Neither were the previous owners, nor the ones before them.

    In the early to mid 1800s, the Kauffmans settled in Walker Township, PA. They built a house and made a home. They made more than one actually, but one in particular stands out. It was never more than a small family farm, but I always knew it as the Kauffman family farm – a focal point for my family’s history – in a country that doesn’t have much more (in terms of time). I’ve only been there a handful of times, the last more than twenty years ago, but I look back on them now as almost religious experiences. In its later years, as fewer people lived at the farm, some of the original belongings at the house scattered. Quite a bit ended up at my grandparent’s house, mixed in with some old Rice family furniture (my grandmother’s family).

    My aunt got it all (or most anyway) when my grandmother moved into a nursing home. Now I was getting a turn. (To be fair, I didn’t have to do much convincing. Cheryl knew it meant a lot to me. I’m very lucky, in many ways.)

    The furniture arrived Wednesday afternoon, after weeks of anticipation.

    We’re still making room for it all, but it’s exciting – and a little scary. No one in my family lives in a house that could be mistaken for a museum. Furniture gets used, and I’m afraid of being the one to break something after over 150 years of service.

    The rope bedNow we have an old rope bed, the same one I slept in when I visited my grandparents as a child. My great-great grandfather Rice (or someone in his immediate family) was probably sleeping in it around the time Florida became a state, before the Civil War. A dresser, dining room table, and (buffet like) cabinet came with it – among other things. Some of it was made by my great-great grandfather Kauffman.

    I’m just as excited as ever to have it, but the little boy in me who lets anxiety get the better of him feels the weight of responsibility – the keeper of family history. I had a few small pieces already. When my grandfather died he left me some of the small tools used by the early Kauffmans of Walker Township, but it was different. Old tools can be safely and easily stored, not that anyone has much use for 150 year old planer.

    The grain binYou’d think having children would make me used to responsibility. After all, it is just stuff, right? I’ve never cared much about my stuff – with a couple of exceptions, but these are not like a television or computer designed for obsolescence. A grain bin finished with milk paint, built by my great-great grandfather Kauffman, sits in my family room. It’s basically a tall brown box. I’ve had it less than a week and it already means more to me than my bike. A month ago I didn’t know what milk paint was. I get chills and a little choked up lying on the bed, thinking about my grandparents, the time I spent with them, and the family I never met who sat where I lie now. The forks in my family tree suddenly feel like a straight line.

    Is it still just stuff?

    I’m not quite into the idolatry realm, or even valuing objects more than people, but I suddenly feel like I have more to lose. I like having a home and I’d be upset if we lost it, but I don’t think it would have been an emotional loss – assuming the people in my life were ok. I can’t say that now.

    The buffetI can’t decide whether it’s unhealthy to place this kind of value in things. Granted, this is different than a desire to accumulate things for their own sake. These things have come to be more than they were, by what they’ve come to represent: family, loved ones, shared history… and yet… none depend on the thing. If the bed goes up in flames I still have family, loved ones, and shared history.

    I think I’m ok as long as I DON’T start to value them more than the people in my life. We’re allowed to let things make us happy, right?

    Maybe emotional attachment to the things we have isn’t as bad as lust for the things we don’t, and I’m confusing the two. Are we (in general) a disposable society relative to other parts of the world? Do we make fewer emotional connections to things, with a perpetual eye for the greener grass? Maybe valuing some things, depending on what they are, makes us less superficial, not more.

    Maybe, in my typical fashion, I’ve WAY over-thought this.

  • Why you always backup your stuff

    I’ve got a post I’ve been working on for a couple days now, off and on (doing a lot of thumb typing on the phone in my spare moments). There’s a picture I wanted to include in the post, but I thought it was lost. It’s a favorite of mine, taken back in the dark ages when people used something called “film” which you then had “developed,” giving you your pictures – a racket not unlike the printer market these days.

    We’ve got way too many prints for albums, so we have photo boxes instead. I’ve had this picture out of the box many times, and one time I misplaced it.

    Anyway, this afternoon I had this hazy notion I might have scanned it and put it up on one of my early web sites – sites I have backed up, along with nearly every other bit and byte I’ve come across, on spindles of meticulously indexed CDs. Alright, maybe meticulous isn’t quite the right word. It took me a while to find it – but I did find it.

    It’s a picture from my last visit to the Kauffman family farm in Pennsylvania. It was the summer of 1991, and I was about to start my third year at UF. I’m the guy in the Hard Rock Chicago T-Shirt on the left, goofing with my great-uncle Raymond (who was great in every way). If only I’d known it would go missing… I’d have a much better scan. But this is infinitely better than nothing.

    Part of me wants to wait and post it with my work in progress, where the context will be richer, but I’m too impatient. I teared up when I found it (about twenty minutes ago). Even if no one cares but me, here it is:

    Summer91.jpg

    I’ll do the introductions a little later.

  • The next time

    People never get used to the unexpected.

    At the height of the terrorism scare of the early twenty-first century, uncertainty was the only constant. Governments raised alarms on anniversaries and holidays, only to find the biggest threat was sowing complacency. They fortified airports, so terroists turned to subways and buses.

    Fearing “weapons of mass destruction,” security efforts focused on “points of entry.” We looked outward, fearing what we saw: people not like us, and the public cried, “keep them all out!” Elected officials took advantage, whipping up a fearful fervor, and spending it like currency. They purchased large goverment contracts for barrier fences to prevent the next attack, biological research centers for vaccines and antibiotics to fight the next attack, and votes.

    But the terrorists discovered they didnt have to get inside to create fear.

    Everyone remembers what they were doing when terrorists, working in concert throughout the world’s developing nations, announced what came to be known as “The Bean Blight of 2024.”

    Within six weeks of the announcement, over 99 percent of the world’s coffee crops failed. Panic ensued. Crowds at Dunkin Donuts rivaled gasoline lines of the 1970s. Riots broke out at Starbucks when they stopped selling Frappuccinos. The President went on the air urging calm, conservation, and the virtues of tea. Conservative reactionaries stormed the major ports, seeking ships rumored to be carrying tea; though they quickly discovered modern container ships bore little resemblance to the sailing ships of the 18th century, and were easily rounded up by local authorities. Their hands were shaking, pain easily seen behind their eyes – clearly suffering from withdrawl. Many were sobbing entreaties to their captors:

    “Please mister, please! I need a grande, no-whip, iced mocha latte!”

    Productivity plummeted – followed by stocks and employment. News celebrities blamed an unsustainable “productivity bubble,” inflated by Americans reliance on coffee to boost alertness and production. Medical journals re-printed long ignored studies on sleep. Unions lobbied for naps.

    Hoping to avoid a backlash at the polls in the coming elections, Congress hastily passed The Taster’s Choice Act of 2024, scaling back regulations on new, artficial stimulants in the food supply.

    Ultimately it was the good ‘ole American, marketing spirit that saved western civilization. Coke was the first to capitalize. Red, white and blue advertisements began to appear everywhere, borrowing from a famous phrase in history: “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning for a caffeinated Coke and a smile.” Soon stimulant products were everywhere. Sales of energy drinks, previously limited to the under 30 demographic, long-haul truckers, and finals week, went through the roof. Cities briefly debated adding caffeine to the water supply, but soon the markets stabilized and cooler heads prevailed.

    In time the US economy recovered, but not without taking its lumps.

    Most of us never did acquire a taste for tea.