LAST Saturday, on 350 Day, the International Day of Climate Action, which forward-thinking people everywhere celebrated with carbon-neutral acts of faith in a sunshine-powered future, I was awash in a sea of smelly detritus from the past, flailing around in musty tides of old shoes, T-shirts, plastic Christmas decorations, screws, Tupperware, plastic soap caddies, collectible figurines. Possibly even at the moment that Micah Posner was defending an old wrecked Honda against charges of racketeering and disturbing the peace in People Power’s trial of the automobile, I was regarding a vacuum-sealed package of something from circa 1989 called Garage Door Lubricant and quietly despairing for myself and all the living things of the earth.
The occasion was a garage sale. Our imminent move from a house with a two-car garage to one with no garage at all is necessitating a purge. It’s been a long time coming. My husband and I are packrats, which is bad enough, but in addition we’ve inherited my late mother-in-law’s modest household. And it turns out that her admirable frugality—so refreshing in an age of excess—has its own dark underbelly. She threw nothing away and prepared obsessively for repairs. Every bit of string, every picture hanger was saved against future inconvenience or calamity (see Garage Door Lubricant, above).
But even more interesting than what it said about her psychology, her habit of hanging on to things provided a window to broader trends in the late-capitalist economy. A dozen times that day my husband looked up from his own labors and commented that the ladle/salad bowl/blanket in my hands was the one he grew up with. These were solidly crafted items made, for the most part, from materials occurring in nature, and they were few in number. In the more plentiful items from the 1970s, more petroleum products show up—plastic belts on dresses, plastic bangles—until we arrive at the age of discount store shopping and such treasures as a plastic soap caddy with a suction cup that is supposed to stick to the wall but which, for 99 cents, probably wouldn’t have worked even if anyone had bothered taking it out of its molded plastic packaging.
I finished the weekend depressed, pissed off and wishing I’d watched the trial of the automobile instead. We’re Americans; we would always rather start a potentially prosperous new project than deal with the wreckage of a misguided old one. But there are good lessons in our junk, even if they do make us a little bit sick.
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