Notes from my Knapsack 1-21-21

Notes from my Knapsack 1-21-21

Jeff Gill

Parking in the garage

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So last month I did something that I hadn't done since last spring. I put my car in the garage.

Starting at the end of March, I began to bring boxes and items back from Indiana as my siblings & I, under our sister's magisterial direction, broke down and took apart the house our father helped build in 1963, which we needed to sell for our mother's sake after his death. But my basement was already "full" of much deferred decision making from years of camp directing and past book collecting and file accumulation, to the point of ridiculousness. Which meant it piled up in the garage, and my car went out into the drive in April.

While there was some brutal culling and Goodwilling and trashing (Goodwill & similar groups had early last spring reached saturation as much of middle America spent the pandemic doing their own house cleaning) on the Hoosier end, much still came home. Dad effectively added onto our childhood home twice, and it had about the square footage of all three of us kids's homes combined . . . and had most of the contents of my mother's childhood home stuffed into it from Kansas, Illinois (largely unsorted from its arrival in the early 1980s after Grandma's death).

All of which meant there were boxfuls and piles which just got carried home for more leisurely sifting than we could afford to do on our stolen long weekends back in northwest Indiana. We managed a sort-of outdoor memorial service for Dad there in July, then a big push in August and it went on the market, selling the next month.

But in August I also resigned from my full-time position in ministry, as it has become necessary for one or both of us to make frequent trips to Indianapolis to care for my wife's elderly father. Her mother passed five years ago, he lives alone in a house with many stairs, a home he will not leave, and the challenges have slowly but steadily increased: with COVID taking that all to a peak of complication, which we relieved by me stopping with parish ministry. And that resignation meant seventeen more tubs worth of books & papers coming home to the garage.

If you're following the math & geometry, that means I have since the end of August disposed of one vehicle's worth of volume of boxes, bins, and papers, plus an additional seventeen tubs worth, and in fact a bit more because there is now more room to turn around downstairs than there was a year ago, but everything is out of the garage. Call it a car and a half's worth. And I know I'm not done.

What's made this even more interesting is the archaeological process of delving into the 1920s of my maternal grandparents, the 1940s & 50s of my father & mother's young lives, their early marriage & home building, and of course the path of my own life, camp by camp and church by church, picking up and laying aside and often throwing away as gone and done and past and of no further use. My wife is not sentimental, and piles up much less because she just doesn't make emotional connections to stuff as quickly, and a good thing, too, or we'd be drowned in cellulose. She's been patient and supportive as I wrestle and occasionally weep over all these stories and glimpses of pasts that were and might have been.

More to do, indeed. But it was a strange and wonderful experience to get it managed and beaten down to where I have my parking place back under cover, not so much for no longer scraping my windshield, which I did for decades earlier in life, and did me no harm (wasn't great for the car, I'll grant you). It was part of the process of putting my own past in order, and looking towards whatever future it is I yet have to work with, in God's good time.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he like many clergy owns too many books, and yes you can, I regret to report. Tell him about your books at knapsack77@gmail.com or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.