In September 2002, I made the decision to move from California to Australia to live with my partner, and by December I was flying to Melbourne. In just two months, I packed up or got rid of all my material possessions.
As forty-one-year-old middle-class Americans go, I had relatively few belongings, but packing was unpleasant and seemed interminable. By mid-November I was working some sixty hours a week on the move, yet I saw no progress. In fact, my belongings seemed to be expanding.
And worse, no one could help me: I alone had to consider every object in my possession, from safety pins to automobiles, from furniture to love letters, from dream catchers to filing cabinets, from fishnet stockings to special rocks. I had to think about and handle every sock, every old toothbrush (kept for cleaning silver), every piece of paper fallen behind the desk. I found endless, useless, redundant junk: Plastic Mardi Gras beads. (I’ve never been to Mardi Gras.) A couple of eyeglass- repair kits. (I don’t wear glasses.) Dozens of paper napkins I never bought. Cat toys my cats never played with. Two (!) complete works of Shakespeare. Angela, my doll from 1963. A couple of hits of mescaline — enshrined since the early eighties in plastic wrap, inside tinfoil, inside cardboard — and a bag of pot, at least eight years old, kept for guests.
Excerpted from “All My Things Considered,” which appeared in the February 2004 of The Sun.
I gave away or recycled some 25 percent of what I owned, but for every remaining possession, I had to decide whether to sell, store, ship it, or throw it away. I hate to throw things away. A fanatical recycler, I cannot justify filling up landfills with plastic or metal junk. Tossing a perfectly good frying pan or pair of old pants seems not just wasteful to me, but selfish and wrong. And yet, some things really weren’t good enough even for charity shops. I am sure Goodwill turned around and put a lot of what I donated right into the garbage bin.
I had four garage sales. Two should have been enough, but I was anxious about money. Although I had more savings than ever before, I had little income because moving was taking all my time, and I knew I wouldn’t have a work visa in Australia. Feelings of financial insecurity made every sale matter, and fear made me ungenerous. I was determined to get at least four dollars for an incomplete set of wineglasses. A close friend and I got mad at each other over the price of a bed.
I hated negotiating and arguing with — or not arguing with but resenting — prospective buyers. I got angry if they bought nothing or haggled over my already ridiculously low prices. If I was selling CDs for a dollar, people asked if I’d take fifty cents. Sometimes, furious at their cheapness — and my own — I refused to bargain. Other times I took their quarters and nickels, and later, like Scrooge, I counted them up.
For the possessions I kept, it ended up costing about five hundred dollars to mail the smaller items to Australia, and another two thousand dollars to ship the rest by sea. It also took three thousand dollars to prepare, move, and quarantine my cats — about $165 per feline pound. In the process, I gleaned much bizarre information about shipping. For instance, it is illegal to mail goods overseas in boxes that bear the logo of any liquor. It is not, so far as I know, illegal to ship alcohol itself — just the boxes are prohibited.
If not being shipped, the things I wanted to keep had to be stored. But where? With friends or in professional storage centers? For how long, and under what conditions, and how much might it cost? I thought of such questions day and night, even in my sleep.
Why do we keep these things? What is it all for?
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