As I once observed in a previous column, most of the sand is in the bottom of my hourglass. My impending departure from this plane of existence doesn’t make me sad. I have had a hand in raising a wonderful daughter, and I don’t have much unfinished business other than my next walk with a dog or the next youth basketball game that needs a scorekeeper. But, while having the curtain drop on my life doesn’t sadden me, it sometimes makes me think.
Some of my thoughts are trivial, like my suspicion that I’ll never need to buy another belt. Other thoughts are a bit more serious.
Sliding toward the serious, the famous rich guy Malcolm Forbes is reported to have said that “he who dies with the most toys wins.” I admire greed, envy and pride as much as the next person, but I find myself feeling sorry for the poor schmo who gets stuck with the task of emptying out the toybox.
And, parenthetically, even when someone makes plans for postmortem toy distribution, those plans can go awry. Fifteen years before my grandmother died, she walked me around her house asking me to point out things I wanted to have after she died. I really liked a framed piece of needlepoint. My grandmother wrote my name on a piece of masking tape and affixed it to the back of the frame.
The needlepoint piece was not in my grandmother’s house when my father, my brother and I cleaned it out after her death. I never saw it again until 30 years after her passing, when it turned up in a crate that was sent to my brother, in his capacity as the executor of our cousin’s will. There, in the crate from my cousin’s house, was the framed needlepoint with my name on the back of the frame in my grandmother’s handwriting. Oops.
Turning to the philosophical dimension of the toybox conundrum, I am less inclined to follow Malcolm Forbes and more inclined to heed the wisdom of Nog, a character from “Star Trek: Deep Space Nine” who once explained a central tenet of the Ferengi belief system: “there are millions upon millions of worlds in the universe, each one filled with too much of one thing and not enough of another. And the Great Continuum flows through them all like a mighty river, from have to want and back again.”
When I think of objects carried along on Nog’s great river, it strikes me that many of us devote too much attention to the flow of things into our toyboxes and not enough attention to how they will flow back out again.
To be sure, the thrill of the hunt can be intoxicating, and acquisition has its attractions. Nancy Jo and I own many things we call treasures — artwork, mostly — and for many of those things, the stories of how we got them, often directly from the artists themselves, are an important part of what makes them treasures. So why consign those treasures to the vicissitudes of an estate sale? Far better, it seems to me, would be to create situations in which we can experience as much joy from moving things along as we experienced when we acquired them.
I have taken some steps in that direction. When I was in college, my parents gave me a Don Swann etching depicting the doorway to the English department at Washington and Lee. I recently sent that etching to the English department. When I graduated, my parents gave me an oil painting by I-Hsiung Ju depicting the ruins of Liberty Hall Academy, the first archaeological site I ever worked on. I have given that painting to the department of sociology and anthropology. I think I have found worthy ports of call for those two pieces of art as they float down the great river.
The next project is our art collection which includes more than 700 pieces. I don’t want to force our daughter to have to deal with that toybox, so we’ve had her select the pieces she wants. We plan on selling the rest during our lifetimes.
We have not worked out all the details, but we plan on partnering with a cultural institution and sharing the proceeds. Here’s what I envision. We’ll have a big opening reception, a farewell party for our art, and what does not sell that night will hang for a couple of weeks for people to visit and think about. I envision myself sitting in a comfy chair in the middle of the gallery telling the stories behind the artwork, to make the buyers’ acquisitions as meaningful as possible and to give me as much joy in saying goodbye to them as I had when I said hello.
Thank you, Nog.