Downsizing Your Life

Downsizing Your Life
By Charles E. Kraus

The kids want us to downsize.  Each time they visit, they look around – eyes landing on the books and records, the CDs, the tchotchkes lining – filling, really -- the living room shelves, and they open the overflowing hall closet.  Just curious.

Have you removed anything?  They want to know.

And my wife answers that just yesterday, she donated a box filled to the brim with ancient gloves (mostly singles, missing mates)(she’d been waiting to see if the absent partners showed up), some gently used undergarments, several combination locks for which we no longer remembered the combinations, and … they’d be happy to learn, four books – duplicate copies of Robert Crais mysteries.  That guy sure can write.  She even gave ‘em the box that held these treasures.  Goodwill is erecting a statue in our honor.

As we ease into our 70s, the kids feel we should either discard all the stuff we no longer use, or need, or we should establish a trust fund authorizing a professional estate sale service to hold a mega sale as soon as we’ve been hauled away to the nursing home, or returned to sender, which ever comes first.

I don’t blame them.  This is a large house.  And having lived here for more than a quarter of a century, my wife and I have had an opportunity to stock it with lots of interesting, useful, or potentially useful trinkets.  You never know when you are going to need a snakebite kit, or a carton of rather colorful feathers (for art projects).  We don’t do art projects, and our kids have already rejected the craft supplies.  But, when our granddaughter gets a little older, she may become interested in gluing feathers onto costumes, formulating collages, perhaps feathering the walls of her room.  Someone went to a great deal of trouble to collect these … actually, lets start even further back.

God, nature … whatever your evolutionary speculation – thought up birds and added them to the list of species.  The birds grew feathers, a few of which got dislodged during long flights.  Then a guy, or a woman, spotted the feathers on the ground, retrieved them, brought them home, collected them, and eventually got them into our storage room.  After all that effort, do we have the right to simply heave these efforts into the trash?

It is true that the storage room contains two cartons labeled “collected art work of Danielle and Rebecca.”  The masterpieces represent our daughters’ best efforts during their preschool years.   The girls don’t even want to look at this stuff.  Actually, it’s not particularly exciting.  But the samples represent a sliver of who they were back when.  They are artifacts, if not art, of personal history.

I’ve been collecting books since I was a preschooler.  That’s a lot of years, and a lot of books. Thousands, actually.  I’ve read about half of them, and have plans to get to the rest as soon as time permits.  Well, some of the rest.  Once you start calling yourself a collector, you have certain obligations.  You see yet another John Updike tome (he wrote about a trillion of them), you feel obligated to add it to your collection.  I don’t think I’ll read his book about golf, nor the art criticism. Mine is an impressive library, not easily reduced.  I’ve been meaning to find a foundation, or a university, perhaps some student with reading habits similar to my own, to whom I can bequeath these volumes.  The kids use Kindles.

Downsizing requires reducing more than what you own.  It requires reducing your interests, your expectations, and hopes and dreams for the days that remain.


You get to that downsizing, dad?

Yea, I’ve started by eliminating a few items from my ‘hope to do’ list.  Crossed off prospecting, hiking the Appalachian Trail, and learning to play the piano.  I’ll donate the electric keyboard, but I’m keeping the boots.