|
Gail Burk is a long-term member of the Friday morning feedback group. She is an avid genealogist and many of her stories center around family history. This piece was written in response to the writing prompt, "Hand-Me-Downs."
No matter how much money I have, and it’s generally not all that much, I’m drawn to hand-me-downs. There’s something appealing in acquiring and using things that someone else once treasured. It’s a little like cruising the bookcart of returned materials at the library, where I’m in the habit of serendipitously stumbling across items first discovered by other patrons. Not that I don’t savor the thrill of first discovery . . . it’s just the randomness of it that I like. How else to explain the wonder I felt upon first hearing the Mongolian throat singers CD, or the visceral comfort I’ve taken from running my fingers over the smooth sides of a piece of black-on-black Navajo pottery picked up at a rummage sale.
Hand-me-down living is not about the filling of closets or the accumulation of material goods. It’s about finding happy surprises in unexpected places. It’s as much about handing things off as it is about bringing new objects in . . . maybe the things I have decided to send on their way will make some other explorer smile. It’s like those paperback books travelers leave on the bench in a foreign land, to be found and perhaps read by a person unmet, then left behind on the metro, or tucked away in a night stand drawer at a rustic pension. I’ve never gone to the website that tracks these things, but I understand there is one. It’s like the sisterhood of the traveling pants so beloved by teenage girls, or a message in a bottle tossed into the sea, where it might cross paths with errant Japanese fishing floats headed for the coast of Oregon, or that crate of rubber duckies that fell off a commercial freighter several years ago and broke open, releasing the toys to bob about in the ocean, across international datelines, the equator, and even somehow navigating the arctic waters of the north pole.
In a literal sense, we hand down to our children and grandchildren the very traits that define us, and them. Our frizzy hair and double-jointed thumbs, the pug nose, the pervasive left-handedness. The thing that would tempt me most to have ten children would be my curiosity to see how many different combinations of physical characteristics and personality traits could be handed down from a single set of parents.
And maybe we hand down some of our talents and passions, too—the artists’ sense of line and color, the musician’s ear, a love of dinosaurs, the unquenchable springtime wanderlust that can only be assuaged by taking to the open road and roaming where the highway takes you until, spent by the quest, you have to stop, eat, sleep, in order to get up the next morning and do it some more. We may not always recognize these hand-me-downs, either in ourselves or our children. Mutations occur along the way, altering things just enough that they feel new and unfamiliar.
When I think about it, we are all the products of hand-me-downs. We’re the recipients of the political ideologies and religious tenets of our parents and grandparents, which we can choose to use and hand down, or elect to jettison to float away like the rubber duckies while we embrace something else. We can, and do, try to reinvent ourselves, and to some extent, we succeed. But I suspect we can never absolutely empty our metaphorical closets of all the handed-down oddments we’ve amassed. Without even thinking about it, we fold our towels in thirds because it is how we were taught, we perpetuate colloquial expressions from New England, Canada, or the Midwest, without ever having lived in those places and without knowing their origins. Generations later, we’re still using the old idioms, which imprint us with a sort of ethnic and cultural DNA which we, in turn, continue to hand down.
Maybe these intangible hand-me-downs are the most intriguing and beautiful of all; they make each of us who we are.
Gail Burk is an enthusiastic mother and grandmother. She is an artist, writer and genealogist. Gail lives with her husband in the Santa Cruz mountains. When pressed, she works part-time as a library clerk and paralegal.
|
Subscribe to RSS Feed
