Better Put Your Name On It

It all started with my sister, Stacy. Since she was the oldest and had started a family first, she began requesting, or in some cases, commandeering things from my parents house. Nothing huge. The first I remember is that she took all our original Winnie-the-Pooh books.



"What do you mean she took them?" I asked my mother.

"I don't know," she said. She was sitting in the living room floor, working on that week's ballet class. She looked up at me and said, "She asked if she could take them, and since I wasn't doing anything with them, I said yes."

I just looked at her.

"Oh honey," she said, "I didn't know you wanted them. They were just a couple of old books. You can have something else."

The thing was, I didn't really want anything else. I was a bachelor living in an apartment in Philadelphia. I had no wife, let alone kids. I don't even know what I would have done with the books, but it was one of the few artifacts from childhood that might have meant something to me. I would have liked to have them, but I had missed out. Apparentlty, the memories of my youth were already being plundered and if I was going to get in on the action, I was going to have to start thinking ahead.

Looking back, I realize it didn't really start with my sister, really. In college, I got the idea that since my grandmother was getting old, I needed to go visit her and write down some of her stories. I took a week off, and flew to Oklahoma City, OK and spent a week at her house. We looked through old photo albums and she told me stories of great aunts and uncles, great grandparents I never knew, and her days growing up in Kansas. During that time, I showed interest in some of her old books.

"Well," she said. "I'll just have to put your name in them, and when I die, they'll be yours."

This started me thinking, and I asked her about some of her paintings. My grandmother, who we called Nino, was an amatuer landscape painter. Her work was quite good, but they were all copies. To my knowledge, few of her paintings were original compostions. There was one in particular that I especially liked. It had hung in the den in my grandparents old house and I had spent hours as a young boy, lying on the old leather sofa and staring at it. The painting was of an old horse-drawn wagon filled with hay, on a country road. My grandmother said that getting the hay right had been the hardest part and she had struggled to make it not look like a big hairdo. It was by far, my favorite. But again, I was too late. An older cousin who lived in Oklahoma had already claimed it. So I asked about another one. The painting of the old dutch windmill. She put my name on it, and years later, much to my Aunt Carolyn's dismay (it had been one of her favorites, too), I was given the painting.

My wife, Jane, considers my family's discussion of post-death memorabilia to be peculiar at best, and morbid at worst. She calls it my family's preoccupation with death. I simply like to think of it as a practical way to avoid a bitter family argument over who gets what. It's not a perfect system, but then what is?



Surprisingly, we haven't split my parents house completely up, yet. For one thing, they're still young and very much alive. But we have begun dividing and conquering already. My little brother, Brad, and his wife somehow got to the piano first, but not before I'd snagged the piano stool, which had been my Uncle Will's. Somebody got Uncle Will's old chair too, but I don't remember who. Probably Stacy.

Stacy and I have different connections to the things in my parents house than our younger siblings do. Stacy and I, for instance, remember when that stationary rocker sat in my Uncle Will's house in Joplin, MO. To my other brothers and sisters, it's just a chair they've always known. It doesn't hold any more, or less, sentimentality for any of us. It just has its basis in different memories.

The grandfather clock, that I managed to snag, probably has more sentimental value for some of the younger kids, because they probably don't remember living in the house without it. In fact, as far as my youngest brother is concerned, my parents have only ever lived in one house, whereas I think of their house on Broad Street in Hatfield, as just their most recent home. But I think I grabbed the clock when I found out the piano had been taken. It was more of a desperation move.

Some of the items we've claimed, my parents have given up to us immediately, like the piano. But others we will have to wait, either until they die, or until they move into a smaller home that won't accomodate the massive amount of stuff.

As I am the executor of my parent's will, I'm hoping that our continued discussions on who-gets-what will end up in a smooth dispursement of the spoils by the time my parents pass away. In fact, to my knowledge, other than dividing whatever money is left over in the estate, no specific items are mentioned. Rather than my parents deciding what they will leave to whom, we've started calling dibs. As a big family with a lot of kids, you learned early on to call for what you wanted. Whether it was the front seat or the wishbone, we have a long history of claiming things of value.

But, seeing as my parents are only in their early sixties, and in good health, this is all a little premature. They have a good many years to both accumulate memorable artifacts, as well as to lose or give them away. They'll probably move at least once, if not more. And each of us will find new attachments to old things, or old attachments to new things, whatever the case may be.

But when it comes time for my parents to leave us, as sad as it will be, we'll all be ready to yell, "Shotgun."