Discard Something Today: Day One "Perishable Goods"

After reading author Adam Minter's Secondhand: Travels In the New Global Garage Sale, I'm confronted with my September 2019 dilemma.

Adam followed Good Point Recycling and one of our many overseas reuse partners, Chendiba Enterprises. And he corrected the abismal reporting on Agbogbloshie, to boot. He understood, and translated, my furious defense of geeks of color, accused of being "waste tourists" because "big shred", through its donations to NGO Basel Action Network,  had more clout with reporters than the accused.

But Adam's book revolves around the End... After Second-hand, there may be a third-hand. Rarely, a fourth-hand vintage collectible. He is fair in defending and supporting the reuse market. But the Secondhand Market is fundamentally tied to our parents death, and the cleanout of their homes one day, beit in Japan, Tucson, India, or Middlebury, Vermont.


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So to start Blog One, Perishable Goods.... Everything is perishable. Every device or item we possess was extracted violently from the forests, and we should keep and renew it as long as possible. But even if it was never harvested to make paper, a tree dies. And so does a book.

Water damaged books are poison to reuse bookstores

More than a decade ago, my wife Armelle's grandfather Gabriel passed away. She was as close to him as I was to my grandparents, and that respect was part of the attraction that led to our marriage. (Adam also had very close feelings for his grandparents, just saying).

When Marcel (Armelle's Papa) and his sister (Pierrette)'s son, 3rd generation Andre, were at grandfather Gabriel Crouzieres' home, to empty it, I was sent in as (I guess) a moderator.  Standing between the two Frenchmen, I was on the second story of the house that had to be vacated.  Below the second floor window was a roll off trash container....

Always more stuff

"Toi, tu veux ca?" nephew Andre held one of Gabriel's attic possessions to me. He was not asking my father in law, Marcel. No, he understood I was there as mediator. I didn't answer. After ten seconds, he threw the child's painting down into the dumpster.

Marcel and his sister barely spoke again for more than a decade after the great Gabriel Crouzieres attic cleanout. The home was listed and quickly sold. But not speaking with your sister for more than ten years, because her son was brusque in tossing your dad's emotional possessions... that's a fail.

Fast forward to my own parents (and revered grandparents) stuff...

After reading Adam's book, I was forced to suddenly deal with my grandparents (and grand-aunt's) stuff. My parents had moved to an Arkansas farm house (a really nice Fay Jones home on a 300 acre Searcy County farm.... 20 minutes from Grinder's Ferry on the Buffalo River).

The home purchase got an unoccupied (non-occupiable) guest house on the 300 acre parcel. My dad decided he could make it a "library" for his father's law books... and also the other books, clothes, and memorabilia he salvaged from the auction of his mother's possessions.  I was the one who said, "keep the books" in the late 1990s, based on my experience with ebay (my account opened 1999) and alibris.com.

As described a few weeks ago, a tree fell in a storm, and chopped the spine of the guest-storage house in half, opening all the contents to several days of rain. No matter how intelligent, valuable, insightful, or rare a book, if it is wet it will mold. Mold is the terminal cancer of libraries and book collections. By the time I got there, these books were wet , and smelled, and the best I could do was photograph them before the big burn.

Like Secondhand, this is all backward view. This is a blog one for 2020 vision...

How do I, as the person responsible for most of the "stuff" in my house, avoid putting my kids in the position Adam well describes?  I'm realizing that every posession that won't wind up in a fricking museum is, in all fact, "Perishable Goods". I have more experience with this than my children will have, when I (will) die.

So this "Perishable Goods" blog series is going to be about my attempt to clean our own house before the kids have to do it for us.

I recently rediscovered that my very first "blog" was posted in 2003, pre-Google-blogspot. I copied and reposted the old blog into my 2006 Good Point blog. Take pictures of perishable items.

Everything in this photo is perishable, except perhaps, our love