The Jacket

To quote George Dubya at the 2016 Inauguration, “That was some weird sh!!t.”

In this instance, I am referring only to a very specific form of American carnage, i.e., my full-time job these past four or five months (when I should have been littering your email box with Katz Tales nonsense) packing up and selling the suburban Westchester house my family and I have lived in for the past 29 years.

That is one of the tasks that fall to the recently retired especially, as in my case, if your spouse is still working and (unlike you) remains a useful member of society.

As George Carlin once pointed out, the whole meaning of life is trying to find a place for your stuff and your house is nothing more than a place to keep your stuff.

Your stuff is important and while “someone else’s stuff is sh!!t, your sh!!t is stuff!”

You lock up your house when you go out so nobody takes your stuff - - and that means the good stuff since as Carlin says a thief “don’t bother with that crap you’re saving; ain’t nobody interested in your fourth grade arithmetic papers.”

Well, after 29 years, our house was filled with tons and tons of stuff and most of it was the kind nobody is interested in!

In fact, nobody was terribly interested in (and certainly not sentimental about) any part of this entire process other than my wife Robin and me, but Robin at least also had the healthy notion that we were moving on to an exciting new life chapter (which sounds better than “we ain’t dead yet”).

Notwithstanding that this was the only house our three sons had ever really known, those now adult miserable ingrates have busy and interesting lives of their own in homes of their own and oddly enough did not get too worked up when I found one of their third grade book reports or little league trophies.

And as you might expect, the buyer and the broker just wanted us and our stuff gone and the deal closed.

Since Robin was busy working, I was left alone, wandering the halls with the ghost of parenthood past, wallowing in cheesy sentimentality.

I could go on about real estate brokers requiring that we remove any sign of personality and paint everything (even the dog) the only color apparently acceptable to anyone under 50 (i.e., white).

Or the moving company representatives who seem friendly and responsible in person but whose social media reviews warn that they recently worked for the Wagner Group in Chechnya and that once your furniture is on their truck prices will exponentially increase.

And yes, to clarify for any of you who once had the privilege of being my client, this former real estate mogul did make the command business decision to sell when interest rates are higher than the guy driving my moving truck rather than two years ago when inner city COVID panic had buyers offering to pay your child’s college tuition for the privilege of buying your house.

But the focus here is that after 29 years making this a warm and comfortable home, with interest rates rising hourly and our buyer insisting that we close pronto, I had six weeks to get over my saccharine weepiness and remove four or five tons of fairly useless crap from what was about to no longer be our house.

To be fair, we already had a fully furnished place in the Hudson Valley that we always planned on being our next home and where we had spent nearly all of our time since COVID so most of our furniture could just be given away.

But still. All that other stuff.

I should have listened early on to our somewhat unsentimental friend Rob who said quite a few times “just call 1-800 Got Junk”. Eventually I relented and there was that one glorious day when the Got Junk truck pulled up into the driveway and filled up and carted away a literal truckload of dust collecting landfill.

But first I had to do the dirty and endless task of boxing, bagging and piling up years worth of clothes, photos, books, CDs, sports equipment, shoes, laptops, PCs (destroy those hard drives), jackets, hats, canned goods, kitchen appliances, paintings, board games, and countless varieties of assorted tchotchkes.

How did we even fit in there with all that rubbish?

I spent almost an entire day cleaning out the hard to reach eaves in a third floor bedroom that was once an attic.

Somewhere along the line, we decided that these eaves would be good for storage. This makes total and complete sense. Find something valuable, hide it away in a dusty eave between your roof and top floor bedroom, and come back in 20 years. Everything should be fine.

Imagine my shock when whatever I pulled out of there looked like a creature from The Last of Us.

Old trunks and suitcases caked in half an inch of dust, broken lamps with cobwebs on their cobwebs, rotting sleeping bags and in the corner a beaten up cardboard box marked “spices.”

I had already learned from a pleasant afternoon cleaning out our pantry and wiping decades of dried syrup from the shelves that spices actually have sell by dates (who knew?) so I was not expecting much from this box. In our pantry even boxes of beans were years beyond their sell by date (not an easy accomplishment) so I could not imagine anything of value left in a box of spices that we probably stored away during the Clinton administration.

I would have thrown out the box without opening it but Robin was curious and inside there it was. The jacket.

A tattered and wrinkled sixty-year old brown sports coat with various holes and pieces of cloth ripped out and hanging loose.

Our family coat of arms.

Somewhere in the 1970’s, I was with my younger brother Michael and our parents on vacation at some hotel or motel and headed out when my mother made the offhand remark that my father’s jacket’s lapels might be a bit too thin and perhaps out of fashion.

Now, neither of our parents had much in the way of fashion sense, as evidenced by how they dressed us until we were old enough in our 30’s to dress ourselves, but our dad was having vacation fun and Michael remembers him ripping off the jacket, throwing it onto the ground and stomping on it.

I remember him also throwing the jacket out the window and Michael and I running outside to retrieve it but I also remember being a fairly competent real estate attorney and I doubt that ever happened.

Since then, the jacket has for years been surreptitiously passed back and forth among family members in surprise “gotchas”, ending up under someone’s pillow, hidden in someone’s dorm room closet, tucked in the back of a suitcase, squished inside a coffee can sent sent from overseas or packed inside an old cardboard box marked “spices.”

Last it had been seen was sixteen years ago on presentation to my son Jordan on his Bar Mitzvah and since then has been MIA, remembered longingly at family gatherings, but nowhere to be found.

Luckily, the jacket is back up to its old tricks, having already been given as a surprise birthday present to my older brother David and will undoubtedly soon be found in someone’s glove compartment or breadbox.

In the end, George Carlin was wrong.

Not about the seven words or baseball and football. Give the man his due.

But your house itself is just a wooden box that sits outside in the snow and rain getting eaten by insects and most of that “good stuff” inside your house will eventually be filling up a recycling center.

The only parts of your stuff that are not sh!!t ARE the fourth grade arithmetic papers!

And the stories your children wrote in second grade, the letters they sent home from summer camp, the old home movies and the family photos.

This includes whatever else might make no sense to anyone else but, like the jacket, made your house, white paint or not, into a home.

The rest is just stuff.