For more than a decade I’ve been left in the posi­tion of clean­ing up after dying cura­tors and col­lec­tors. It’s an object les­son in where col­lec­tion actu­ally exists: surely the boxes of pyrog­ra­phy or ele­phants or first edi­tions that waited for your atten­tion are no longer your col­lec­tion, now you’re dead. The record is gone, the record you bore in your mem­ory, the sparks of recog­ni­tion and anec­dotes that you car­ried in response are unreach­able now.

So my father’s mem­o­ra­bilia from NACA and the first days of NASA Lewis Research are now bare pho­tographs, snips of glass­ware blown by the mas­ters in the instru­ments lab, parts of plaques and trin­kets received to honor unknown anniver­saries and projects. My mother’s gar­den­ing books are reduced to a mere pend­ing book sale, her cards iden­ti­fy­ing the jum­bled gar­den she kept as use­less as the plowed-​​over drought-​​purged gar­den itself. My wife’s par­ents, with their own accu­mu­lated and uncu­rated prece­dents, are a genealog­i­cal mys­tery story too baroque for pub­li­ca­tion: Wait, I thought she was mar­ried to him—who’s this? My lost friend Nancy, her­self a col­lec­tor of col­lec­tions, can no longer tell me the dif­fer­ence between the fancy milk glass and the cheap junk, or help me split the Vic­to­rian pyrog­ra­phy from the 1930s kit-​​work she accu­mu­lated in her over-​​small house. My god­fa­ther, who came to this coun­try as if to a fron­tier, with a patent in hand that made a (small) for­tune by stuff­ing your attics full of pink floss, his few passed-​​along bits and bobs sal­vaged from a 1900s Wiener Wek­stätte youth adorn our shelves and con­found vis­i­tors by being so out of place.

There’s a swirl of pop-​​cultural pop-​​psychology float­ing in and around col­lect­ing these days, focused on throw­ing “hoard­ing” glibly down in front of any cul­tural vari­a­tion that shows respect for mem­ory and mate­r­ial cul­ture at the expense of geo­met­ric aus­ter­ity. Yet at the same time we love love love our tum­blrs full of scanned ephemera, the RSS feeds filled with snap­shots snipped from 1940s girlie rags and punk zines, the free (as in what? “beer”?) books scanned up to the cease-​​and-​​desist line of 1923. The past is all the more a for­eign coun­try because it’s kept in other people’s houses, in muse­ums and libraries and pri­vate col­lec­tions we not only never visit but we alien­ate by call­ing “pathological”.

If the autis­tic or the over-​​social, the reli­gious or the ruth­less athe­ist, the cap­i­tal­ist or the vol­un­teer can all make their valid claims for respect in our soci­ety, let this be a claim on behalf of remem­ber­ers. Not those pun­dits who resort to big-​​story macro­scopic remem­ber­ing: where were you when Large Things Hap­pened that Tie Us Together? But the sup­pos­edly triv­ial mem­o­ries, a.k.a. “the fab­ric of his­tory”. The baby thrown out with the bath­wa­ter of hoarding-​​abhorrence is the baby of our ori­gins in fam­ily and cul­ture, the fine wires that con­nect the stuff we read in his­tory text­books to our selves.

Know­ing about all this junk is the only way I know to own your own his­tory, the his­tory of your place and your peo­ple. Oth­er­wise, any­thing not in your head is reduced to a cun­ning sci­ence fic­tion story. When we who breathed leaded gaso­line fumes are all dead, it’ll only be the key fobs for lost man­u­fac­tur­ers, the unin­sta­grammed images of gas sta­tions with uni­forms, the mis­folded road maps and quaint mag­a­zine ads that reminds us what that thing meant to the world.

I’m sit­ting within a few inches of a Chi­nese check­ers board (of Nancy’s, since hers is the stra­tum we’ve recently uncov­ered after the purge of a decade’s deaths) and sit­ting next to it is a lit­tle wooden con­trap­tion: a block of mahogany-​​stained oak carved cun­ningly with chan­nels, dec­o­rated with rotat­ing screw-​​hinged caps, hold­ing mar­bles for the game. It’s a purpose-​​built wooden Chi­nese Check­ers marble-​​holder, man­u­fac­tured by the Van Raden Prod­uct Com­pany of Alter Road, in Detroit. Not by Mil­ton Bradley, but rather by… some dude. You Google it, you’ll find this men­tion, and some forums some­where on some wood­work­ing topic where a fel­low found another and doesn’t know what to make of it.

The address was 3136 Alter Road, Detroit. Go look it up on Google Maps. Zoom right on in there. Look real close at the house where this man lived. What you see? Zoom out a cou­ple blocks. Look at those blocks, that wide-​​ranging per­fu­sion of lawn they seem to have. Spa­cious, yes? Gone. Zoom out a bit more, look at that den­sity. The voids. The holes.

Gone. Gone. Gone.

Tell me the story of the man who made the mar­ble hold­ers, back in the Chi­nese Check­ers craze of the late Depres­sion, in that vacant lot in Detroit. The neigh­bor­hood in which he arose is filled with empty blocks, five or six houses left stand­ing on entire city blocks. Res­i­den­tial blocks. Each miss­ing house once filled with things that ended up dead stuff, the chaff of history.

I don’t know what to do about this. It’s no eas­ier to fix than the death of peo­ple is, and some days it seems there’s no more point in attribut­ing “his­tory” to key fobs from dis­ap­peared car deal­er­ships and framed prints on the wall behind the pho­tographed dead than there is to sav­ing emp­tied milk con­tain­ers and screws in a baby food jar. And yet there is in fact some­thing hap­pen­ing, some­thing odd and inter­est­ing. I can find my godfather’s name here and there in the grow­ing mem­ory of the world and some­how draw the flimsy links through pub­lic records to the point where we can drive up to his Ross­ford neigh­bor­hood and rec­og­nize things from pho­tographs he took the day the house was new, in 1927. I see my father’s tiny image stand­ing at the side of pho­tos in the NACA Lan­g­ley his­tory archives, and that same day he clearly took a pic­ture for him­self, stand­ing look­ing back the other way. And I go to see Van Raden’s street, now, after wars and more wars and aban­don­ment and scour­ing, and if I want take back his hand­i­work and make a new (though flimsy) link of sorts.

Not every thing’s a reminder, nor of his­tor­i­cal import. But the abil­ity to tell mean­ing­ful sto­ries about those things is as far as I know the only way we have to explain them and ourselves—the sort of expla­na­tion that’s not merely our strength but also our responsibility.

This just to say that as I sell things off, and purge and lighten and dis­card, I’m doing all I can to weave as well. Be reminded; that’s all I ask. Be reminded.