Okay, I’ll admit it.  I have a strong attachment to certain objects in my house, things that have a story behind them and art that speaks to me.  I don’t typically name them, though I admit to calling our truck “Big Chip” and the plastic bull head used for roping practice “Little Chip.”  I also have a wooden statue in the back alcove I christened “Shaun Ray,” the reason being that the wood has a crack in it that runs down the native’s face, an almost exact replica of the knife scar on my friend Shaun Ray’s face.  But no other non-breathing entities have names.  I think.

When we evacuated from the 2003 San Diego fires, and after we had grabbed our three children, three adult dogs, 12 4-week-old bloodhound puppies, two cats, and one frog, we then retrieved the computer, important files, and hastily selected clothing.  On my final hurried walk-through accompanied by the cacophony of my thoughts mixed with the noise of the police and their get-out-now bullhorns, I grabbed Daddy’s stamp map, the one inanimate object I couldn’t live without.

My father collected stamps from boyhood.  When he was a teenager recovering from the upheaval of his father’s severe alcoholism and subsequent death, he finished this map.  His mother, who affectionately called her son “Muffin” because as an infant, he was warm and soft and smelled like the good smells of new life, mounted the map for him using the bathtub and wallpaper paste.  They built the frame together.  The stamp map was a regular fixture in the varied homes of my youth.  It graced many a fireplace mantel and was a source of pride for my dad and for his family until the day he died.  I can’t live without it; it contains a smidgen of his soul that I need around me, a little piece of him that gives me comfort.

My father’s father, the wild child who morphed in time into the unhealthy drunk, was once full of spirit and intelligence.  He graduated from Brown and traveled the world, searching for something just out of reach to fulfill him, a restlessness that alcohol medicated in his final years. In the 1930’s, he ventured to Tahiti, a Tahiti before high-rises and tourist traps.  The natives befriended him and gave him many gifts which he brought home to Baltimore and put in storage.  Years later, when consolidating her things with the help of my dad, my grandmother offered the Tahiti boxes to him.  The native costumes, the chief’s skirt and headdress embroidered with tiny shells and dyed grass, the women’s grass skirts, and the original batik cloth are now all in museums but my parents first had a lot of fun goofing around in them at parties.  Beside my mother’s fireplace sits Tiki, a foot tall sculpture carved from stone by Tahitian artisans and, I admit, coveted by me.  Yet, I am privileged to have my favorite object from the Tahiti boxes, this Tapa Cloth, pounded from tapa root, formed into parchment, and then painted and dyed in its aboriginal design.  I love it.  If the police hadn’t been screaming at me to leave on that fateful day and if the cloth demanded less dismounting time, it would have been right beside the stamp map in the back of my car. 

From my mother’s side of the family, we have a newer addition to the pell-mell eclectic atmosphere that is our home, these moonshine jugs.  My mother grew up in rural Carroll County, Maryland, and was shuffled from one broken down farmhouse to the next and from one well-meaning relative to another.  Her parents had a volatile marriage full of the stuff of hard memoirs, beatings, shotguns, screaming, and booze.  Granddaddy didn’t drink at home but would head to the still with his buddies and get plastered before coming home to knock his wife and kids around.  My mother and her siblings had a hard row to hoe and, as often happens to children of abuse and upheaval, many turned to the same poison and the same anger that their father had within him.  Three of the six died young, suicide, murder, and drug overdose.  One is in jail and has been for years although his crimes are minor in comparison to what we hear on the news.  It’s the only way he knows to live his life.  My mother and aunt are the only two that have done okay but they each battle demons and always will.  It’s a damned Faulkner novel.

As a child, I was kept away from Leonard or “The Old Man” as my mother’s sister, who had no affection for her father called him.  But my mother loved him despite everything and would visit him on her own.  He and his ex-wife, my maternal grandmother, made the journey to my wedding and Leonard charmed my husband with his strength and wit and David likes him to this day, the man who had the largest hands he had ever seen and could perform feats of strength although he was missing one lung and in failing health, He has since died and these are his moonshine jugs, the jugs he drank from before revealing his dark side.  They serve multiple purposes, pieces of Americana, reminders of the man, and lessons on the dangers of excess and anger.  Today, they’d find their way into my evacuation vehicle.

These things, Daddy’s stamp map, the Tapa cloth, and Granddaddy’s moonshine jugs, are all just inanimate objects on the surface but each represents a slice of history, a piece of my heritage, and a lesson on how to, or not to, live life.