“I need to confess something, but I’m afraid you won’t love me anymore when I do.” After I say this, my husband rolls his eyes and gives me the look. “Seriously. I need to tell you something awful.”
“Just tell me what you did.”
“Are you sure you can forgive me?” then I quickly add, “I wasn’t unfaithful, but I need to know you won’t stop loving me?”
“Babe, you know I’ll never stop loving you.” The look is replaced with sympathy.
I hesitate, so embarrassed to reveal the cause of the pit in my stomach. It’s threatening to become an ulcer the longer baseball season lasts. As the Phillies get closer to capturing the National League Pennant, my husband and his twin brother keep wondering where they left their signed baseballs. A gentleman they knew as children worked at the old stadium and gave them two pairs of baseballs covered in players’ signatures. I can picture my ten-year-old future husband bringing them out of the old cookie tin where he stored them, examining the autographs, tossing them back and forth to his brother, and dreaming of his own future exploits on the field. They haven’t seen these balls for over twenty years. Now that the Phillies might win it all, the need to find them intensifies. The latest theory is that the balls are in their parents’ attic. They plan an expedition to find their lost treasure.
Before working up the courage to confess, I’m begging God. “You are the God of the universe and you know where every atom of matter is. If there is any way you can find me those baseballs, please make it happen.” I feel silly praying about baseballs, but many years earlier, I took God up on His offer to trade anxiety for prayer. Every time fear for the lost baseballs pops up, I’m like the shampoo bottle instructions: Get anxious, pray, rinse, repeat.
“Remember your baseballs,” I say now. We are parked in his parents’ drive. He looks at me from behind the wheel.
“Yeah.” He draws this out and raises an eyebrow.
“Every time you talk about them, I feel just awful.” I stutter, “I . . . I think I threw them away.”
“Why would you throw away my baseballs?” He is more astonished than angry.
“Could you still love me if I threw them away?” When I ask this question, his eyes soften.
“You are more important to me than any baseballs. Of course, I can still love you.” He pauses and asks again, “But why would throw them out?”
I explain: I was an idiot. That the ugly old cookie tin they were in had no place to hide in our tiny newlywed apartment. I was cleaning up in haste before friends came over. I just tossed it. And that is how I remember it. I have a clear visual memory of my hand holding the tin over the open trash can.
Every now and again I get a little nutty about excess stuff. Too many objects sitting around weighs on me; getting rid of it lightens my burden. And when it’s someone else’s apparently unused-old-stuff—I am ashamed to admit—it gets on my nerves even more. The apartment cleaning frenzy might have been the first time I threw away something my husband valued, but it wasn’t the last. Maybe I’m ready to change my tightly held mantra from William Morris, “Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be beautiful or believe to be useful.” I’ll add, “unless it’s your husband’s.”
Dan’s ability to continue his affections despite four old baseballs is rewarded when his home team wins the World’s Series! The morning after I am still smiling about the Phillies, though I’m annoyed; instead of celebrating I’m stuck in the basement trying to dig-up my childhood immunization records for graduate school. I determine to go through another unopened box marked, “Memorabilia.” When I lift back the cardboard flaps, I see the ugly old cookie tin I clearly remember tossing in 1986. By some baseball miracle it is recovered twenty-two years later. I celebrate bigger than I ever did at a championship.
Think about this: Have you ever had a clear memory that was proved false? If we made a spectrum from minimalist to hoarder, where on the line would you fall? Why do you think you have the relationship you do with “stuff?”
When I was newly married, a wise woman gave me a word of advice, “Never throw away anything that belongs to your husband.“ I have fought that urge for many years by packing away his items in boxes and learning to live with some of the items he chose to display in his study. I cringed at some of the things he chose to display, like the miniature Taj Mahal that someone gave him. We have no connection to this, and I can’t understand why this gift speaks to him.
On the baseball front, I, too, am lamenting throwing away baseball memorabilia. I once had a program signed by many of the 1975 Red Sox team. All the greats, Carlt…
I fall into the minimalist category except for clothing and shoes. I believe the minimalist comes from “stuff” suffocating me whereas my clothes “hoarding “ comes from growing up poor.