Possessions and Memories

object permanence

When I was young - maybe nine or ten - we had a stereo cabinet in the living room. It wasn’t a rack like the ones that became popular in the 80s. No, it was a full fledged piece of furniture, a wooden structure that looked like a coffee table on steroids. It had a sliding top, and when you opened it, there was the turntable, and the am/fm receiver. Open the front, and there were the albums; Beatles, Broadway cast recordings, doo-wop records, a stack of 45s.

I loved that stereo cabinet. It was a source of comfort. I have vivid memories of my mother flipping over records, handling them carefully, putting the little yellow disc in the middle of the 45s. Saturdays were for music and we did our chores while the faithful stereo churned out hits of the 50s, 60s, and 70s.

Nostalgia is something I get caught up in often, and it usually costs me money as I try to recreate those comfortable scenes from my childhood. I recently bought a box set of Disney books, the same ones I used to read as an eight year old. I’ve purchased old issues of Highlights magazines and read through them, trying to pull from them the idyllic sense of being from my youth. While there were intangibles that brought my comfort when I was young, it’s the possessions I had that I keep going back to, the things I could touch and feel, things that bring sensory memories. The feel of the hardback cover of those Disney books, the smell of the Highlights magazine; they evoke days spent in my room immersing myself in other worlds. What I wouldn’t give to recreate that stereo cabinet in my living room in a grand effort to recapture that Saturday morning comfort.

I think about years from now, what touchstones I’ll have to this part of my life, to my adulthood. What possessions do I have that bring me comfort or offer solace? What will I look back on wistfully, what objects do I hold dear now that would help me slip back to this particular time?

The truth is, I have no prized possessions, there is nothing I hold dear. I have furniture, I have objects, I have Airpods and a KitchenAid mixer and a toaster oven/air fryer and I appreciate them all deeply. I have a soft, warn doll my son carried around with him when he was a toddler, but that is his to retain, not mine. All those things like the stereo we once had are in the past, gone from my life, and I hold their memories close. Why haven’t I established any sense of permanence with something I own in my adult life? There’s nothing I have now that I will remember warmly as I’m on my deathbed, rummaging through my treasured moments.

Maybe there’s just more in childhood to claim than there is in adulthood. There’s certainly more fun, more play, more relaxed moments as a kid than there are as a grown up, where everything seems to revolve around work. My computer is not something I think of as particularly comforting. When I look back on these specific days, I’m not going to find fuzzy memories in spending 40 hours a week in my office, or sitting depressed on the couch for hours each night.

So I take stock of my life and my possessions. And I realize there is something I own that I will look back on with reverence some day.

I have an ever-growing collection of albums, a blend of 80’s, 90s, and current music. While the physical records themselves aren’t things that I’ll wax nostalgic about later on, the songs contained on them are. Each favorite song, each song that makes me feel things deeply, each one that makes me cry or yearn, the ones that still give me goosebumps, the songs that make me sing out loud- they are all in some way a prized possession. I don’t own them, per se, but I’ve made them mine. They live in my heart, they burrow in my soul, they are a part of me. They are as much a piece of my life as that stereo cabinet, as the Highlights Magazines. Perhaps this is what I will think about as I start to fade; I will hold thoughts of bass lines and high notes, of sad rhymes and screamed out choruses. All these songs offer themselves to me and I take them as my own so I can wrap myself in them, the same way I comforted myself once by putting the needle down on a record on my mother’s stereo, the same way I felt safe and at home when I opened one of the Disney books and traveled to faraway lands.

That is what I own. That is what I possess. I have no special trinkets, no piece of furniture that elicits a sigh, nothing but the songs I sing. And that will be enough.

[I made a playlist of deathbed songs you might enjoy]