Snail Mail your "Stuff" to Friends

A very unusual envelope landed at my house recently. It was from my seventh grade teacher, Nathan Sloan, whose 90th birthday I attended -- and wrote about --  a couple years ago.
Inside was a sheaf of papers about an inch thick:  his collection of newspaper clippings and Xeroxed articles, mostly political, that resonated with him.
The stuff you cut out to think about later, but mostly never do.
With the batch, came this admission, "I know! I know! This is an enormous amount of 'stuff'...Hope you enjoy the 'library' I've sent. "
At first I was stunned. What was Nat doing? Sending me the stuff that most people who are downsizing would just toss?
Yet, this wasn't as if he was handing off an old lamp or a pile of textbooks. This was personal, and I couldn't help but open up his brain-dump, curious about this man whom I've rarely seen since high school but who tenaciously kept touch with so many of his students over the many decades.
In the collection  were such titles as "How Socialists Built America" and "Government by the People Campaign Builds Momentum."
Also included was a letter (undated) he presumably had sent to the chairman of the Democratic National Committee, recommending a tougher stance against the Republicans. "Why haven't we learned that honey and civil discourse doesn't work with the likes of McConnell, Boehner, Cantor...We should be shouting that the 'trickle down theory' doesn't work."
In the pile, too, was a copy of the "Tillman Act of 1907" which, in case you never read it, prohibits monetary contributions to national political campaigns by corporations. What happened to that?
On a piece of lined notebook paper, in his careful capital letters, he wrote the names of 22 "Feminist Freethinkers," from Sarah Bernhardt to Alice Walker, to Marlene Dietrich and Clara Barton.
On 3 other sheets were the names of 133 atheists, agnostics, deists and secular humanists, which included, at the bottom of one column, right after Carl Sagan, his own name, Nat Sloan.
In 1999, he wrote a 'letter to the editor,' arguing that presidential campaigns should be limited to four months and contributors should immediately be revealed.
(I am sure I know who he's supporting for President).
Well, I took a lesson from Nat Sloan. Since I had been going through old newspaper stories I had written, debating whether to toss them or not, I decided to send a few on to my three daughters. One article in particular, I thought would resonate with them, since they are all working mothers. It was about one of my maternity leaves, which I spent working to save my local elementary school. The district was thinking of closing it just days before the echo Baby Boom revealed itself (my newborn included). The essay expressed my gratitude to the women who stayed home (at the time, it was mostly women), and fought the community battles that us working women did not have time for.
So, Nat, thanks for sharing with me your views and beliefs. It was a thoughtful gift that I am now having difficulty de-accessioning, as it were.
I'll close with a poem he included:

Stuff, More Stuff and Too Much Stuff

 Yesterday, my daughter dropped by for one of her last visits before she moves to Boston in a couple weeks. She and her boyfriend will be combining apartments and moving in together. “We have doubles on a lot of things. What do you need?” she asked.
This is a question that those who are transitioning smaller –or endlessly contemplating doing so – do not  want to hear.  It’s supposed to be the other way around. When I tried to decline,  she made it clear that I should be more grateful. After all, they had some good stuff.

Better than my stuff.

Not wanting to offend, I tried to graciously accept a blender (to replace the one given to me as a wedding present more than 40 years ago and a bit cracked) and new measuring spoons to replace the bent up, blackened  ones which were once my mother’s give-aways. I even said yes to a Foreman grill.
Wait until you get to be my age, I told her, trying to explain one of the Great Generational Divides.
Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Dan Rubin said it much better than I could as he discussed his 86-year-old father’s decision to box up Dan’s books and those of his older brother.  This quote doesn’t do justice to the whole piece -- worth reading -- but it gives you the flavor:
“I told Dad I preferred that the books stay right where they are, so I can freeze time, so whenever I drop by my old house, I can sit in that room, on the velour sofa that replaced the twin beds, and as night falls and the radiator belches that foul steam heat, I can get lost again in the words that took so long for me to hear.”
Or, as his brother told his parents, “They’ve been there 40 years. Another few years won’t hurt anyone.”

I dropped by the Inquirer's offices today --and speaking of "stuff," they're throwing our decades-worth as they prepare to move in a week.  Dan Rubin gave me some news to break here.
An email just landed from his father:

"All of the books have been put back on the book shelves, in order of their size. The next rainy day I will catalog them and rearrange them alphabetically, however they, as well as the shelves, are now clean. No longer dusty."

Dan Rubin can go home again.