Phyllis Nutkis

In the summer of 2005, my in-laws sold their house in New Jersey and moved to Chicago to be near us. The day before the move, I flew to New Jersey to help them with what I, perhaps naively, thought would be “last-minute details.” Mom had assured me that everything in her domain—the linens, the dishes, the cookware—had been packed. She was pretty sure that Dad had hardly packed anything, but he told her not to worry about it. Worrying was the only thing she could actually do, though; and when I arrived, I discovered that she’d been right to worry, since all Dad had packed was—nothing. I peeked into his office, which was still full of books, stacks of papers, and piles of “stuff.” I sighed and said to him, “Come, I’ll help you.”

We started with the desk drawer. “Anything you want to keep we can put into this box,” I said. Dad held up a small notebook and began leafing through it. “I remember this!” he exclaimed. “I got this from Joe—what was his name? Joe…Green? No…Glass! Joe Glass! I met him at a wedding in Brooklyn…” (long digression about whose wedding it was, how the couple met, etc., and from there, the story meandered on for 3 or 4 minutes.)  

I finally interrupted and said, “OK, Dad, but do you want to keep it or throw it out? We have a lot of stuff to go through…” at which point he dropped the notebook back into the drawer and picked up a dusty, unlabeled floppy disk.

He scrutinized it, turning it over and over in his hands as if it would magically reveal its contents. “I think this belonged to Marvin Taylor,” he said. “He’s Bob’s cousin. We were at Bob’s for dinner once, and he was telling me about his wife’s uncle, who was a welder…” and launched into another lengthy monologue.

He was completely oblivious as to whether I was listening; I was pretty sure if I left the room, and possibly even if I left the house and flew back to Chicago, he would have blissfully continued revisiting countless moments. It was obvious that we were going to make exactly zero progress, so while Dad was engrossed in his reveries, I quietly began opening drawers, dumping the entire contents into boxes, and taping them shut.

When Dad got up to go to the bathroom, I emptied the contents of the desk drawer into a final box and sealed it up. The next morning, the movers loaded the boxes on to the truck. When the moving van arrived in Chicago, there wasn’t nearly enough room in my in-laws’ new apartment for Dad’s boxes, so they went into our garage.

Some 18 years later, the boxes are still there. Dad never asked about them. Perhaps, knowing that these records of his memories still existed was enough—or, more likely, he forgot all about them. He passed away in 2007, but we haven’t thrown the boxes away. We haven’t even opened them. The contents are meaningless to us--but how do you discard someone else’s memories?

Phyllis Nutkis

Phyllis Nutkis recently retired as Grants Manager for a Chicago social service agency. She plans to use her new free time to clean the garage.

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