Look & listen as my guest, gay historian Andrew Lear, shares the unique, yet universal story of the cleaning out our loved ones home’s after they die.
He had taken on much of the responsibility of caring for his aging Mom for MANY years, but when his Mom finally died, he was teaching at Pomona College in Southern California. This left the major cleaning out of his mother’s seventeen room Victorian mansion, which was built by Andrew’s great grandfather and packed with family stuff, to his brother & sister.
It was filled with 18th century family china & of course their mother’s art work. As “luck” might have it, his brother took all the things of monetary value & his sister took every thing else. So whenever he wants, Andrew can visit these “museums” of his family’s possessions.
Andrew prides himself on being a bit of a minimalist, so he didn’t take much from his Mom’s place. You see she had found a way to gift him her art work while she was alive. When displaying her work at galleries, she would mark the works she knew Andrew would like as SOLD. They shared a knowing of what was her best work.
But while visiting the family home after his mother’s death, Andrew opened a drawer in the dining room. It was lined with menus from the Captain’s table of the SS France, a ship his mother & he, as a young child, sailed on when they traveled back & forth to Europe. Inside the drawer was this early pen & ink sketch of his mother. Andrew guesses that it’s from the 1940’s, when his Mom was young & looking cool. He wonders what she was like then.
This sketch hangs by his bed & sometimes travels with him as he lives his high-end homeless life since the start of the pandemic.
In her 70’s Andrew’s mother returned to watercolors after many decades. Andrew has a collection of them but they’re too big to travel with him. He is now considering purchasing a condo, which his partner kids him about it becoming his $200,000 storage unit.
This short story was clipped from my live virtual Show & Tale: Significant Objects in the fall of 2021 which encourage us to build connections, community & legacy one story of stuff at a time.
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