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                    Museums and Memories

     Today it's too cold and rainy to go out to the garage to
finish or even to continue the cleaning up, the sorting and
ordering, saving and throwing away of the many diverse
objects that have accumulated in our household over the past
fifty-two years; if not indeed, longer than that, seventy
five years, the span of an entire life.

     I feel as if, and I tell myself that at last, in my old
age, I am becoming a junk man. As I extract coils of wire,
sockets, plugs, copper fittings, galvanized ells and tees,
ceiling and wall fixtures that for one reason or another I
have taken down, for which I have no present use and no use
in the forseeable future, I ask myself "Why am I doing this?"

     Although it seems obvious now, it took me some months,
no, in fact, it took me some years to find an answer.  It
seemed absurd that I was so reluctant to part with objects
that were of no practical use.  It was, I think, that I had
some memory associated with each object, and that if I threw
away the object, I would be throwing away also the memory I
would in fact be throwing out, I would be abandoning a part
of my own life, a part of myself.

     I realized then that I was in effect making my own
museum.  I was reminded of Freiligraths poem:

Das sind dieselben Toepf und Kruege,
Oft an der Heimath Born gefuellt!
Wenn am Missouri Alles schwiege,
Sie malten euch der Heimath Bild;

     This experience is apposite to an even greater extent to
books that one has read, the memory of which is woven into
the fabric of ones thought.  It is therefore not
inappropriate that the original museums were in fact
libraries.

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Copyright 2005, Ernst Jochen Meyer
