Sentimental objects, or How do we pass things down?

One of my husband’s favorite Little Golden Book from his childhood was The Little House in the Big Forest, in which a family builds a house in the forest and then settles into its cozy shelter. His mother wrote his name and the year—1949, when he was three—on the title page. The book reminded him of happy times in his childhood. On the other hand, it mostly sat in a box in his closet.

Last year, he decided that our oldest grandchild, who was seven, was old enough to enjoy it as much as he had. He sent it to her, and she did love it. She read it every night as she went to bed. And one night, she fell asleep with it in her bed. By the time she woke up in the morning, most of the pages had been creased or folded or torn. Some had been ripped out altogether.

He doesn’t blame our granddaughter. She slept on it because she loved it so much. Nor does he regret sending the book. What else was going to happen to it, after all? Was it just going to sit in his closet until we downsized or died? (And then what would happen to it?) He’s glad, however, that he took the time to sit with the book for a while before he sent it off. He even thanked it—a trick he learned from Marie Kondo. And even so, it took him a few minutes to adjust to finding out that the book was now in tatters. He decided that he’s not ready to send her his absolute favorite, The Happy Man and his Dump Truck—not just yet.

So there’s our dilemma. We can either keep sentimental objects or pass them down. If we pass them down, they will either languish unloved or get dented, battered, and broken. What, and how, do we choose?

I’ve been thinking about this for two reasons. For one thing, I just read a marvelous piece by Anne Patchett in The New Yorker, about shedding objects. (She calls it a practice, like meditation or yoga.) For another, during a Zoom chat last week, one of my friends talked about sending two such objects off to her tiny granddaughter. Her process struck me as a good model.

Sally sent off a message to her son and daughter-in-law:

Dearies, do you think Elke Louise would be interested in either or both of these?  They each have a back story that is the reason we have kept them all these years.

The elephant was given to [your brother] at his birth by the doctor who co-authored with Dad the study about couples deciding whether or not to learn the gender of their baby before birth. It comes from a very fancy Newbury Street shop known for its French provincial fabrics. [We] would love for you to have it if it’s of interest but will find it a new home if not.

The bunny is incredibly soft and squishy and was given to my mother for comfort as she was dying, and she loved holding it. It was given to her by her best friend Binny, a child analyst who was in the medical tent during the Edmund Pettus Bridge March in Selma and who stitched up John Lewis’s broken head.

So you can see that each has quite a pedigree.
Let me know if there’s any interest.
❤️❤️❤️🦊

Her son wrote back,

Absolutely! Beautiful and meaningful. As long as everyone is okay with them being “loved” by a baby, aka suffering structural damage. 🙂 

And she replied,

Oh, my goodness, absolutely, being loved to shreds, that’s the best.  The Velveteen Rabbit.  I will send them your way. ❤️

That’s a great example of passing things down mindfully. Sally took a picture and shared the meaning of the objects she was sending. She honored them and their role in her life. She also consciously acknowledged that their fate will be that of the velveteen rabbit: They will be “loved to shreds.”

Will she feel the same way about precious objects from her own childhood? Maybe, maybe not. Or maybe not yet.

Some of the sentimental objects from my childhood have slowly been given away—some to the well-used recycling table at our town dump. But there are still plenty of things I’m not yet ready to get go of.

There’s my shelf of childhood books, for example, most with their spines falling off or their covers frayed. Maybe I’ll send some of them to my granddaughter when she’s old enough. But my copy of The Secret Garden sustained me through a childhood of life-threatening asthma; it remains with me as long as I can find space for it.

There’s also my favorite stuffed animal, a rabbit I named Super Floppy. Because of the severity of my allergies, everything in my room, from curtains and bedding to my beloved companion, Super Floppy, had to be washed every day. (Every single day. My poor mom….) Super Floppy’s tongue and eyes were sewn back on many, many times. Now Super Floppy sits entangled with my husband’s old sock monkey, Jocko. Some days I think of the two of them as like the Roman Lares and Penates—our little household gods, presiding sweetly over our domestic life. Some days, I think they just like to hang out together.

If and when we move to a smaller house, I think I’ll be able to shed many delightful and sentimental objects. Even my grandmother’s rolling pin and my mother’s wedding ring. Even the old, gorgeously decorated copy of Paradise Lost my students bought and signed for me one year. Maybe even the antique advertising poster I bought from the café where I wrote much of my doctoral thesis. (Maybe.)

Super Floppy and The Secret Garden, though—they were my childhood companions and refuges. They make me feel secure in the world. They’ll follow me as far down the road as I can carry them.