Behind the Ironic Column

I was glad they used a man in the picture of the disarray and confusion that results from “hoarding.”  According to a story in my local paper yesterday, the tendency to keep more and more things that pile up and surround the hoarder with sometimes dangerous stacks of stuff is a complex syndrome and not just a facet of obsessive-compulsive disorder.   There have been various research studies and it’s now being considered a separate mental disorder.

Growing up in the South, I often visited the homes of our somewhat eccentric aunts  and great-aunts.  They usually seemed to live alone and their rooms were treasure troves of all kinds of materials – stacks and stacks of magazines, kitchenware, clothes, almost anything you could think of.  I was a child who insisted on reading in every free minute, so the tables and shelves piled with magazines were entrancing to me.  There was no way I would ever run out of things to read when I visited my aunt.  My brothers like the stacks for another reason – it made hide and seek that much more entertaining to have all the extra nooks and crannies.

In the years since, I’ve seen many newspaper stories about people (almost always women) who were crushed or smothered by an avalanche of paper.  In an ironic twist, I recently found several of those articles which I had carefully cut out a good dozen or so years ago.  I found them in a huge stack of magazine and other articles that I’ve been saving.  Not that my accumulations reach anywhere near those of the man in the newspaper photo or even my mental picture of my aunt’s reading room.  But still, I make a note in the back of my mind to pay attention to the rate that things accumulate.  The article cheerfully goes on to say that hoarding may have a genetic aspect and definitely is influenced by family environment.  I could be doomed – in my family the tendencies toward accumulation run in two opposite directions.  One group of us tends to be sentimental about possessions – we hang onto things long after their actual utility is gone.  Whether that slides on over into hoarding I’m not sure.  In a few cases I can see that it was definitely headed that way.  The other family group takes the opposite tack – and frequently causes a problem by getting rid of something that shouldn’t have been gotten rid of.  I still remember a visit to one aunt (one of the anti-clutterers) who was renowned for keeping a clean house.  She would dust  around you while you were standing there talking to her.  And she never let even one scrap of paper mess up her coffee and end tables.  All that trash went straight into the fire.  In her zeal to get rid of an errant section of newspaper, she tossed a twenty dollar bill into the fire at the same time.  (Why my uncle had put a twenty down on the table remains a mystery – he should have known better.)  Anyway, she saw the money just as it started to burn and yanked the charred pieces back out of the fire.  The bill had been folded and burned across the folded end – which turned out to be the best possible place to be damaged.  Once the yelling subsided (twenty dollars in those days was more like a hundred today so this was a serious thing), there was considerable debate about how to make the money whole.  Finally one of my cousins said he’d heard that the bank would replace damaged money if you had both ends of the same bill (they weren’t dim enough to replace it if you only had one end – no matter what story you told.)  So he took it off to the bank and the rest of us went about our business.  It didn’t affect my aunt in the slightest, though.  She still grabbed every loose piece of paper and shoved it into the fire.

My tendencies run toward the accumulator side of the family so I guess I’ll have to keep a watch on that.  As long as I can still find things, and I don’t sob for days over discarding a bottle cap (I do keep a few), then I think I’ll be OK.  And I have this occasional fantasy that something I’ve accumulated may at some point be the object of desire of someone with more money than possessions.  E-Bay and other sales places seem to be full of things that I could hardly imagine wanting.  Of course I don’t look too hard at what people are selling.  I’m afraid it will turn out to be the one thing that I recklessly gave away years ago instead of saving it for future emergencies

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