Usefullness (originally written August 15, 2009)

In watching Justice Sandra Day O’Connor of the American Supreme Court, I learned something from her answer to a question. The question was to the effect that given her childhood growing up on a 300 sq mile ranch in Arizona and all the wide open spaces and the opportunity that comes with that, there must be a certain type of folk that lives that type of life. She started by saying that you have to be able to do things on your own to be able to fix things. There were no telephones or electricity and when something went wrong or got broken you had to be able to fix it, didn’t have to be beautiful, you just had to fix it. She went on to say that they would keep bailing wire and old nuts and bolts and scraps of metal and things of the sort. Immediately I thought of myself and the many pounds of stuff that I’ve been unable to throw away due to what I consider to be its usefulness. I still have copper wire that I removed from electrical components back in the 80's. I used to sneak out in the garage get my father’s soldering iron to take apart old radios which I found, Christ I’ve still got the magnets from the speakers. I would take it all apart, transformers, transistors, resistors, capacitors all taken from their boards and then I’d take them apart. I would always keep the copper wire. I knew better, but part of me thought it could be gold. It was ever so thin and wound neatly, and that stuff I had pounds of.

To get back to my point, Justice Day O’Connor spoke about having things around, things that would or could be useful. Well I have lots of things which I keep around that I believe are useful, in fact I have hundreds of pounds of things which I consider useful. Things that when I was a teenager my mother would call junk and tell me to either pack it up or throw it away, suggesting there was no point in “keeping all this junk”. I agree most of it is probably junk and definitely of no real value, but the obsessive compulsiveness evident in an 8 year old wouldn’t let me throw away the containers of rocks and beach glass I had found as a child. On one of those days in my late teenage years when my mother told me to “thin out the place” - meaning my room, the rocks and glass were sure to go, all 20 or 30 pounds of it collected over many years, thrown out onto the gravel driveway where it had a better chance of providing grip in the winter months than to poke holes in the tires.

Again back to the Justice, the folk she spoke about were resilient and self reliant, much like the folk that I grew up around.
My Uncle Edwin is known for being referred to a pack-rat as have I on dozens of occasions, my grandfather was a farmer and let me tell you he had a stable with rafters full of junk, but it was all useful. Maybe it was a broken pitchfork that hadn’t been replaced yet, but still had a good handle or scrap metal that would come in handy for a part on the tractor but it was all in contingency. The point is, is that I now believe it runs in the blood, it’s not nurture, its nature. I have more books with bookmarks still in them than I have books that I’ve finished, and I have a lot of books. Here lately though I’m trying to change that.