The Holiday Landfill

The emotional overload season is upon us. Plus, Robert James Waller, Pema Chödrön, a Stephen Dunn poem, cool ills.

In the early 90s, Robert James Waller was one of the most successful writers on the planet, thanks to his lusty middle-age adultery story, The Bridges of Madison County. My mother–everyone's mother in the suburbs, it seemed–was obsessed with that book. My mom couldn't wait for the movie version but was disappointed when Clint Eastwood was cast as the male lead. (She preferred Paul Hogan, star of the Crocodile Dundee franchise, to play the sweaty-shirted photojournalist Robert Kincaid. Crocodile Dundee. That's who got her all horned up.)  

But before he was world-famous, Waller wrote this essay titled "Excavating Rachael's Room," about the extra heavy heartache of cleaning out his daughter's bedroom soon after she left their home in Texas and moved to Boston for her first real job. The essay is a detailed inventory of what's left behind in her room—the toys, the books, the old horse-riding ribbons, and trophies—and the memories they conjure. as he and his wife, Georgia, mournfully sift through all of it to say goodbye:

"Slowly, we change from rough-and-tumble scavengers to gentle archaeologists. Perhaps it started when we reached the level of the dolls and stuffed animals.

"We hold up treasures and call to each other, "Look at this! Do you remember…?"

And there's Barbie. And Barbie's clothes. And Barbie's camper in which the young female cat was given grand tours of the house, even though she would have preferred not to travel at all, thank you.

Twister—The Game That Ties You Up in Knots. The ball glove. She was pretty decent at first base. And the violin. Jim Welch's school orchestra was one of the best parts of her growing years.

She smiles out at us from a homecoming picture, the night of her first real date. Thousands of rocks and seashells. The little weaving loom on which she fashioned potholders for entire neighborhoods. My resolve is completely gone as I rescue Snoopy's pennant from the flapping jaws of a trash bag and set it to one side for keeping."

Even though I was childless and still living at my parents' home when I read it, this essay destroyed me. If I ever had children, I swore I would keep EVERYTHING. Nobody leaves! Nobody grows!

I have not kept that promise. We're about to embark on our third excavation before the holidays commence. We filled eight trash bags full of broken plastic toys and matted stuffed animals the last couple of times. And every time I load up a bag with another one-footed dinosaur, handfuls of Hatchimals, and crusty Matchbox cars, I think: Christ. I'm inside Rachael's room.

We hire the same junk guy every year to haul it all away. And I always get light-headed when I watch him toss a broken tricycle or a giant stuffed bear into a pile like it was never meaningful to anyone.

I wish it were Christmas in the 1800s, and I could make our children happy with old socks stuffed with oranges, weird cardamom taffy, or dolls made out of sticks. I can't even remember which toys stuck around from last Christmas, besides the Barbie Dream House, and that’s only because it takes up a full section of the living room wall. Our daughter barely uses it but our youngest is a big fan of having King Kong shove an unsuspecting Thomas the Train into Barbie’s pool house toilet.

But we are not in the 1800s. It is almost 2024 and the earth is on fire, and in a few weeks, a whole new pile will be waiting under a living tree: More monster trucks. Trolls. Possibly a drum set. More princess costumes. More Barbies.

My goal is to have there be less stuff, more joy this year. If not this year, then next. And sober. Always, forever sober. My kids don’t know what a gift that is just yet. But mostly: less stuff. I outsource hours of joy to the stuff.

My sister and other friends, who are parents of older teenagers, told me that the plastic things turn into heavier things, longer-lasting things eventually: clothes, jewelry, electric guitars, hockey equipment, and, lastly, people. People become the things. Friends. Boyfriends. Bosses. "It gets easier," some of them say. 

Waller died a few years ago, but I wanted to see if there were any stories about what Rachael was up to today. I found this Texas Monthly article from 1997 about her father's real-life infidelity that led to her parent's messy divorce and Rachael's total estrangement from him.