Nobody Wants Your Old Stuff!
Notes on Downsizing

If you ever want an opportunity for sobering reflection on life’s choices, (and you have been lucky enough to have dodged the County lock-up, multiple high school reunions and/or rehab) try walking around a middle-class, suburban home with an auctioneer.
I did this not too long ago and it was gut-wrenching. It wasn’t my mother’s house, but it could have been. A table full of crystal stemware?
“Nobody’s buying this clear glass. We actually had a dealer take a truckload to the dump.”
The owner’s wedding silver?
“Monogrammed. I can’t sell plate, but the sterling could be melted down.”
Solid wood breakfront, sideboard, table for eight?
“Maybe someone could paint them. Have you heard of chalk paint?”
Embroidered linens? Dresden figurines? Walls full of books?
“What about a yard sale? Or Goodwill might send a truck out if you could box this stuff up...”
A disabled friend’s mother had passed. The suburban split-level had to be sold. His father was moving to a nursing home. He was moving to a tiny, subsidized, apartment. A relative, in the name of being helpful, had called in an auction house to see if some money could be made liquidating the family heirlooms. It was nauseatingly easy to imagine the same burly guy with the clipboard at my house shaking his head over our family treasures.
My partner and I have assisted in downsizing before and since and It never gets easier. As very-late Boomers (1962) of the Sandwich Generation, we just seem to be sharing in an all- too- common experience, as evinced by multiple articles recently written on the subject, that propose to aid our age-group, with this difficult process.
Of course, most of these articles have the same advice.
Scan the documents and take lots of photographs for future generation to savor on a designated flash drive or upload the images to a photo-sharing site, then…Throw it all away.
Nobody wants it.
Nobody.
Even Goodwill is allegedly turning away “brown furniture” after a twenty-percent increase in donations. According to a broad swath of articles from mainstream news outlets to antiques trade periodicals and senior-living screeds, the next generation has no use for our furniture, scrap-books and collectibles, so we, their elders, shouldn’t be disappointed when they turn up their noses at Grandma’s good dishes.
Especially when they are offered Grandma’s good dishes.
The greatest generational scorn seems to be felt for higher end tableware and the accoutrements of fine dining.
An interviewee in the New York Times “felt obligated to take my mom’s Lenox,” though,” it’s just going to sit in the cupboard next to my stuff.” The Washington Post assures us that “Millennials don’t polish silver.” Forbes takes time to explain that “This is an Ikea and Target generation. They live minimally, much more so than the boomers.” And that Millennials “are far more intrigued by Fisher Price toy people and Arby’s glasses with cartoon figures than sideboards and credenzas.”
I am sick of hearing this bullshit.
The media can gush on about the aesthetic delights of eating cheese cubes over a paper towel (Apparently Millennials hate napkins too.) , but if you ask me, this aversion to graciousness is a combination of selfishness, laziness and pique. Get over yourselves.
Previous generations scrimped, saved and splashed out for nice tableware because we used it. We fed people on it. We entertained. We brewed tea and made bridal punch and Thanksgiving dinners and Christmas buffets. We cut the crusts off sandwiches for friends of our mothers, we saw once a year. We poured drinks for the boss and served homemade cookies to the paperboy.
In the eighteen years my millennial daughter has lived on her own, I have been treated to two Mother’s Day lunches in restaurants and one Labor Day barbecue when she bought a house. At Christmas, some years, not every year, I am gifted with a sandwich bag of cookies. That’s the sum-total of her culinary munificence. If she deigns to eat a holiday meal at my table, she arrives (with company) as the first full platter hits the damask, and leaves as soon as the final crumb of dessert enters the last diner’s mouth via my silver pastry forks. There are always other tables to visit and other people to see. Surely, I can understand that?
In eighteen years, I have yet to see her take her empty plate to the kitchen or even offer to help clean up. My friends have similar experiences. Yet most of us, if given the opportunity, wouldn’t change a thing.
We worked to feed others because that’s what family does. It was sometimes expensive and exhausting, but that’s what was done for us and we felt a responsibility to pay that hospitality forward. Your parents’ embarrassing collections of extension-leafed, dining-room tables ,ugly sleeper sofas, jigsaw puzzles ,photo albums, board games and saggy badminton nets were bought, kept and maintained all in service to the same end… to take care of family. You. Your cousins. Your friends. Family is created through small shared experiences over time. Sometimes you need stuff to help facilitate the process. Tangible, not digital stuff.
Many people talk about the smaller houses and tighter budgets of the millennials. My Depression-era, immigrant grandparents could certainly relate. Yet many times, as a child, I saw a dozen people around their kitchen table. My Nana might only have been able to serve Lipton tea and a translucent sliver of cake, but it was treated like a feast and served on her wedding china, which I still own. When my first grandchild gets teeth next year, he’ll be the fifth generation of the family to eat off those plates. Looking at a digital photo of those dishes on Shutterfly is no equivalent.
So Millennials….
Turn off your devices, including the television.
Cook something.
It would be nice if it was from an old family recipe, but Stoke-on-Trent wasn’t built in a day. Set the table. Invite people over. Have conversations.
Wash the dishes and put them away.
Together.
Have more conversations. Repeat. See if there are enough pieces left to play Monopoly. Heat up some leftovers later. Spend time.
Together.
It won’t always be great, or easy or worthy of Instagram, but this is how people, especially families, bond, civilizations advance and real social networks are built. Suck it up.
We did it for you.
Now take the china and say, “thank you.”
And take good care of it.
You might have kids of your own one day who will want it.