Last week, my eight-year old daughter spent a considerable amount of time drawing some lovely, if somewhat abstract, pictures, which she dedicated to me, with love. I received them gratefully and told her how much I admired them. This week, however, I don’t know where they are. In the bin, probably, like thousands of their predecessors, not only from her but also her three sisters.
The precious things we throw away are so commonplace as to be unremarkable. Drawings are just the tip of the iceberg. The toys they cherished as infants, the little pink pig or the one-eyed doll – they too find their way to the skip or dump.
This must be the fate of these concrete manifestations of memory, otherwise there would be no room to move in the house or space to open the drawers. You can imagine them all there in a pile, all the beautiful, creative, lovingly crafted detritus, sculptures made from lolly sticks, papier-mache masks, infantile smudges and shaky depictions of the human face in crayon and gouache. And then you can imagine setting fire to the pile, for this is what we must do.
This is life. Yet wrenching as it is, it is better than the alternative of compulsively hoarding the past. For the retention of memory has become a modern fetish. A selfie is a form of memory as is every digital and analogue image ever recorded, as is recorded sound. We are constantly working to solidify a life that is at heart irredeemably transient and lost (and gained) at every second.
The more modern we become, the greater this tendency asserts as we try to protect our disappearing world with technology instead of crayons and paint. We are constantly clutching at that which is always disappearing. Our days are our artefacts, our gifts, our offerings from nature, or life, or God, if you prefer. And we throw them away or we clutch at them fruitlessly, when the only thing to do with them properly is honour them as they depart.
I am not a taker of photos or a keeper of mementoes, but I do have a pinboard for my favourite greetings cards – always hand-drawn – from my children. They are a source of great consolation to me sometimes when I am feeling like a bad father or a lost soul. Of course they themselves are fossils – the shells, or solidified trace, of an emotion that once was – but they tell me that although perhaps I never really was the “best dad in the world”, someone once thought so, if only for the time it took to create that picture, those words, those scribbled kisses.
These cards and drawings and sculptures that children produce in abundance from their free-flowing hearts with their unashamed hands – how remarkable they are. Why do we as adults stop creating such things for one another – for friends or partners? Instead we give shop-bought tributes, consumer articles purchased on demand. These are not really offerings, they are taxes, required by convention. The gifts my children give me are more often than not unconnected to any special day because for them, every day is special and therefore worthy of tribute, of the expression of love and giving of time unalloyed with guilt or a sense of responsibility.
Just as we throw most of these artefacts away, we throw our days away, the days we spend with our children, perhaps not noticing their ephemerality, their beauty. Days, in other words, are what we take for granted. For although all are lost, some are honoured, some acknowledged for what they are – infinitely precious. Not often enough, though. Not often enough.
With acknowledgement to Michael Chabon, who inspired this piece
