Material World

A favorite exercise of mine for freshman composition class: your apartment burned down and with it all your clothes and you have to wear--temporarily, don't cry!--your mother's clothes.  Write about how you feel.  Most kids would rather wear a blanket.  Me too.  You too, Mom, admit it! You said Grandmom dressed like a Polish immigrant.  We define ourselves by the things we surround ourselves with, what we eat, even the people we associate with. I know a man who will only associate with attractive people.  Superficial bastard, right? A woman who will only eat organic food no GMOs for her no siree.  Snob. Are you with me? We (used loosely) all laugh at Asian tourists who flaunt clothes covered with high-end designer logos as if its magic made them polo players or Hello Kitty forever little girls.  My husband cuts the logos off his pants not wanting to be mistaken for a member of the "members only" club.  When I lived in Germany I witnessed a fad where Germans wore polo shirts with arbitrary English words embroidered on the chest--"Blackey Blackey" "English Garden"--and they proclaimed themselves multi-cultural.  The curse of first world materialism--this stuff!--and yet it's the same for all worlds.  Aboriginal people can't wear garments/colors/decorations reserved for royalty. Sumptuary laws are on the books in every culture since the ancient Greeks because stuff has meaning about who you are.  When I uprooted my life a decade ago and moved elsewhere, I would wake up for the longest time discombobulated.  Whose sheets?  The mattress creaked.  The scene out the bedroom window--trees? The books on the nightstand--I would never buy hard cover, so wasteful!  And who was that next to me?  I was a visitor in someone else's story. I'd sneak away and open my suitcase that held momentos of who I was, and what I collected from where I'd been and recite my narrative. But what did that make me? A collection of souvenirs?  It took a long time for me to imbue meaning to the new material of my life. To adjust my story and surround myself with new things that had new stories attached to them.  Because that's all stuff is--props to help you tell your story. Isn't it grand?  It always comes back to storytelling.