You Are Too Old To Believe You Need to Save Your Good Things Only for Special Occasions

Too Old for This Sh*t: How to Take Your Life Back from an Ageist Society

The first dining room table and chairs in YEARS. Breakfast today at my house.

Why do we save the best for everyone else, or for the last, when much of this stuff will outlast us?

This morning I found this article from

Patricia Cusack

in my inbox. Over the last many years I’ve been downsizing regularly, always and forever stunned at all the stuff (crap) and really good things I’ve accumulated over the years. If you’re in the mood to minimalize, I recommend her article.

I’m not there, may never be, but I sure am all in on reductions, which are essential to minimizing things like…stuff that needs dusting. Which I effing HATE.

I related in a thousand ways to Patricia’s points about how it feels to part with our things. Faced with the huge piles of boxes, opening them often feels like Christmas. Then we realize, shit, I gotta get rid of most of this.

It’s not just that our kids don’t want to inherit the four-foot-tall ceramic rooster which dominated the enormous dining room. Or whatever. Any visit to Saint Vincent de Paul will reveal just how much kids revere their parents’ best china. Or the hutch that held it.

Not at all, it seems.

There are two things going on here. First, a moral imperative to get rid of all that stuff which allows us to be more in life rather than cleaning, dusting, organizing, moving, boxing all that stuff.

A quick aside here for those Carlin aficionados: why is it that when it’s ours, it’s our stuff, but when it’s other peoples’, it’s their shit?

Just asking.

Second, those things which are impossible for us to part with just yet, are we, like my mother, still saving them for that special occasion?

Mom had a collection of gorgeous Franciscan Ivy china that she’d gotten for her wedding. It lived in a cabinet high over our fridge, out of the way of clumsy little hands. We used paper plates most of the time.

Guests got the china. I never ate off it until I was in my sixties.

Eventually, I inherited what was left of it. Those plates, saucers and salt and pepper shakers were shaken and shoved endless times as I moved, slowly succumbing to the insults of time, neglect and moving vans.

By the time I hit 68 and moved to Eugene, ostensibly for my last house forever, I still had five bedrooms’ worth of ….this.

this doesn’t include furniture. And it’s after years of purging. Really?

One of those boxes held the remaining pieces of my mother’s Franciscan Ivy. I took it out, washed it and started to use it every day. What was left was pristine. That didn’t last long either.

At the time I felt guilty that I had dared expose those beloved plates to daily use. My mother had a hard time exposing her face to daily use in the harsh Florida sun of my youth, so frightened was she of aging and the inevitable rejection from my father.

As long as the Franciscan Ivy was perfect, perhaps a piece of herself was, too.

You and I are WAY Too Old to be saving stuff for that perfect time. The perfect time is now.

I sometimes wonder if protecting the Franciscan Ivy from harm was also one way to protect the memory of her wedding, which was so full of promise for a woman coming from a high-society family.

It felt as though I had crossed the line each time I laid an omelet on one of those precious plates. At the same time I also felt freed of the emotional restraints that so many of our parents laid upon us: that such-and-such was only to be rolled out on “special occasions.”

By the time you reach a certain age, just waking up is a damned special occasion.

I wouldn’t blame any kid who took out that special soup tureen that ONLY came out for other people, lined it up and took a baseball bat to it. Apparently we kids weren’t special enough to deserve the good stuff. Bet you can relate in some way.

By the time my mother was in her lively Eighties, madly in love with an old family friend, living in a tiny cottage in an aging facility, the Franciscan Ivy had faded into memory like so many other parts of her life. Stuff no longer mattered.

She cared about love, and life, what was left of hers.

The true “special occasions” were visits from the kids, her friends, a phone call from her beloved Ed.

At that point, nobody cares about the damned china. If anything, had it been in her cupboard, she might well have finally eaten off it every day, knowing that her failing eyesight would likely be the end of her wedding gift.

The way I see it, at least she would have been celebrating every day as the special occasion that it truly was.

The Ivy is long gone. I now have a few things that I bought and have protected the same way, expensive Portuguese pottery that has my name painted on the bottom.

It’s time to stop using the Goodwill cups and saucers and plates I bought because hand surgery made handling good things a dangerous game. I lost a great many things because I couldn’t grip for the better part of a year.

That was then.

This morning for the first time in years, I sat down at an actual dining room table.

My table. My chairs.

I put out my favorite, hand-thrown horse bowl full of oatmeal. The bowl for “special occasions.”

It sits on a gorgeous, hand-woven placemat, made by special-needs Tanzanians at Shanga, where I have often bought such things.

My favorite bowl, with oatmeal residue, lovingly used.

If today isn’t worth celebrating, what day is?

If you and I aren’t worth our best creams, our sweetest soaps, our best shirts, who is? If you and I aren’t worth our best crystal, our best china every day, who is?

Who on earth are we trying to impress?

In a world where a single climate event, one fire, one texting teenager, one aneurysm could end us or most certainly drastically change our world, when is life worth celebrating with our best?

Who are we saving those things for?

How about us.

Just, how about ourselves.

Let’s play.

Photo by Clay Banks on Unsplash

Thanks for exploring these ideas with me. I hope you got value from your time, and if so, kindly consider

If someone you know could use a little boost to bring their best to their every day, kindly also consider

Either way, I hope you wear your best things, your best finery, eat off your best plates. You most assuredly deserve it.