Who says you can't take it with you?

I am a pack rat. Always have been.

My mother says I clung to the placenta in which I arrived for a week after my birth, and wailed like a banshee when the doctor finally pried it away from my tiny hands.

Six decades later nothing has changed. I still can’t bring myself to part with things on the off chance I might need and/or want them someday, even though I know my children will, after I’m gone, curse me for leaving them to wade through belongings they won’t understand why I kept.

“WTF is this?” one will ask, pulling a musty multi-page document, stapled between two sheets of faded red and green construction paper, out of a box.

“I dunno and I don’t care”, the other will respond, grabbing it and hurling into a garbage bag the December, 1960, issue of Tiger Tales, the mimeographed school newsletter from the Auxvasse Elementary/Jr. High/High School for which I was personally chosen that month by my teacher, Mrs. Scanlon, to report the Fourth Grade Class News, one of the first bylines I ever earned.

I sometimes wish I weren’t a pack rat, especially now that my wife and I are packing up the Connecticut house in which we’ve lived since 1991 – more than one-third of our lives. It has sold and, according to the contract, we’re supposed to leave it “broom clean” when the buyers take possession September 26.

Fat chance. Maybe by September 26, 2017, but no way we're going to be able to cull through all that stuff in a month. We’re simply going to have to move it all to Florida with us.

While it’s well known that pack rats generally marry neat-niks who toss things they won’t be needing within the next week into the trash, our marriage is an exception. My wife is a pack rat, too. It’s just that we’re pack rats about different things.

She’s a pack rat about clothes. For instance, she is moving 300 cashmere sweaters – all of which look exactly alike except for slight color variations – to Florida. I point out it is hardly ever sweater weather in Florida ­­– even in January – and that, if she wears a different sweater on each of the 30 cool evenings Florida gets in any given year, she can wear a unique one each time for a decade. She ignores me.

Just as I ignore her when she complains about all the photos and documents I insist on bringing with us. So far I have filled five 18 x 24 x 12 boxes with them and that’s just from the second story – I haven’t moved down to the first floor yet. Amazing when you consider we haven’t taken a picture that has been printed on photo paper this millennium.

Dozens (and dozens and dozens) of those photos, naturally, are framed and I’m packing the frames, too, but it’s not like they’ve been on display. They’ve been stashed at the bottom of closets and behind bookcase doors. Most were moved in 1991 from our first house here in Wilton, Conn., to which they had been moved in 1985 from our condo in Norwalk, Conn., to which they were moved in 1983 from our apartment in Manhattan to which they were moved in 1978 from our Chicago high-rise.

I can’t bring myself to throw away precious treasures like the framed photo of our first dog, a corgi-dachshund named Sybil (who went to that big boneyard in the sky 27 years ago), and me accepting a ribbon for Sybil’s second-place finish out of a field of 80 dogs at a Chicago obedience school. She would have won first had she not suddenly sat bolt upright through her 60-second “down-stay” command. I was so proud – every bit as proud as when I later watched one son cross the stage to accept his law degree and the other his Master’s.

I have no photos of those events, naturally, because they took place in the digital age.  

But Sybil’s framed graduation pic? I’d like to be buried with it. Along with all the thousands and thousands of other photos and documents I’ve saved, from a photo of me finding the fire engine the Easter Bunny left behind the propane tank in 1954 to an insurance policy I’m pretty sure expired in 1992 but want to keep just in case it didn’t.

Which means, I suppose, that my final resting place will be a landfill.

Because that’s the only place that will ever be able to accommodate me and all my stuff.