The Garbage Chute

Making Space

Work in progress

I bought an apartment with James in 2024. It’s just under 800 square feet and we’ve jammed in two people’s lives plus a dog’s. I’m always looking for stylish ways to make room that don’t involve stuffing things under the bed or jamming my cupboards too full or relocating kitchen stuff to the bathroom closet.

I installed a new floating bookcase from Room & Board and started making it pretty. A group of Pulitzer biographies shadowed by a spilling pothos from above. A globe lamp that illuminates the corner in soft gold. Cormac McCarthy’s entire collection flanked by a pair of reading statues. A shelf of poetry with a photo of James and me on our wedding day.

Once the shelves felt right, I was on a roll. I decided it was high time to keep going. I pulled out my personal archive from the depths of the closet.

Since 2020, I’ve moved six times. Through every one of those moves, I’ve dragged around the same three boxes of old letters, photo albums, and cards. I’ve opened them in five different apartments and shut them again, slid them into a closet and told myself I’d deal with it later. Today was later.

Reader, I threw out five photo albums and two Cub Foods grocery bags of cards.

Photos from confirmation camp at Hasscib Lake with an embarrassing number of images of one particular boy. Summer Services with the most frumpy knee-length shorts and hair-sprayed bob. Peace gardens and the red leather jacket handed down from Annemarie. A ski trip with the church youth group where some of my friends met their future husbands. Photos of people I haven’t talked to since 1994 went sailing down the garbage chute of my building. I crammed them into the mouth of the chute and shoved them down its proverbial throat. It felt so good, better than it should have. If Frankie could have clapped, he would have.

I also threw out my post-religion years. Dozens of photos of me smoking cigarettes in strange places, like the top of a railroad bridge, sitting on my brother’s motorcycle, and the bathroom at First Avenue in Minneapolis. Images of me dancing in the spotlight, trying to master how a body moves when it’s free. Pictures where I look deeply sad and uncomfortable at Stony Lake Camp for some weird gathering that, looking at it now, I can’t even fully identify. Someone’s confirmation camp? Language camp? Who knows. My face in the photo tells me I did not want to be there.

Two whole eras of myself, gone down the chute in one morning. Captive years and bewildered years. I don’t need the documentation of either one. I know what happened. I lived it.

Here’s what I kept: honor cords from my graduation at City College. A hand-written card from one of my Hollywood clients congratulating me. My Emmy nomination. My hard-earned grad school diploma from CUNY. Letters from Mom. Cards from Annemarie. A few mementos from the significant moments. Things that mark the life I actually built and the people I actually loved.

That’s it. My archive fits neatly into Dad’s old yellow suitcase, right alongside Mom’s high school yearbook, Dad’s 1939 diary, and a photo of Annemarie and me going down the log chute at the Mall of America.

I rearranged my shelves, too. There’s empty space where the boxes used to be. The apartment feels bigger.