I recently spent 10 days watching You’ve Got Mail on VHS and working from my parents’ house in Mississippi. My parents’ entire home is like a very good thrift store—items everywhere, and you can have just about anything you want. I stayed in my younger sibling Bob’s old room, in particular, which was a cleaner slate since my dad recently cleared out all the stuff and painted it beach-sky blue. My dad did this on his own, and there were a couple of places where the paint escaped the margins onto the moulding and the carpet.
He had placed some furniture in the room, including 3 extra chairs. He likes to have a place to set things down, so a chair or two for your jacket or your bag is most obvious him.
He put our old TV with a build-in VHS player on the dresser. It was plugged in, so when I got there and set down my things and recovered from the initial shock of all the things my parents have continued to accumulate since February of 2020, I went into the den where the VHS tapes were stored and found the one I was hoping to see—You’ve Got Mail.
I followed muscle memory and inserted the tape while the TV was still off, and as I felt it would, the TV turned on and began to play the tape.
While the inexplicably soothing tune “The Puppy Song” played, I began the project I had come for: Find all my old stuff. Put it in boxes, drop it at Goodwill*, do what I needed to in order to handle it.
*(“I prefer the Salvation Army,” my dad said, as he toted my giveaway items off to his truck. “They’re real respectful and appreciative of your donations.”)
Of course, I also came to visit my family. But they’re a fussy bunch, and any expectations for a normal visit are the main ingredient in a recipe for disappointment, so it’s wise to come with a project in mind. Plus, COVID has prolonged this already past-due errand, which is a larger task for me than it may be for others: my parents are emotionally incapable of throwing things away, and it turns out that I was an extremely sentimental child who used scrapbooking as a creative outlet.
Do I need any of these pictures I took at camp over the years? Do I need this hat to wear to funerals? Do I need anything I don’t already have at my house in Asheville? Was I a happier kid, as the pictures suggest, than I remember?
I cleaned out two sets of floor-to-ceiling bookshelves (many of which were double-packed with books and papers), the top of a walk-in closet, a closet full of clothes my mother has been augmenting with her hand-me-downs for 20 years, shelves of vinyl that totaled 9 feet in length, two underbed storage containers and a small suitcase filled with “craft supplies” (read: trash), a built-in desk covered in books and the baskets and boxes “stored” under it, a shelf in the attic labeled (in 2012) “Whitney’s stuff for when I get my own place” (which happened in 2013), and two 3-drawer bedside tables that were brimming with papers and journals and old cellphones. I checked every cabinet and closet and room and even under the sinks for things that were mine to deal with, and found things all over, even hanging on the walls.
In my car, I was able to fit five clear Rubbermaid boxes, a few boxes of books, 3 bags of records, the handy underbed storage containers, my little sibling’s old Sony tape/CD player (a true score), an electric typewriter in perfect condition (another score), and some hanging clothes.
Most of these items’ destiny is yet undecided. And I regret that I had to leave behind even more boxes, all clearly labeled, in my parents’ attic to be removed another day.
But I kept my head above the water, largely thanks to the lighthearted outlook of Kathleen Kelly, owner of The Shop Around the Corner, who has no father, no “kinfolk,” no highly contagious Omicron variant, only positive feelings toward her mother, and a great apartment that is decorated in eclectic fashion with happy sentimental items and books.
I left the VHS of You’ve Got Mail behind, in a little basket next to the TV. I have no VHS player, and it seems that it should remain next to the TV in case the next houseguest, should they need (as I do every day of my life) a character who is not only a relic of the entire aesthetic I remember believing was beautiful in the 1990s, but who is a compass toward the meaning of being okay in the eye of the storm.