What personal belongings do you hold most dear?
What an appropriate question to follow the one from yesterday about collections that we have. This reminds me of a post I wrote way back when on this blog. I was a big fan of the show, The Walking Dead, and I got to thinking one time about the bags that everybody carried on the show. Most of the characters always had some sort of backpack that they took with them. The natural assumption is that the bag has all of their worldly possessions in it. All that remains after the zombie apocalypse. So, by that reasoning, what’s in their bag must be of the utmost importance to them. It made me think…if an apocalypse happened and I had to flee my home. Or let’s be realistic, if war broke out or some other catastrophe and I had to leave my home, unsure of when or if I would ever return, what would I think is important enough to take up space in the one bag I take with me?
Whatever I take can’t be too big. I have to leave space for some of the essentials like a few pairs of clean underwear and a toothbrush.
I don’t think it would be anything electronic. In unpredictable situations, there’s no guarantee of electricity to recharge a device.
I thought about maybe taking a Bible, particularly the one my holier-than-thou grandmother gave me when I was 13 or so and didn’t really care one bit about the fact that I was Catholic. The movie, “The Book of Eli”, emphasizes how valuable and important a Bible may be in an apocalypse. But if I was going to take something religious, it would be the rosary that the same grandmother bought me from the Vatican when she went. St. John Paul II was the pope at the time, so this rosary was blessed by him. For a while I never used it, thinking it too special to be used. But then a time came when I was working at a Catholic school that I began to actually hold it in my hands and pray with it. The first Thursday of the month had the whole school praying the rosary (minus the kindergarteners—nobody wanted 5 year olds knelt down for 20 minutes before an hour long Mass). I would probably take that along. It’s small enough and while my faith is not as strong as other Catholics, certainly not as strong as my grandmother’s, it’s comforting to have and a powerful prayer tool.
Photographs are some other things that are the most precious to me that I would also pack. They’re not only heartfelt visual memories of people we’ve loved, they’re historical markers. They really do tell our story. I’ve never met my father-in-law. He died when my husband was just barely in high school. But I’ve heard about him. He’s actually quite legendary and the fact that I share his last name gets people asking me about my relation to him pretty often. I plan on writing about him one day. Like I said, I’ve never met him, but the few pictures of him that there are let me know who he was. I can look at the pictures and envision the man that strangers will talk to me about when they hear my last name. I see his face and picture him doing all the things my husband has told me about. The pictures simply tell the world that he existed. He’s not around anymore, but he was, and this is what he looked like. This is how he dressed. This is how he smiled, or sort of smiled. Many of the pictures I’ve seen show him with a serious kind of smile, almost like he’s always deep in thought. From what my husband says of him, he probably always was.
Now that I’m trying to think of other things that I hold dear, I’m reminded about another post that I think asked a similar question. I think that’s when I wrote about the holy grail of Jim Carrey memorabilia that I have. That’s certainly a literal prized possession, but not something I would take with me in a zombie (or other) apocalypse. I have it because it has value, in a worldly disaster, an autographed magazine has no value.
I could ramble on for a while longer musing about different things I own. Maybe a pair or two of handknit socks would make the cut. You haven’t worn socks until you wear a pair of handknit socks. There is absolutely no sock comfort greater than those made from sock yarn. Ack! So comfortable! Even in the summer, the lacy ankle socks I knit are very comfortable to wear around the house.
My journals are also things that are near and dear to my heart. Speaking of history! They hold my history. I certainly couldn’t take all 40 of them with me. But maybe the first one and a blank one. Before we sent the kids home for the Covid lockdown, I told my English students to write about their experience. Keep a journal throughout the lockdown because this is history. Their kids are going to learn about 2020 in their history books (or tablets/e-readers/whatever) and they will be amazed to hear what their parents did during that time and what it was like. I even kept a journal throughout that time. I wrote a few sentences every day. What I was doing at home, and what I was hearing on the news. I kept a list of Covid buzz words, like ‘flatten the curve’ or ‘social distancing’. Those were new terms back then. Now they’re just a part of our language. I’m still not clear on what ‘draconian’ means exactly, but I wrote it down because I kept hearing it on tv. I wrote updates for about a year. I think the last thing I wrote was when I got my vaccine. Maybe I’ll publish on here what I wrote like I did with some of my earlier journal entries.
I think ultimately though, the possessions I hold dear are the ones with meaning. Well, except for the socks. They’re just amazingly comfortable socks. But I enjoyed making them because knitting is a hobby. I’m just sentimental like that, I suppose. Nothing wrong with that I think. Nowadays society could benefit from a little more sentimentality I think. People having fond memories of loving people and moments and carrying that love to their interactions with others they come across. I feel a 60s song lyric coming on, “What the world needs now, is love, sweet love.” Yes, yes it does.
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