Stockpile

From kindergarten until fourth grade my best friend was girl named Kim, my opposite in almost every way: she was tall, skinny, white and from a working class family; I was the short, plump, brown daughter of immigrant psychiatrists. She lived within walking distance of my house, just outside our neighborhood in a one story bordered at the back by woods. Not far behind the tree line was wide, deep pit where her family and many others tossed their garbage, as well as old air conditioners, buckets of dried up paint, and later, after he was tragically run over, their cat. Next door lived her grandmother, a novelty to me as I had never met any of my grandparents. Two had died before I was born and the other two lived oceans away in what is affectionately called the Third World. Sometimes Kim’s mother sent us to her grandmother’s house to buy TV dinners from her. She had a freezer big enough for a body and stockpiled with Swanson. It was the mother load of Salisbury steaks.

Two things have always stayed with me: first that Kim had to buy the food she was getting from an immediate relative; and second that her mother sent her to buy just two dinners to be shared among four people. Even as a child, one TV dinner was never enough for me. Because my father didn’t get home for dinner until 9 or 10 at night, my mother let me eat whatever I wanted when I got home from school. I thought of TV dinners as appetizers of papery mashed potatoes and processed meat frozen in space and time. When did this chicken leg roam the earth, I thought as I bit into the soft mush of its breaded coating, and who knows what the world was like then?

While Kim’s house was neat and relatively uncluttered, we had at all times enough canned, frozen, and dry goods to last us well into the next decade. My mother, who had lived through the Japanese occupation of the Philippines in World War II, simultaneously practiced frugality and over consumption. This translated into buying a ton of stuff on sale. We had stockpiles of everything: toothbrushes, toothpaste, deodorant, soap, shampoo, conditioner, canned beans, canned soup, canned meat, cake mix, brownie mix, pie filling, spaghetti, macaroni, tomato sauce, tomato paste, instant rice, instant popcorn, salted peanuts, cupcake wrappers, hotdogs, pickles, plastic wrap, tin foil and salad dressing, to name but a portion of her hoard.

To my mother, expiration dates have always seemed more like suggestions than rules to live by. On a recent trip home, she pushed a hefty bottle of dark brown ketchup into my hands as I went out the door. Only when I got home did it occur to me that it had been a long time since I had seen ketchup in a glass bottle. Also, ketchup is supposed to be red. This stuff was a dark rusty brown, like the color of dried blood. I tried looking for an expiration date, but it had long faded away. There was, however, a label advertising a chance to win tickets to the Super bowl – Super bowl 1982. The ketchup was over 13 years old. I told my mother and she said it was still good – to cook with! She is a faithful advocate of the idea that if you just heat something for long enough and at a high enough temperature, you can will it to be edible again.

Not only did we have more food than we could eat in a year, but mounds of books, magazines, newspapers, clippings, junk mail envelopes (because you could write on the back), catalogues and coupon fliers covered nearly every surface. Mattresses and couches older than me moldered in the basement, along with every shoe and scrap of clothing we had ever worn, shoeboxes full of proofs of purchase, everything we had ever received in a box, and every box that went with it.

Perhaps my mother would not have been so prone to collecting food and my father so keen on keeping every shred of paper that came through his hands if they had not had to leave their home in Iran in such a hurry. They, like many other Western educated professionals, fled after the Islamic revolution and left behind almost everything they owned, including their newly built house. For my father, it was as if his home and his family were almost completely severed from him, with the only connection left the unpredictable and scratchy phone lines and letters that had been censored by the mullahs. For my mother, it must have been a throwback to her childhood, when her father was arrested by Japanese soldiers during dinner and the family had to flee their home to live in the mountains without electricity or running water.

This sudden and irreversible forced immigration seemed to push my parents to hoard. The idea that a thing has no value if it has no use means nothing to them, because there is always the possibility that it might one day have a use. You never know what you will wish you had kept, or what piece of paper turns out to be vital information. And oh, the horror, if it turns out that the very thing you needed, the thing that would solve everything, was something you had casually tossed away.
It used to bother me when I visited, to see them surrounded on all sides by clutter they could neither see nor give up. But there is no arguing someone out of a possibility. This is especially true if they have lived through war and exodus. In the face of an unpredictable and possibly violent future, how can I tell my parents not hold onto everything they’ve got?