Ralph Gardner Jr: A Space Of One's Own

Tuesday was bittersweet. I bid farewell to my storage locker, the one I’ve rented since May 2019. That’s more than forty-eight months. I required the space for approximately sixty-five boxes of stuff I’d assembled after cleaning out the apartment where I grew up and my parents lived for sixty years.

I’m not one of those weirdos you’ve probably heard about that turns his storage locker into a man cave, though I admit that the affection I felt toward the receptacle might not have been all that dissimilar to those some guys harbor for their basement tiki bars with their naugahyde barcoloungers, multiple TVs tuned to ESPN, and sports memorabilia.

I never got around to decorating the walls. Never even occurred to me. But part of its allure is that it was my domain. Even though my spouse is the person who found it for me -- a brief car ride from our house -- I don’t recall her ever visiting. She intuitively understood it was my space. Also, I think she was grateful that the junk it contained remain there as long as possible, rather than migrating to our basement.

Allow me to describe the locker even though it doesn’t really require description since it looked like any other storage locker. It was a modest 5’ wide x 10’ long, similar in size to a walk-in closet, with a concrete floor. Access was gained through a metal roll-up door. At the storage facility’s suggestion I bought a stainless steel disc-shaped padlock that thread through the door’s latch. The lock was just in case there’s a cohort of thieves out there with a passion for things like porcelain figurines or photos of my grandparents’ cruise to Corfu in 1937.

I suspect I’m not making my storage locker sound especially enchanting but it was to me. I’d never owned a storage locker before, or rather rented one. But as long as I paid the monthly rent on time it felt mine. It even came with a view. Storage facilities aren’t typically associated with scenery – there are probably those, myself included, that would consider them a blight on the landscape – but mine looked out on Route 9H in Columbia County, a busy artery but one that still maintains its bucolic charm.

But the primary allure of my storage locker was the stuff inside. My brothers and I had been required to vacate my parents’ rental apartment in three short months. I wasn’t allowed to linger for long over individual items of family history before I was forced to make a decision: chuck it or throw it into boxes and send it upstate? When I opened those boxes I felt as if I was exploring their contents for the first time. I knew something of how British archeologist Howard Carter must have felt when he discovered Tutankhamen’s tomb. While no priceless scarabs or pet mummies, the boxes contained some pretty cool stuff.

I’ve been informed by my wife that cool is a subjective term and that few people, other than me, would have considered the boxes contents worth preserving any longer than it took to locate the nearest dumpster. I have no desire to enlist supporters to side with me in my valiant and fruitless struggle with my spouse over the desirability, archival value and aesthetic merit of individual items. But let me just mention some of the amazing stuff those boxes contained:

• Every piece of personal correspondence my mother received dating back to her teenage years after moving to the United States in 1939; it’s a virtual tableau of life in New York City in the Forties. Just to prove I’m not a hoarder I tossed dozens of boxes filled with Christmas cards from the early Fifties on. OK, so I saved a selection of cards, but mostly for their period design value.
• Multiple copies of “Horatio Alger or the American Hero Era,” a book my father wrote in 1964. I frankly don’t know what to do with them, but I feel it would sacrilegious to send them to the town dump.
• A large box filled with nothing but audio equipment. They’re the remnants of an author interview show my father, a journalist turned adman turned journalist again, hosted from his apartment during the Seventies and Eighties. I also have the interview tapes with literary types such as Isaac Asimov, Susan Sontag and Erica Jong. I don’t feel the same responsibility toward the tape recorders and related accessories that I do to the Alger bios. But eBay is filled with that kind of stuff for sale. For all I know I’m sitting on antique sound recording gold.
• Dozens of books my father had those authors sign. My brothers and I divided up the best ones – I got Kurt Vonnegut’s Slapstick signed with a flourish on the writer’s 54^th birthday as his inscription noted; as well as a copy of poet Allan Ginsburg’s collected works inscribed “overlooking Central Park in mist” and signed “Empty Head.” But is anybody in the market for an autographed copy of Art Linkletter’s “I Didn’t Do It Alone”? I didn’t think so.

The final few boxes to depart the storage locker – they’re in our basement now – include my mother’s children’s books, decades of 16mm home movies together with a Bell and Howell projector to view them on, and the original cast albums from shows like “Annie Get Your Gun,” “Carousel,” and “Kiss Me Kate.”
Once I’d loaded the last box into my car I swept out the storage locker, not that it was required. I did so as a coda, a form of closure. Because the locker was more than a space. It was a place to meditate over the departed. That period has now come to an end.

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