Found Objects, Vol. 1

Miniature sojourns into items that shout at me and say something about the world they occupy. Today: a cereal-box DVD from my mom.

THE BACKGROUND: Twenty years after I left for college, we moved into the suburban Pittsburgh house where I grew up. Our aim: to be near, and help, my parents as they transitioned to independent, then assisted living. Now, 15 years later, both of them are gone and I am still excavating the accumulated excess of items from the complex life they built and left behind. This is what I’m finding.

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THE OBJECT: When it comes to my late mom, this might be the most on-brand thing I’ve ever found among the things she left behind. It encompasses her generosity and solicitousness; her Post-It-and-perfect-penmanship proclivities; her packrat instincts; and, most of all, the lingering effects of a Depression-era childhood that ensured that absolutely anything she could ever harvest and put to good use, she would.

My mother, Ann Louise Terbrueggen Anthony (1924-2018) always used to marvel to me that people had fewer things when she was little — that the mass-produced consumer society we now take for granted was just beginning, and that the notion of clutter was something still on the horizon. She made up for that by amassing lots of miscellany in her life, uncounted things that were — wait for it — unsorted but significant (or in some cases not so significant).

I was the beneficiary of this in college, during the decade before the internet. Regular envelopes would arrive at my Penn State dorm room and fraternity house containing carefully cut clippings from the three newspapers she took, and of course the shinier weekly cuttings from Newsweek and Time magazines. I looked forward to these envelopes, particularly when they were accompanied by a $10 or $15 check for pizza money.

The envelope tradition continued for years. Wherever I moved— West Virginia or New York or Beijing or New Jersey — the hand-addressed envelopes of relevant, maternally curated miscellany always followed. It was usually just paper — articles — as if I had my own personal clipping service.

But a DVD plucked from a cereal box! “Ted will love this,” I can hear her saying. And what is on the disc, you ask? It is a single random episode of the CBS-TV sitcom “The King of Queens,” starring Kevin James. An episode called “Clothes Encounter” from season five of its nine-season run, when you wouldn’t be giving away too much by including it free with a box of Total, my parents’ preferred breakfast. Why General Mills decided to include it in the box, we may never know.

Now for your kicker. I do not have this semi-obsolete piece of media because my mother saved it, as she did with so many things. I have it because she sent it to me, and for some reason I socked it away and saved it for all these years until it, like me, somehow managed to wind up back in this house.

Perhaps I am as miscellaneous as it is. Paging Dr. Freud.

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