The first time I moved – that I was old enough to realize and conceptualize – I lost my teddy bear in the transition. He wasn't a super-huggable thing, but he was fully articulated and inspired my imagination; with my father's help, I wrote two stories about his adventures while I was either asleep or away at school.
I still sometimes wake up in the night momentarily tearful at his loss. But over the years there has been so much else. My parents split not long after that move, so we moved again, twofold. My father left the country a few years later, and I followed him the year after that. Then he lost his temporary job, so that was another move within the year. And once you get to college, if you live in campus housing – it's an uprooting every year for four years. You lose things.
Everyone who knows me knows I accumulate stuff. I love everything I obtain, and yet I've let massive chunks of it go over the years. I still think of things I miss, but I've learned to cope a little bit. Yet as I write this, there's still a chance that a wall of flame will take away my Los Angeles residence and everything in it.
When I first came into a second home in Joshua Tree (ere you accuse me of massive wealth privilege, I assure you it was through no achievement of my own), I thought the obvious thing: I hope that if L.A. ever faces a major disaster, I'll be out here. I didn't expect two of them within five years. The last major disaster I lived through in the city was the Northridge earthquake, which inconvenienced USC for maybe a day at most. Living with my mother-in-law for almost a year during COVID was a bit different, and if I'm being honest, probably hastened her desire to get us into the guest house.
Much of my collection in recent years has been “free,” which is to say, given to me on condition of my writing about the item and photographing it. Not much of what I have is worth a lot on the secondary market, as some assume – I used to have libertarian friends who insisted I couldn't bitch about not having health insurance if I had a massive toy collection; pre-Obamacare, said toy collection might have covered one month.
Most major religions encourage you to let go of material goods. Jesus in particular famously advocated that people who followed him should give everything they had to the poor first, which is why American capitalist Christianity is so peculiar. So ingrained do we have it in our heads, thanks to marketing, that the stuff we own proves our worth, that we want to prove our beliefs worthwhile with possessions too. Hell, I'm tempted to buy a “Friendly Neighborhood Atheist” T-shirt from the Freedom From Religion Foundation right now. I think, though, that the faiths are on to something in that loving your neighbors and looking out for spiritual/moral riches is where it's at. The more I accumulate, the more I make my wife unhappy about where I'm going to put the newest thing.
One thing I have realized over the years is that even if my favorite toy goes bye-bye, my favorite toy characters will never not be in circulation. There'll always be a new Skeletor, or Destro, or Alien and Predator on the market. Embarrassingly recently, a magazine interviewed me about my collection and asked me for my prized possession in it. I responded that it was an autographed Clive Barker figure – and imagine my face when I realized I couldn't find it to send them a picture.
I know I'll be miserable if I lose all the stuff that's in my city abode. I also know I can survive it, having discarded mini-lifetime's worth of things before. It's different for my wife – her mother still owns and lives in the house she grew up in. A single lifetime's worth is contained therein, and it's fairly secure, give or take desert rodents. If we can save anything from a flaming condo, among Julia's most prized items are two white teddy bears.
I worry more about the air. After only wearing masks inside for a year, we might now have to wear them outside everywhere. Will it take another Jon Stewart 20 years to get help for the lung-afflicted firefighters doing a heroic job right now? In a week, a vindictive president who conditions aid on whether or not a given state “likes” him will be back in place (that NBC, based in this State, basically handed him the illusion of competency matters not when his base rages daily against HollyWEIRD). If there's one thing I've learned about idiot Republicans who think they can coast through the presidency, it's that major disasters happen on their watch that ought to have been predicted, never are, and we are woefully unprepared for. We are on our own these next four years, and we might want to emotionally brace for losing things.
So hang on to each other. Because living and loving for others is our meaning. I loathe the thought that God is some being who could squash the fires and wind immediately but opts not to thanks to a nebulous master plan, but I can roll with the folks who think God is that impulse which calls all of us to help and to love. I've seen it even in a local conservative church reaching out to help people of different faiths that they don't even know.
I do not see it in the politicians who most loudly call themselves Christian.