A Memento for the Moment
BY MADISON GARBER
Just after 9 AM, Jack, the thirty-something tow truck driver I’ll come to think of as a godsend, leads my boyfriend and me to the dumpster that holds all our possessions, which we’d packed onto a moving truck three weeks ago in South Florida. Jack’s got kind eyes beneath the bill of his trucker cap, and he addresses me with a well-worn Texas ma’am even though right now I feel far younger than my 27 years, bracing myself for a sight I’d already seen in photos. Yesterday, I cried when I saw the snapshots the moving company sent, the boxes I spent weeks carefully packing sent flying, crushed by furniture, dented by shrapnel, and then left mangled with the totaled semi somewhere by the highway. The truck was abandoned there for two days before the sheriff called Jack to collect the remains and bring them here, to a rural tow yard in Bastrop, Texas.
It’s late August. We’re 1200 miles west of where our things were picked up in Boca Raton and 230 miles south of Denton, where the truck was supposed to deliver our possessions. My doctoral program at the University of North Texas starts in three days.
Jack tells us that when he got to the truck, it looked peeled open like a tin can.
“He must’ve fallen asleep at the wheel,” he speculates. “You never know with these fly-by-night companies.”
It’s the first time I’ll hear this term—fly-by-night—but it rings true when I look it up. I think of the surprise extra charges on move-out day. The weeks we’ve waited in Texas, apartment empty, for a delivery date. The dodged calls when we tried to find out where the truck was. Finding this tow yard took a call to the local sheriff—the moving company wouldn’t tell us. And it’s Jack who woke up early to let us into the yard before he heads out on his shift. He tells us that he lost his own belongings in a house fire years ago, and I don’t know how to thank him properly for his empathy, his kindness—the only glimmers on this otherwise gut-wrenching morning.
Jack also tells us that the truck driver was okay. He was pulled from the semi’s cabin, which was splattered with blood, and taken to a local hospital. The moving company confirmed as much, but the dash camera was never found, if there was one at all. I’m numb to this news, in shock as I stare at the dumpster before us. It’s a red monster of some 20-yards holding bits of furniture, tattered moving boxes, mattresses, a washer and dryer set, and the shrapnel from the moving truck’s back doors. To consider the human involved in the accident would have been too much. I needed to stoke my determination and quash my sadness if I hoped to climb the heap.
I wear the t-shirt and pair of leggings I packed for move-in day. Sweat is already gathering on my upper lip. Though the sun hasn’t yet crested the loblolly pines surrounding the tow yard, it’s 80 degrees and climbing. My boyfriend and I stare silently, fists clenched, at the dumpster. Though the sight is daunting, resolution has settled in my chest. My things are here, somewhere, hopefully, and so I pull on my utility gloves and step forward to dig.
***
Two months before the move, I found Taoism the way some people say they find Jesus, if by “finding Jesus” they mean listening to a podcast that rocks their world. I was three months deep into the pandemic, restless and craving sunshine, even if it was the middle of June in Florida. I started taking long afternoon walks along the Intracoastal, listening as Dr. Carl Totton, founder of the Taoist Institute, finally gave name to the beliefs I had about nature, balance, and finding inner peace. I suppose I’d given up thinking there was a religion for me out there, but I realize now that I was hungry for it—for some truth to live by when the world seemed to have gone to shit.
Everything has an ebb and flow, Totton intoned in my earbuds, and I believed, needed to believe, this would be true of the pandemic too.
Here’s my hang-up: Taoists live simply. They resist earthly attachment. Avoid desire driven by materialism. The sage does not hoard, she gives her surplus. Giving her surplus to others she is enriched.¹
My boyfriend of two years had an easier time with the not-hoarding thing. As we prepared to move in together in Texas, where he hoped to teach, he was perfectly willing to sell or get rid of all his kitchenware and furniture—everything apart from his music equipment, some prized books, a few hard drives, and his clothes. I, on the other hand, had started to pack weeks before my move-out date. At home, souvenir glasses from FSU’s National Championship and the Washington Nationals’ World Series wins were cushioned in my wool socks, silver necklaces placed in the slots of a pill organizer, books wedged Tetris-style into small moving boxes, great-grandparents’ knick-knacks bundled in tissue.
I could not fathom the idea of leaving anything behind.
***
Our belongings were not alone on the moving truck—this I learned from the movers before driving down to Bastrop. But the fact hits differently as we climb through the back end of the dumpster, faced with the difficulty of sorting through strangers’ things to find ours. There are five mattresses stacked over the heap—enough to supply a small family, plus us—and beneath that, a family’s worth of boxes, furniture, and appliances to sift through. We work quickly against time and the rising heat. Though the moving company won’t let us communicate with the other family, we hear from Jack that they might have the dumpster delivered to their home in Austin, leaving us with limited time to scavenge for what we can. Our plan is to return to Denton later that evening.
Jack takes off in his tow truck. My boyfriend and I start by heaving the mattresses over the rim of the bin. We rip moving blankets’ strangle-hold on shards of furniture and toss them aside. Burst moving boxes have made a landslide of debris—bottles of paint, CDs, dry erase markers, hair rollers, Christmas tinsel, bedsheets, and printer cartridges—that we rake aside, searching for anything still intact. My boyfriend quickly finds his music equipment utterly wrecked, but his novels, scripts, and comic books shelter in the warped shell of a heavy-duty plastic bin. He ferries the unscathed books to our U-Haul, a 10-footer my optimistic self had rented, and inspects them one at a time, easily tossing aside anything unusable. In the coming hours, as the sun makes its arc over the tow yard, he takes photos and videos to document the day, fascinated by the surrealistic scene. To me, it’s a nightmare. The things that once made an unfamiliar apartment, far from family, a home are destroyed, perhaps lost forever.
As he sifts through his books, I clamber over the mountain of wrecked objects, careful not to slice myself on the truck’s shrapnel or lose my footing on the precarious pile. We decide to work our way from the top of the pile down, tossing anything too trashed to salvage over the side of the bin. While I dig, I set aside what I think the family who shared our truck would find important: sports memorabilia and children’s crafts, cookware and bags of turmeric and rice, colorful saris folded in torn-open suitcases, official documents ripped and smudged by Texas clay, an earthy smell that will linger on the things I salvage, haunting me with painful recollections months later.
Maybe the things they want to find are not at all what I’ve set aside, but with so much destroyed, even these small items feel like something. As I search, the family becomes a strange companion to my efforts, people I’ll never meet but will come to know from the things they own—things they tried to bring with them to a new home. I’ll later wonder what they would have made of me from the objects I keep had they sorted through the dumpster first. Sentimental, I imagine. Nostalgic. Certainly not a true Taoist, living simply.
I have a list of things I want to find:
my great-grandmother’s silver ring and tiny tea set;
my great-grandfather’s copy of The Elements of Style;
a CD of Radiohead’s In Rainbows signed by Thom Yorke and Ed O’Brien;
an oak trunk filled with memorabilia from my travels: guidebooks and ticket stubs and maps and collector’s pins.
But I’m surprised by the things I end up putting on the U-Haul:
books torn and bent beyond use;
a single unbroken saucer from my parents’ wedding dishes, the set of which they’d handed down to me when I moved out of their house;
a Jimmy Buffet nutcracker, margarita glass snapped off from his wooden hand.
I’m desperate, it seems, to hold onto anything when so much is gone, my hand-me-down furniture from three generations destroyed, two TVs cracked and crushed, who knows what else left in the dirt along the highway.
What strikes me as we dig and toss and set aside is the randomness of the destruction. Here is a roll-top desk smashed to splinters. Here: a bike folded in half. And here: a Royal Albert teapot perfectly intact, ready for afternoon tea.
But the afternoon is a long way off yet. We’re barely through an eighth of the dumpster by the time 11 AM approaches.
***
A year after my dumpster dive, my grandmother will confide in me her fear of what will happen to her things when she’s gone. She uses the adjective precious, and the word will feel weighty, almost dramatic, to my ear, but I understand what she means. Her home is an antique collector’s paradise, full of colonial curiosities: butter churns and lanterns, cast iron skillets and rusted farm tools, blue glass bottles and pewter dishware. There are newer things as well: colorful sun-catchers, Labrador retriever statues, and Pueblo pottery from her trips out west to visit her brother. My grandfather jokingly laments that every visit to a historic site or museum ends with a trip to the gift shop. She needs a memento for the moment, I think, a way to hold onto a memory.
I am my grandmother’s granddaughter. I still buy a collector’s pin for every place I visit, a token to mark the trip on a framed cork board that makes it out of the dumpster in Bastrop. But I think she’s anxious about us figuring out what to do with it all when she’s gone. Anxious that we won’t find the same meaning in those things that she did. I still struggle to understand this worry. Does she want us to feel the residue of her joy on the vase she bought on her trip to Delaware? Or perhaps she wants us to remember the people who gave her those items—people I don’t know who have shaped her life in some way worth commemorating.
I realize that the things I keep might not mean much to anyone else. However, I do understand the desire to keep the memories held by these objects alive. In this sense, maybe an object means more to the giver than the receiver. It’s the consolation of knowing that somewhere in a person’s home a piece of us is watching over them. An emblem of our presence even when we’re far away. Even when we’re gone.
“Maybe write it down,” I tell her. “The things that are important, tell us what they mean to you.” But she only casts a quiet look around her collection, daunted perhaps by the thought of such an undertaking.
***
How does one begin to inventory one’s possessions?
I learn how some things are easy to stick a price on—pressure cooker, TV, coffee maker, printer—but time is a calculation insurance companies don’t tabulate. The hours I invested flipping through boxes of vinyl records at a thrift store or searching for the perfect dress for a cousin’s wedding. Or the weeks I spent cushioning it all in bubble wrap and blankets to ensure it arrived safely in Texas. I see now what Taoists are getting at: how much time I wasted pursuing and preserving things when I could have been living. But what about the column for memory? For a connection to a past, a person, out of reach?
In the weeks after the accident, on an Excel spreadsheet, I’ll try to record what was lost from memory alone, knowing somehow that some things will always be missing.
***
By 12 PM, the dumpster has become an oven. Sweat slicks the inside of my utility gloves and runs down my spine in rivulets as I pick my way over the pile. It takes a set of Jack’s cable cutters to pull it off, but my boyfriend and I manage to push the wrecked washer and dryer—now free of a tangle of wires and cords—off the heap with our legs, exposing a new quadrant of the dumpster for excavation. It’s there that I find my jewelry box, a tiny white cabinet, still intact, perched amidst the mess.
My heart lifts as I pull it from the heap. I open the first drawer. The slots that once held my earrings are empty—no way of finding them now, small as they are, perhaps still on the side of the highway. But that blow glances off for now. It’s not them I’m looking for. It’s my great-grandmother’s ring.
I’m not sure why the ring means so much to me when I have so few clear memories of Grandma Irene. I remember how she called my brother a little rascal for the mischief he got up to on our visits. She had the most beautiful blue eyes and a breathy laugh that still echoes in my mind. Impressions, really, of a time before the dementia set in. Before we found it too difficult to visit her as strangers. Maybe it’s that void that makes me long for a connection. A tangle link. The ring had fit perfectly on my finger. It had tiny scrollwork and chips of diamond so small that the sparkle seemed to come from nowhere. Exactly my style. Exactly hers.
I slide open the next drawer. Several rings still cling to their foam folds, but Grandma Irene’s ring is gone. I feel ill then, from the heat, the exertion, the crush of my hope folding in on itself. I want to sit. Or throw up. Or go back in time to choose a different moving company—a different timeline that leads anywhere else but here.
Something in me persists though. Maybe it’s stubbornness. Denial. Or maybe it’s some intuition, a call from nowhere that moves my hand. I pull the drawer out from the box and peer into the cavity. There, tucked away in the corner, is the ring.
***
A list of things I won’t find in the dumpster:
three winter coats;
dozens of leotards accumulated over a decade of dancing;
the earrings my grandmother wore to my mother’s wedding—the same earrings I wore to the graduation ceremony for my master’s program;
my Death Star teapot with its tea-stained innards;
the pill organizer with my silver necklaces, including a locket from my first communion;
a letter opener from my alma mater;
a pair of Converse sneakers with the cities I’ve traversed scrawled in permanent marker on the soles;
a mug by artist Stanley Donwood with rose-adorned letters spelling Fuck it in cheerful colors.
A list of things I won’t realize I’ve lost until weeks after the accident:
signed copies of my professors’ novels with hand-written well-wishes
for the future;
a favorite silk skirt I thought made my legs look good;
a shadow box filled with ticket stubs from the trains I rode and the shows I attended in my semester abroad in the UK;
my bike helmet;
a set of gilded teaspoons;
a photo of my three-year-old self dancing on my dad’s minor league baseball dugout—perhaps the only copy.
***
Which is greater, your life or possessions?
Which is more painful, gain or loss?²
The correct answer here, of course, is life. Greed comes at a human cost: a life wasted in pursuit of riches, an endless and futile search for satisfaction. But is my grief caused by greed?
I think about the many items I’ve collected over the years:
postcards from places I’ve visited pasted with Mod Podge onto a wooden trunk;
playbills from every play, musical, or ballet I’ve seen or performed in;
greeting cards scrawled in loved ones’ handwriting.
They’re mementos, all of them, for a moment in time, not riches hoarded in the hope of fulfillment or notoriety. But the greeting cards are a collection I never meant to create—the product, I think, of an inability to let go. How can I throw away the love someone has put into words, sealed in an envelope, and sent to me miles and miles away? To throw them in the trash feels like tossing someone’s love aside. The written word, after all, is not ephemeral.
The cards sat in a shoebox in my closet in Florida, a steady accumulation of holiday well-wishes and congratulations that find their final resting place in the relentless heat of a Texas dumpster.
***
By 3 PM, it’s 102 degrees.
When I lean against the dumpster’s metal rim to rest, I jerk back, skin scalded, and sit instead on an upended leather couch where the heap seems stable enough to sit. The dumpster is half empty now, but we’ve started to work in bursts out of necessity: 5 minutes in the dumpster, 5 minutes in the car, AC blasting, legs shaking. I down my second bottle of lukewarm Gatorade, cheeks radiating heat. I think then how it would be nice to have a hat, but I’ve yet to find my baseball caps in the dumpster.
I take a breath and steel myself. Get out of the car again and again and again, even as my boyfriend’s rest breaks become 10 minutes, then 15. The smell of baking cardboard and dirt coats my nostrils. The dust forms a fine film over my sweat. Still, I scramble over the heap, toss wreckage onto the pile of trash steadily building beside the dumpster, unearth another layer of stuff. Every now and then, I ferry a teacup, a cookie jar, an angel statuette to the U-Haul behind me. There are eight half-full moving boxes holding things in various states of damage on the truck, but there’s so much I’ve yet to find—my vinyl collection, my signed CD, my trunk of travel memorabilia, my necklaces.
It’s nearing 5 when I learn what it means to encounter an immovable object.
I was raised to push through many discomforts in life, but I cannot push past this white leather couch. Perhaps if it was still intact instead of twisted and tangled in the mess. Perhaps if I’d encountered it at 9 AM when my legs could still keep upright. But not now.
I get on my knees and try to shimmy underneath it. There’s not enough room to squeeze into the cavern beneath the couch though. I see my dresser underneath it, just out of reach, and suddenly the simple thought of getting my underwear, bras, t-shirts, and PJs back is both dizzyingly tantalizing and utterly impossible.
This morning, Jack offered to forklift things out of the way when he got back from his tow jobs, but it’s quitting time for him now, and my boyfriend gets out of the car to coax me off the pile with the same thought. That’s enough. It’s difficult getting this idea through my heat-hazy head.
Reluctantly, I climb down. My body won’t last much longer anyway. We hadn’t planned to stay the night, but there’s no driving back now, drained as we are. We devour dinner downtown and then get a room at the Hampton Inn around 8 PM. Sagging in the shower, I try to wash the dumpster, the day, off of me.
I contemplate the idea of giving up then. I’ve never felt exhaustion like this before. My body sinks into the hotel mattress like a weight in water. Would I be able to climb the pile again? Lift another piece of shattered furniture? I’m not sure. I just don’t know if I have it in me to walk away either.
My boyfriend doesn’t want to return to the dumpster. He’s ready to move on—I can sense it in his insistence on getting back to Denton. I can’t exactly blame him after today’s struggles. Then again, he’s not as persistent as I am. He’s also not as attached to his things. He seems to have already accepted his loss, nearly all his inventory replaceable—not like the collections and mementos and knick-knacks I have.
I can’t help but wonder then what a Taoist would say about all this. After all, I’ve only flirted with the philosophy in the weeks leading up to the move. Is my earthly attachment too strong? Is that a weakness—a vulnerability to exactly the kind of grief that will roll over me in the months to come? In that moment, I almost envy my boyfriend for his lack of attachment to his things. This whole ordeal would be much easier if I were more like him, able to lie on the other full-sized bed and watch TV, to put aside thoughts of what yet remains in the tow yard’s dumpster and what I will chose to leave behind.
But if this attachment is in fact a vulnerability, as I twist Grandma Irene’s ring around my finger that night, it’s hard to feel it through the small gift that is this tangible connection. It helps me sleep easier as thunder comes rolling in over Bastrop.
***
The next morning dawns meekly. Rain ripples in gray sheets outside the hotel window. Over the phone from Florida, my parents convince me to go back to the dumpster. They don’t want me to wonder what I might have found had I persisted, and I have to admit, it feels good to have someone affirm that my things mean enough to me to keep searching. After all, there are too many boxes on my list still unchecked. So for now, I abandon the idea of letting go.
Convincing my boyfriend to go back is more difficult. He doesn’t understand why I want to dig in the rain for “trinkets,” and though I wish I could have his understanding, I settle instead for time. He can wait in the car while I scavenge. Just give me until noon to search.
It’s still raining when we pull into the tow yard at 9, the clay lot now a rocky soup. I pull on my sweat-stiff gloves and the rain jacket I found in the rubble yesterday and stand beside Jack’s forklift as he hoists the immovable couch from the dumpster like a great beached whale. He drops it onto the sopping pile of trashed furniture with a thud.
It’s cooler today at least, and I move quickly to put whatever I find onto the U-Haul before it gets soaked by the rain. There’s less furniture to contend with, so the sorting process is easier apart from the slick of mud that’s forming on the dumpster’s floor. A few times I have to steady myself before I crash headlong into the dwindling pile. Scattered across the floor are photos of my family and friends. Though the photos themselves are beyond salvaging—torn, mud-smeared, and soaked—their faces are an unexpected comfort amid the destruction. Every now and then, I pick one up, soak in the wattage of their smiles, and carry on.
I ransack my dresser first. My shirts and camisoles are stained by the bag of turmeric I tossed aside yesterday, but they’re a comfort nonetheless. Dry socks especially are a boon. Draped over the corner of a crushed box, I find a tangle of necklaces from my jewelry box. Wedged beneath a pile of mangled Tupperware bins is my travel trunk, wrapped in heavy-duty trash bags. In the mud on the dumpster’s floor, I spot flecks of silver and crouch to sift through the clay like a miner panning for gold, putting earrings and charms into a dented tin mug, each plunk of metal against metal a tick of relief. Under the layers of debris that remain, my Radiohead albums turn up warped and torn. And though it was packed in the same box with the albums, I find the signed In Rainbows CD nestled in a plastic grocery bag on the other side of the dumpster. Its ink is faded and the cardboard casing is bent, but it’s there, in my mud-caked hands.
As I skate over the mud and wreckage to ferry my things to the truck, I realize I had to go through hell yesterday to get to this side of the dumpster, where I could bask in the temporary relief of these sentimental finds—grateful to salvage what an insurance company could never account for. These remains make my steps a little lighter, give me an ounce of strength to stoke as I prepare to face the months of insurance claims and rebuilding to come.
***
Two years after the moving accident and one year after breaking things off with my boyfriend (our differences, it turned out, went beyond our irreconcilable philosophies of things), I’ll sit down at a desk in an apartment in Denton that takes over a year to piece back together with the help of renter’s insurance. It’s a streamlined version of the home I once had, no longer a mishmash of hand-me-down furniture and too-many kitchen appliances. But the remains of my old home are sprinkled around, chipped and worn, smelling faintly of Texas earth.
Perhaps this is the flow after the ebb that Taoists talk about, a letting go that makes space for the new to rush in with just enough of the old to remember. Or perhaps I’m rationalizing my own philosophy of things, more complicated than the Tao Te Ching would have me believe. Simplicity is a struggle for me still, sentimental as I am, but I’ll feel a shift as I rebuild, more selective of what I choose to bring into my home.
It’s then that I’ll write my way through the tangle that is this moment. Then that I finally read the full accident report for the moving truck.
In the months after the crash, when we had to fight the moving company for an insurance claim, I’d avoided looking at the report. Anger was easier to carry than grief. I could blame a faceless stranger, focus only on my own hurt. But the driver isn’t faceless or unhurt, and I didn’t want to be angry anymore.
The diagram in the report shows the path the truck took, drifting over onto the highway’s shoulder before the driver overcorrected to bring it back onto the road. The truck then went into a side skid across the westbound lanes, flipping on its side then its roof then back again onto its wheels. The cargo area of the truck was torn open, the contents strewn across the highway’s center median.
It turns out that the driver was air-lifted to the hospital with class-A injuries. “A,” I learn, designates “serious injuries,” including “broken or distorted limbs, internal injuries, crushed chest, etc.”
My eyes catch on the word distorted, and when my stomach turns, the guilt finally hits—for my lack of caring that day in the dumpster and my anger long afterwards. My things, while not meaningless, are not as valuable as life. An obvious lesson, really, but one that takes time to rise through a strange and undeniable grief.
***
A list of things I choose to leave behind in Bastrop, Texas:
the shattered bits of my great-grandmother’s tea set, save one cup, one saucer;
twenty years’ worth of playbills;
four years’ worth of greeting cards;
the idea that things are just things;
the idea that things are precious.
***
The rain lets up as noon approaches. The end of this awful dig is finally in sight as I uncover more and more of the dumpster’s floor. My shoes are more mud than fabric now, my leggings torn, legs sore. But I’ve completed a process that seemed almost impossible when we pulled up yesterday morning. Behind me, the U-Haul is comically large for our small bounty: a Rubbermaid trashcan filled with scavenged clothes, my mud-covered trunk held together with packing tape, my sewing machine in its warped suitcase, intact desk drawers filled with odds and ends—an old pair of pointe shoes, my box of ticket stubs, a red telephone booth bookend, chipped but usable. Still, I feel better than I had when I got the call about the accident. I needed to see it, to have the chance to find what I could and say goodbye to what I couldn’t. A letting go that will begin here, the slow unfolding of a clenched, mud-crusted fist.
Before we leave, I make a final loop around the dumpster. In the last of the debris, I find the word grateful printed on a piece of paper. I recognize it as part of my boyfriend’s gratitude board, a pushpin collage of photos with the phrase What are you grateful for? printed at the bottom. The word feels like an irony at first, but I pick it up anyway. It’s a limp memento to an ongoing struggle, a reminder to carry with me when I leave so much behind.
¹ From Chapter 81 of Tao Te Ching.
² From Chapter 44 of Tao Te Ching.
