(Photo by John Griswold)
An old friend and roommate once identified a phenomenon important to recognize: Crap transference. This is when people give you things they own, apparently with good intentions, except you do not need or want them, and in fact may not have known they existed.
Maybe some unused picture frame made them think of you, and they need the space, or they could not bear for a knick-knack to end up at the Goodwill but do not really want it. Off it goes to you in the mail, that garbage disposal service run by the U.S. government. Maybe the object is left at your doorstep at an hour when you are never home, which everybody knows.
This is regifting of the most pernicious type, done for no reason other than somebody with nostalgia was decluttering. (If it is agreed-on mutually, as with the “no waste” or “buy nothing” movements, it is not crap transference.)
Another friend, ML (who I should name, so he would die of shame), has been packing up his household to move for the third time in a decade. He is a collector—of all sorts of things, from Native American pottery to plastic toys—which makes the situation worse. He really just hates to get rid of anything.
It started with Beatles figurines, the colorful plastic ones of the lads, with the Yellow Submarine, a Blue Meanie, the Glove of Love, Jeremy Hilary Boob, and Old Fred, the submarine captain. ML called and asked if I wanted them, still in their clamshell packaging from 1999, when collectors such as ML were sure they could be sold in future to buy a retirement cottage, after Beanie Babies had sent the kids to college. As it turns out, so many Beatles were manufactured their ROI is nowhere, man.
I agreed to take them, because I am a Beatles superfan and cannot bear to think of poor Ringo recycled, and my kids owned some of the figures, which have been lost.
The next afternoon, as I was having lunch with a midwife and a potter down at the Stagger Inn Again, ML texted to say he was boxing up my Beatles, but did I also want some coffee sacks? I explained to my friends how ML had bought, back in the day, a lot of two dozen old-school coffee-bean sacks made of woven jute, not synthetic fibers, with company designs stenciled on them. They were really cool but enormous, I said, and heavy; what would I possibly do with them? I might get one on a kitchen wall as functional art.
The midwife and the potter laughed that I could make a hairshirt to wear for penance, oh, down to the supermarket, or could cut and sew curtains from them. Curtains? We all agreed it was one thing to see the trap of transference, and another not to walk right into it anyway.
Sure, I texted ML. I’ll take that crap.
When the box arrived a week later, it was suspiciously heavier than it should have been and contained other things we had not agreed on, such as a miniature train locomotive and boxcars given away in a Shell Oil promotion; a box of “Authentic granite from the Statue of Liberty memorial”; some sort of Lego knockoff of a little, bland guy in a gray, corporate cubical; a cassette tape of a radio broadcast about the history of pencils; and the foreign object pictured above, which I can only assume will come in handy if, “I am a lineman for the county / And I drive the main road / Searchin’ in the sun for another overload.”
A few days later, another box with ML’s return label arrived. It was filled with Simpsons figurines and battery-powered play sets.
“Do I have a little regret getting rid of them?” ML said to me on the phone. He was talking about the coffee bags, it turned out. “Yes. Yeah.”
