Trapper-Keepers and Thrower-Outers

Which are you?

There are famously two kinds of people in the world: those who think there are two kinds of people in the world, and those who don’t.¹

The first kind \included Henry Ford:

There are two kinds of people: Those who think they can, and those who think they can't, and they're both right.

Despite typologies that offer a broader menu of options (Meyers-Briggs, the Enneagram, astrology, the DSM-5), the binary continues to exert its simple, stark seduction. In politics it’s become a death trap, but on the magazine rack at checkout, it’s just a pop quiz. We’ve been divided into introverts and extroverts. optimists and pessimists, early birds and night owls [writing this at 12:40 a.m. btw], Beatles or Stones? (Binary-busting retorts I’ve heard to that one include “Led Zeppelin” and “Debussy!”) How ironic that the one area in which a serious assault has been mounted against binary thinking is the only one that is, in cold hard fact, binary: biological sex.

But away with all that’s serious. This is a pop-quiz post. I’m inviting you to ponder yet another way of dividing us into two kinds of people: the Binary of STUFF.

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My mom was a thrower-outer. At least, a thrower-outer of other people’s stuff. Her kids’ stuff. As a child you don’t really own anything, the way women used to not be allowed to own property. All “your” stuff is actually held in trust by your parents and is at their mercy. You can’t assume that what’s important to you is important to them. Thus my personal letter from Yul Brynner, a kind response to the rapturous fan letter I wrote him after seeing The King and I live at age eight, disappeared somewhere along the line. I can still see his bold signature.

Maybe that’s why I have kept a box of letters from friends and family going back sixty years. (I did make a stupid attempt to shrink it down—by throwing out all the envelopes; now all the undated ones are forever undated.) As what I’m calling (at risk of trademark trespass) a “trapper-keeper,” I stash messages or gifts from people I love as if they were the living touch of those people, and to throw them out would be an act of reckless disregard for a vital bond. This retentiveness goes beyond sentiment into superstition: it both wards off and provides against a day when that might be all I have of them.

By contrast, a thrower-outer (at least as I idealize them) will consume the contents of a message and discard the wrapper, like the rind of an orange one has enjoyed and incorporated: no need to keep the peel. As a result (or so I imagine), thrower-outers live in serene, uncluttered spaces, while there is a long box jammed up on a high shelf of my closet, and though it is translucent plastic, I have no idea what is in it, and can’t get it down without triggering an avalanche.

I fall short of qualifying as a “hoarder.” One of my neighbors is a hoarder, and a compulsive online shopper who gets at least two or three packages every day. Once, years ago, while she was away in rehab from surgery, some plumbing or gas leak emergency necessitated her well-guarded cave being opened to our gaze. It was like a coral grotto, every inch of wall and floor lined with books, purses, teacups, tchotchkes, and fantasy figurines, with a small clear patch to sleep on like a mermaid’s ledge. (Her in-laws cleared it out; she set right about replenishing it.)

The clutter in my skylight studio, in contrast, is sternly confined to the edges, though you can feel it straining to tumble forth and heap up. I actually threw out the boxes of unread New Yorkers (but there’s something in every issue you’ll want to have read!) and switched to an online subscription, where I can in fact read any article I want to, back to 1925. I got a third of the way through one drawer of my file cabinet, making neat new folders; now it’s mysteriously more bulging and tight-packed than before. Then there are all the books, evidence of a bad case of tsundoku, books I will probably never read but keep acquiring.

This post was provoked by another burst of effort to choose books I really can cart to the thrift shop without regret. I looked through a shelf of oversized books and reluctantly boxed up:

• two unrelated volumes on Serbian outsider art;

• a product of magnificent and grisly anatomical obsession called The Unfeathered Bird; and

• a comprehensive, beautifully illustrated coffee table monograph on Australian marsupials.

The trapper-keeper’s trap is to look at each item and go, “But I actually am interested in this! . . . Or I should be. Or I might be one day.” The fact is, most of the marsupials look like minor variations on a mouse, and the birds stripped down to their skeletons and muscles are hideous. But a trapper-keeper has to ponder each candidate for discard and weigh what intellectual or emotional appeal might tip the balance and win a reprieve. I admit to having put things into the thrift shop box and taken them out again. And put them in again. That autographed copy of my late husband’s late Swedish hospice volunteer’s self-published memoir . . .

It’s not only our living spaces but our devices, even worse in a way because their capacity isn’t bounded by physical dimensions. Virtual “space” can also be clogged or austere. If you don’t have a disciplined habit of prompt deletion, virtual Stuff piles high and deep as fast as roadway flies by in that instant you glance at your phone at the wheel. Then clearing it out, much as you might want and need to, becomes a Project you never have time for. Mine still contain multiple working copies of manuscripts I edited years ago, silly screenshots I was posting too fast to go back and delete, photos of my siblings’ grandchildren . . . Both my phone and laptop scold me daily that I MUST make hard-drive space if I want to keep taking photos or download the latest OS update.

When I see a homeless person with a shopping cart piled high with STUFF, I relate. Watch how possessively people heave their precious rollerbags into the overhead bins on a plane. Apparently, to accumulate is human. The miracle is that there are any who don’t. I want to hear what life is like as a thrower-outer. How do you do it? Do you have a photographic memory? Are you descended from nomads, is carrying little in your DNA? What, if anything, do you make exceptions for? Because I suspect that like most binaries, this one is false; almost everyone collects something.

In fact, I’ve been unfair to my mother: she may have thrown out our childhood treasures, but she saved every letter I wrote her from college. Why?? (Because she was a writer, and saw one hatching?) When I found the file drawer full of them, after she died, I cringed at the thought of even glancing at them, and knew I should throw them all on a fire.

But no, they’re in a box under my bed, just in case.

1. An observation apparently original to humorist Robert Benchley and stolen by Groucho Marx.