LETTERS FROM HOME: ANNUAL TRAINING IN MAKING THE BEST OF `FOUND OBJECTS'

April 30, 1998

Dear Patty,

The city's spring clean-up week has come and gone without any major accumulations of other people's discarded junk. Some years you get lucky.

In the past, DC's late-night forays during this Festival of Glut have filled the pickup truck. We have too many things, all of us, and I'm persuaded that the only reason we ever get rid of any of them is because we've run out of room, and there are still more things we want to get.

At the curb awaiting the trash collection truck each year of the festival are treasures DC is amazed other people would throw away. One of those, a cracked marble sink, still seems to be bracing the foundation at the back of our house. It has not moved since the night DC brought it home three years ago. Likewise the frame for the glass-top table we'll someday have if anybody ever throws away a matching glass top. Not that it has to match.

This year her prizes are a cracked bird bath, a cabinet that once belonged to a pioneer of Cape Girardeau dentistry, and an orange vinyl chair from the 1950s. The bird bath, she says, will replace the bird bath we already have, which is too small. But not small enough to throw away.

The cabinet is a sentimental treasure she hasn't figured out a use for. But she lives by the belief that some things -- tables and chairs in need of refinishing, pillows, candles -- are impossible to have too many of.

DC recognizes that the chair doesn't look at home in our 1914 house but says it'll be fine for the laundry room that someday will materialize in the basement. Somehow I'd thought one of the joys of home ownership was no longer having to sit beside a tumbling washer and dryer.

We ourselves threw away only a few cardboard boxes that had gotten wet and the floor mats from a long-demolished car.

I cannot divine the psychological reasons for not being able to throw things away and not being able to let other people throw their things away. They must be deep-seated. This isn't recycling. This is the deification of junk.

Some artists create with "found things" and God bless them. Come to our basement. Our back porch. Our backyard. All art galleries-in-waiting.

While you're here, meet Hank and Lucy. They like "found objects" too. They are "found objects." Mostly they like bones gnawed in the most fascinating patterns until they become almost unrecognizable as skeletal remains and finally, over a period of days, so abstracted that they seemingly disappear into the ether.

And they've had no formal training.

That's not strictly true. Lucy went to school for a while, but her spirit would not be tamed. Our own Gauguin.

Hank is more of a Van Gogh, an unruly, sensitive soul terrorized by this world's beauty. We have tried to reassure him that everything will be OK, search everywhere for the book, the wisdom that would erase the worry that haunts his eyes.

My current theory is that reassuring dogs -- or people for that matter -- who are afraid only reinforces their belief that there's something to be afraid of. So instead of running to the door and saying "It's OK" when he growls at some passerby on the sidewalk or bird in the flowers, we now simply say, "Come Hank," and reward his vigilance with affection.

While taking a nap on the couch a few nights ago, DC was repeatedly awakened when Hank jumped off, ran to the door and growled. Each time, she loyally stuck to my new technique. "Come Hank. Good boy."

After the third or fourth time, I arrived home from work wondering why all those fire trucks were across the street.

Vincent and Hank. So misunderstood.

Love, Sam

~Sam Blackwell is a staff writer for the Southeast Missourian.