Letting go

Feb. 3, 2011

Dear Pat,

When I was a kid, Mill Hill was fabled as the place daredevil sled riders went for thrills after a snowfall. Mill Hill is Cape Girardeau's piece of San Francisco. That section of Mill Street drops precipitously like an Olympic ski-jump approach. My cousins and I only braved the moguls on the courthouse lawn, which was dangerous enough. Unless you stopped the sled yourself you and perhaps your sled wound up sliding across Spanish Street. I never knew anyone who was actually brave enough or foolhardy enough to sled Mill Hill. Maybe they just didn't survive.

Our friend Charlie owns a huge building midway down Mill Hill. The building once housed a church called the Evening Light Mission but isn't shaped like a traditional Christian church. It's more square than rectangular, though the downstairs is one big room with two levels and the ceiling does soar.

Inside the building are arrayed many thousands of the curious goods Charlie has collected at yard and estate sales and at secondhand shops throughout the region and on forays to New Orleans. He used to own a shop called Curious Goods. Now he just collects things because he does.

Years ago Charlie lived upstairs in the church, which is drafty and barely heated. Eventually the church primarily served as a set for Charlie's Halloween parties. The church and its oddities were the primary attraction for guests from all over who dressed in bizarre costumes they probably wouldn't have worn anywhere else. People danced and conversed with a male Marie Antoinette or a member of Kiss. Some dressed as political statements. One year our friend Robyn came as a university parking lot adorned with Matchbox cars to protest the concretization of more and more neighborhoods.

A fortune teller sometimes offered guidance. Charlie never knew who might show up or what might happen. That was the genius.

The casino that is coming to town bought Charlie's church and a few other deteriorating houses he owns in the neighborhood. All of them soon will be torn down, which means Charlie needs to dispose of many of his curious goods. At a recent party at the church guests could bid on objects they wanted. A few things sold but not enough to tell.

A 6-foot-long old-fashioned can opener hangs over a bar made from an old wooden door. Perhaps the world's tallest step ladder stands in the church, the better to hang a dragon kite or a chandelier from the ceiling. Every cranny of the building is filled something, from paintings, statues of lions and lambs, Turkish lamps and sculpture Charlie made of chrome car parts to primitive furniture, old rugs, Chinese merchant lamps and two coffins.

Letting go is Charlie's dilemma of the moment. For people who live to create and collect things, letting go of them can be traumatic. Even those of us who aren't collectors of such station know the pinch of sentimentality that resides in a book a friend gave you when you needed it, a T-shirt that walked lonely beaches with you.

One day soon Charlie must let go of the building where the artifacts of his life were housed. The church that once focused prayers of brotherhood will come down, the building that once housed cries of delight and joy will no more. The question for letting go is not, Why? The question is, What's next?

Love, Sam

Sam Blackwell is a former reporter for the Southeast Missourian.