Receipts

papers that litter my life, boxes in the garage

I stand at the cashier and they ask me if I want a receipt. I always say no.

We took a family trip to Denmark when I was 9— my mother spoke at conferences and we WOOFF-ed and made tables and ate with animals— and my father collected every single receipt we ever got. Strawberry jam and bread, bike rentals, many many cups of gelato to keep me and my 5-year-old brother pedaling; all documented on little slips of paper and stuffed in his rubberband wallet or wadded in his pockets. He thought we would go through them afterward perhaps? We didn’t of course. In my humble observation, he just likes to collect slips of paper, he likes to store them in boxes, and perhaps they will never see the light. Maybe he imagines a time when he will open the envelopes and boxes and look over the slips of paper that show his life, compiled in receipts and letters and books and journals.

I am home for Christmas break. I stay in the guest house because my little brother moved into my room four years ago when I moved away. My mother bought a dresser for the guest room two years ago, she says it’s the nicest piece of furniture we own. It’s covered in a hot pink shawl so that my candles and glasses don’t leave rings on the wood. I think she would like me to think that it’s my dresser, which I do, but in essence, it’s mostly storage.

I can tell you exactly what is in the guest house. In the dresser are workout clothes that I didn’t care to bring to school, old pants that are too small but too nice to throw out, and 5-7 thongs that I bought when I was sixteen that I don’t want to wear anymore. On top of the dresser, there is a framed watercolor that my mother did in the ’90s of a clove of garlic, a cardamom-scented candle, and a jewelry box with jewelry that I don’t wear and seashells that I collected in the Bahamas. The closet contains my ski pants, a UC Berkeley sweatshirt, an Alzar sweatshirt, 3 floral dresses, the last sweater that my grandmother bought me before she died, and my childhood dog’s ashes. The living room is my father’s office when I’m not home, which is most of the time. There is a table that my mother built for an art project, with terracotta bowls inlaid. This summer the surface was clear (a rarity), and I crafted and sewed on it. This winter it’s covered in boxes of my late great uncle’s journals and my father’s matchbook collection from when he was a teenager. The shelves are loaded with books, alphabetized when we moved in but now only sparsely organized, and my father’s yearbooks and teaching awards. Over my bed is a poster that I hung this summer that reads: Utopia means NOT PLACE, Utopia is a DIRECTION, not a Destination. Beside this are black-and-white film contact sheets I made in my senior year of high school. In the filing cabinet are my parent’s wedding vows and all our passports and birth certificates. The flats next to it are the only place in the house I have ever seen my mother’s art. Two years ago I helped her clean out her old studio. I found boxes of journals, photograph portfolios, and a novel that she wrote in her junior year of high school. That was the first time I had ever found a stored collection of my mother’s art. Strange given that she was an art professor at the time.

The garage is filled with boxes of my father’s journals, dating all the way back to the 80s, and binders full of student work from every school he ever taught at. I opened one box this summer and found four printed and bound manuscripts of his, as yet unpublished. My mother told me that when they drove from Vermont to California to get married they packed the beige Toyota sedan with my father’s boxes of journals. She left behind the sculpture that culminated her time at the Vermont Studio Center artist residency to make room for the boxes of paper. They had met 6 months prior; he worked at the VSC, and she was an artist in residence.

As I get older and make more art, I realize that I have no place to store it all. I have probably around 300 photo prints from just this semester, all sitting on top of a desk I don’t use, or in the drawers. They take up space, but am I just supposed to throw them out? Usually, the art I make doesn’t take up space. (Perhaps I should do some self-reflection about this…). Either it’s a song or a piece of writing that takes up cyberspace on my hard drive, or it’s a set of dishes that I use daily. But now as teachers hand me printouts of readings, and I print out my own writing, and my own photos, I just shove them in my desk. I even found myself thinking that I need my very own cardboard box for all the papers taking up the limited drawer space.

When my grandmother died my mother took all the pots and pans and dishes— the usable artifacts— to our house. She said that this was enough to remember Grandmom. The orange Le Cruset soup pot, the 100-year-old breadknife, and the thin wooden spoons were all necessary. We use them every day, we see her things every time we cook. Everything else in the house, the silver, the books, the side tables, the blown glass sculptures, and the wine fridge were all sold in the estate sale. Her brother, my uncle, didn’t want anything except the old photographs and my grandfather’s tackle box.

My great uncle Greg, my father’s uncle, died four years ago, leaving behind a mess of an apartment in Queens. The apartment is quite nice if cleaned up, but at the moment it contains 5-gallon bottles of vodka, a collection of books on homosexuality, a samurai sword (unsharpened), at least 15 bottles of roach killer, and a single can of Trader Joe’s artichoke hearts.

Since his death, there have been yearly visits to the apartment by different assortments of Cummins cousins and brothers. Once a year photos are sent to the group chat, asking people if they want things in the apartment. I took the annual visit for the first time this year (thus the contextual photo) and took a set of cufflinks, two books, a jar of pins, and an old sign that reads: AVENGE THE ATROCITY. My father told me that the first time he came to the apartment four years ago the cabinets were covered in notes. I wouldn’t be surprised if he took the notes and put them in a folder for safekeeping, unable to resist collecting little papers of life.

My mother continues to be confused as to why there has been no cleaning crew hired to just go through and throw everything in the apartment out, but that is just not how the Cummins family works. My grandmother even asked me if I wanted the can of artichoke hearts.

When I was a kid we lived in a two-bedroom house, my father, my mother, my brother, two cats, two dogs, and me. There was no room in the house for the boxes containing my father’s life, so we rented a storage space. Now that we’ve moved, the guest house is the storage space.

I don’t want to haul around boxes of papers at the age of 19, but where does it all go? I enjoy looking through the binders highlighting my art and my behavior from preschool. I enjoy reading my journals from when I first moved away. I enjoy that I am able to think of a book and call my dad and he will find it in the “library” for me. The library is my room, the storage space, the guest room, the place where the books go.

My father enjoys going to the “library” and picking out a stack of books. He moves them into his room or into the kitchen where they will rest for a month or two (the stack will grow as he moves more books) until my mother tells him he has to move them back into the library because they can’t all go on the end of the dining table. I think maybe he relishes this cycle. He gets to touch the books, read the blurbs on the back, and recite the plots and connections to whoever is around to listen. I finally realized what my father’s dream job is this semester. Suppose he could get paid for spending time with books. He could go into a wealthy intellectuals library, pull all the books out of the shelves and lay them out on the floor, (he LOVES to lay shit out on a grid on the floor) and then skim them all. Then the wealthy intellectual would come back and my father would put all the books back one by one and tell the individual about his own connection to the book— maybe he lived in the same place the author grew up in, maybe the main character’s dogwalkers cousin knew the individual’s ex-girlfriend, maybe my father dated the ex-girlfriend’s sister— and the historical context of the book in relation to the city and its connection to the individuals past. If he could get paid for this he would be the happiest man alive. He could call it “Get to know your books”, it would have a niche audience, but if anyone would like this service, even if you don’t want to pay for it, I’m sure he would be happy to do it.

I’m not kidding about laying shit out in a grid on the floor. When he was writing his memoir he would print out all the chapters and lay them out on the dining table, to look at them in order. Maybe he would shuffle them around, maybe he would even take a red editor’s pen to a couple of them, but usually, he spread them out, looked at them, and explained each one of them to my mother who listened and then obviously told him that we in fact actually needed the dining table to eat on, not just to spread papers out. When he was a teacher I would come into his classroom and find him laying out all his student’s work on the floor in the center of the room. He would lay them out, and then stack them back up and put them in a large LL Bean tote bag. He carried the tote bag everywhere; to the gym, to the grocery store, to a function. Wherever he goes his papers go with him. On “dress as a teacher” spirit day students would come with a canvas tote, a fleece vest, a blue button down, and a fanny pack around their waist. If you know my father you know that this is all you need to bear a recognizable resemblance to him.

On Sunday mornings we used to have family meetings. We would allocate an hour for it, but in the circular nature of our conversation and the distractibility of my ADHD father and I, it would often go on for at least three hours and most of the time would end in tears. I often questioned if they were productive. Sometimes we would plan to clean the house together. My job was to clean the bathroom and tidy my own room, my brother’s job was to wash the kitchen floor (slide around on two soapy washcloths to jazz music), and my father would immediately volunteer to sort the books. As the books take up a remarkable amount of space in the house, this is an unusual but necessary task in the process of cleaning our house. My mother had hope for years that in his sorting, some books would be put in a box to give away, but now we all know the truth. Sorting books means laying them all out in a grid and simply spending time with the books. When she was done with whatever task she was doing, she would come and check in on how he was doing. He would look up from his crouched position on the floor, surrounded by his books, the bookshelf empty in front of him, and hold each one up to recite the plots of all the books to her. The reason their marriage works so well is because she indulges him in this, she finds it interesting.

Even as I write this my father is sitting on the couch on the other side of the room. He speaks to the silent room, “This book is really funny, in the acknowledgments it references the book she was inspired by, about menopause and how it caused her to go to Burning Man and lose her job and her house and force her to live in her car. Can I read one sentence to you?” My mother hmms from the couch across from me and he begins to read a paragraph about her pulling the car over to the side of the highway and crying about her midlife crisis and her kid’s dead hamster. My mother stops typing and listens to him read, “Good god.” He laughs and she tells him that it sounds like an accurate description of menopause. Then they begin to argue about menopause.

There has never been a time in my life where all the surfaces in the house are clean and empty. Stacks of books, junk mail, and New Yorkers dating at least 5 years consume the tables, the shelves, and (much to my mother’s dismay) every nook where there could be keys, napkins, or anything else. It is not so bad, a life constantly filled with books and paper and art.

Not only does my father collect his own life in paper, he collects the lives of others on paper. We own 5 boxes of Great Uncle Greg’s journals, 4 of Great Uncle Tom’s, and the newest addition, a carpet bag from my Great Aunt Margurite. All these things are in the guest house, of course. He imagines that he will read through them all, and maybe even write a book about each of them. Maybe he imagines that he will read through his own journal boxes and write a book, but maybe he imagines that will be my job. Although I never want to cart around the boxes, there is a strange pull to read all the journals.

It is somewhat of a guilty pleasure of mine— definitely learned from my father— to go through boxes of my old things, collections of my children’s books (although this comes from a deeper care about children’s books), and boxes of my mother’s art and high school papers. I crouch down on the floor and pull the things out of the boxes, sorting them into piles as I go, only to put them all back and close the box, unsorted and unused. I am enthralled by the smell of dust and the window of memory opened by something I made, or someone else made.

I always refuse the receipt at the register. I refuse to end up with little wads of paper that I will never look at again. But my desk at school is filled with every paper that has ever been handed to me, folders filled with completed high school homework assignments, stories written by my classmates, readings that I annotated, and every letter I’ve received within the past two years. I have inadvertently begun my own cardboard box of paper. Refusing the receipt has not saved me from my fate.