The Cinderella Bags

Several months after my mother passed away, my dad moved to a retirement residence. My sister, JoAnne, came and we started the work of getting ready for an estate sale. As we pulled items from cabinets, we’d look at a thing from our growing up years and one of us would say: “Do you want that?” And, as often as not, the other would say, “No, I don’t want it, but I want you to want it.” Getting rid of so many items that had our histories attached was difficult. But, neither of us had space in our homes to bring in, say, two more sets of dishes, the pots and pans that we grew up using as we learned to cook and bake, and a whole house full of furniture. Daddy had taken some things to the retirement residence, but nowhere near what we found ourselves left with.

We certainly did keep some things, and we used the proceeds from the estate sale to rent a U-Haul to take things that JoAnne did want. She did take some furniture, as did I. She took some of the dishes, for her son who was living in an apartment and actually needed some dishes. But much of the U-Haul’s space was cluttered with the Cinderella bags.

When we were first going through the house, after Daddy moved, we opened up a couple of large, lidded, rattan containers in the master bedroom. They held plastic bags. Not the grocery store kind, but, for example, dry cleaning bags. I supposed Mother meant to (and maybe did) cover other clothing items, like rarely used heavy coats or nicer dresses that she wanted to protect. There were also bags from department stores where she shopped. Some had handles, which would have been useful for toting things for an overnight trip or back and forth to church; that sort of thing.

Cinderella was a very nice ladies store in downtown Waco. They carried clothes, lingerie, probably hats, and . . . shoes. For most of my growing up years, we didn’t shop at Cinderella. Too expensive. But later, in my late teens, we did go there. I remember, clearly, the first pair of shoes I got at Cinderella. They were white, with a rather chunky heel, and the leather in the toe area had been woven. I loved those shoes. When you purchased something at Cinderella, you got a good, sturdy, pink-and-white striped drawstring bag, for carrying your purchase(s) home. My mother, who even saved dry cleaning bags, was most certainly not going to get rid of a Cinderella bag.

In addition to all the other stuff we had to go through in my parents’ home, there were the documents, paper stuff, memorabilia, photos, et al. And we just didn’t have time to make careful decisions. So, when we found things that looked important, we took them with us. In the U-Haul, in sturdy plastic bags. Many of them were genuine Cinderella bags.

As we traveled, at every gas stop, JoAnne would say to me and her daughter, Natalie: “Get some Cinderella bags from the back.” We’d put them up in the cab and go through the papers/documents/stuff, and decide if we could get rid of them or should they be kept. Then, at the next gas stop, we’d dump the rejected papers in the trash bin by the pumps. And we’d put the “saved” papers back in the truck’s rear space and retrieve a few more bags. And the bags, all of them, no matter what sort of bag they were, began to be referred to as “Cinderella” bags.

All the way from Waco, Texas, to Seattle, Washington, we went through the Cinderella bags. In one bag, we found Daddy’s speeches. For many years, he was a very active member of a Toastmaster’s group. There were lots of speeches. Natalie and I pulled out a couple of them to read aloud. One was about how he always liked suits with vests. He talked about the suits he’d had and how he wanted to be sure to be buried in a vested suit. We put the speech folders in a “keep” bag.

In Seattle, JoAnne’s family helped move all the furniture, saved items, and the Cinderella bags into the house. I stayed to visit for a few days and then flew home. Over the next few years, JoAnne and Jim made a few moves. At some point, she mailed me two Medium Flat Rate boxes, which were full  of documents and photos and stuff from the Cinderella bags. Then, when she was living in Texas, she brought me a couple of large bags, also full of documents and photos and stuff.

Last week, I opened up those boxes and went through those bags. And I tried to put all sentimentality aside. We have a significant amount of papers, photos, documents, etc., in our house. I don’t have room for another whole set of papers, photos, documents, and stuff. There was shredding.

I’m not quite done. There were three large folders with information from Daddy’s family: civil war records, family trees. When I looked over all those legal-size papers with long lists of folks, my eyes got blurry. But all this looking at papers and invitations and gobs of photos makes me realize that I need to be culling out stuff that I’ve kept that will just be stuff that my own sons will have to deal with. So, it’s made me think more carefully about stuff and is all of it really important to me? Hmmm. Maybe. And maybe not.

When Daddy moved into the retirement residence, we didn’t realize he was ill. He seemed tired, but, he was in his 80’s, and Mother had passed away a few months earlier, so it didn’t seemed too alarming that he would still feel weary. Eventually, he was hospitalized. When he wasn’t interested in the Detroit Tigers’ (a baseball team that he had supported for most of his life) being in the World Series, JoAnne knew things were amiss and came to see him. He went into a nursing home on a Monday. She arrived on Wednesday evening and spent all day Thursday with him. She and I went on Friday morning to have breakfast with him, and then went to run a few errands. We went back to be with him at lunch, and, when we entered the foyer, a nurse came to stop us and said he’d quietly passed away. We began the process of funeral arrangements, and went to his apartment in the retirement residence to get his suit for the funeral home. As we pulled it from the closet, we said, “the vest!” We needed his speech about his vests. JoAnne called home and talked Natalie through where to find the storage tote that had Daddy’s speeches. Natalie found it for us and read the first few paragraphs for us to write down to give to his pastor for the funeral. So I guess it’s maybe okay and useful to keep some things, after all. Some things. Not everything!