My “Own Personal Potlatch”

Ms Day has known me for all but 19 of my 76 years and she, clearly, knows my triggers and moods better than me. Even as I wrote them, I knew that it would seem like my last three or four essays were self-pitying whining old man drivel. At least to me, I felt like I was expressing my confusion and disappointment in this phase of life. As I've written a few times, I'm a long ways from somebody who is rich in self knowledge. As a 1950s male, "suck it up and move on" would be pretty close to the motto I've lived by.Yesterday morning, after observing my mood, Ms Day asked me, "So how was your own personal potlatch?" Almost instantly I felt pretty good about the last couple of weeks. Seriously, just that question put the entire “end of motorcycling” in a different light that made me appreciate not just my lucky past but the enjoyment I got from passing my treasures on to people who will also enjoy them.

If you are looking for a guy filled with white pride, you'll need to keep moving . . . a long ways from me. Mostly, I think European males have been a plague on the planet and Mother Earth will be glad to be rid of us if she finds a neutron bomb-way to get the job done with minimal damage to useful lifeforms. The best and most honest thing I've heard about my race (and species) is Ms Day's reminder, "Beware of the Ice Age Hunters." We may not be smart, creative or inventive, pretty, industrious, or reliable, but nobody is more ruthless, brutal, and efficient when it comes to making war. Whatever you can build, we European males can break, destroy, steal, and claim for our own. European immigrants to North America upped that game so dramatically that the Nazi’s studied our Civil War for tactics and Hitler’s version of Jim Crow.

When I was in my early 20s, I got seriously interested in North American Native religions, culture, and government. We were living in Dallas and the downtown Dallas library was the kind of intellectual wonderland that I had never expected to discover. The North American Pacific Northwest Coast tribes (Haida, Nuxalk, Tlingit, Tsimshian, Coast Salish, and Kwakiutl) practiced various forms of the potlatch ritual and I have tried to honor that whenever possible in my own life.  Wikipedia says, “During a potlatch, the host may lavishly distribute gifts or even destroy property to demonstrate wealth and generosity. These gifts can include real property like food, blankets, copper shields, canoes, and carved items. . .” There is a lot more to the potlatch custom, but that bit fits my feeling as my equipment and motorcycle was leaving my garage.

While I was piling everything from weird motorcycle parts and paraphernalia to the Aerostich gear that has been my copilot for several hundred thousand miles onto my buyer/guests, I was weirdly happy to see my things go for very affordable prices to people who might appreciate and use them. Some of those things had been nearly gifted to me by friends, vendors (when I was a magazine columnist), and simple good fortune discovering great products early in a company’s start-up stage. I don’t think I’ve ever gone through this ritual to “demonstrate wealth,” but I can be accused of deliberately trying to demonstrate generosity in an attempt to “pay it forward.”

Since leaving my father’s home when I was 15 and when Ms Day and I joined forces when I was 19 and she was 17, I (then we) have moved 31 times. Every time I have moved, lots of stuff was left behind. Sometimes those things were precious but too bulky to be kept. Sometimes things were accidentally left. Often, we knew people who might put our excess to better use. Rarely, we made the effort to sell off our excess. My father used to have a tennis rule, applied ruthlessly in his later years, “When in doubt, out.” I modified that to “When in doubt, throw it out.” For a lot of years one of my personal goals was to own no more stuff than I could fit into a well-packed utility van (I always visualized a 1970’s Econoline E150). Being an electronics engineer in the 1970s and 80s meant chasing our floundering manufacturing economy as it deteriorated from the center out to the coasts. The 80s were particularly hard on my kind of “skilled labor” since Reaganomics moved capital from work (manufacturing) to idle money (investment and speculation). My poor kids probably thought getting to know anyone was a waste of time, since we’d be moving soon and, pre-internet, staying in touch with friends at a distance was a complicated project.

Since retiring and having taken part in dissolving the estates of my father-in-law and my own father’s property, I have tried to constantly re-evaluate my own stuff looking for things I no longer use to sell, give away, or throw out. Ideally, the day Ms Day and I no longer need “stuff,” there won’t be anything to fool with that our daughter’s don’t want to keep for themselves. And I hope to continue enjoying passing on this potlatch tradition to the end.