I know precisely where my innocence is buried. The latitude and longitude, the Google Map coordinates, the Zillow Zestimate, the length, breadth and depth of the grave. 10416 Durness Dr, Glasgow Village, MO 63137. Never mind the ramshackle appearance of the once tidy, modest home that my parents bought new as their first, some sixty years ago. Sure there are still cerebral treasures to be plundered from gazing at that long abandoned place, abstinent memories of family and youth that skitter about my mind with ever abating intensity. However, the real treasure, the tangible and tactile evidence of carefree innocence is buried alongside the neglected structure. Growing up in those distant years, from earliest memory till around the age of seven or eight, I spent my happiest days alone, digging and playing in a deep ditch that ran the length of our home. These were surely my years of innocence, before original sin had a chance to slip on the coveralls and really get to work on me. If I was born carrying any specific sin, it may have been the sin of selfishness, that petty offspring of greed and pride. I was steadfastly content to play alone, to horde all the toys, to determine the fate of my playthings without interference or suggestion from others. The ditch was a naturally occurring byproduct of a lack of gutters and a back sloping lot. It was substantial and like a meandering river it was ever evolving with the elements. Many long hours were wiled away in that ditch as I constructed roads and caverns, tiger pits, jails and graves. I forged the landscape to suit my needs and created many a new movie set where within my cowboys and Indians, army men and tanks, dinosaurs and astronauts conducted their battles. Hardship came to everyone as Hot Wheels plunged over ravines and canyon walls collapsed on unsuspecting stragglers. Many an army man, a Matchbox car or model airplane were buried in the network of twisting, turning valleys and hillsides. Most often they would be dug up, reprieved and retrieved to play another day. Unless of course mom called for dinner and I abruptly left them to their earthy fate. I imagine her frustration at trying to set the table with a noticeable absence of spoons, as so many of these conscripted digging devices lay twisted and mud crusted in the yard. Occasionally my toys were intentionally left entombed, a secret misdeed all my own, a tiny treasure for which I held the only map. There is something gratifying about leaving something of your self behind, of having a secret that is just for you. To this day I imagine what joys I might uncover if I returned to that insignificant looking side yard, garden spade in hand. Once dug up though, the magic would dissipate, better to leave these voided, invasive atoms in the ground.

I guess I’ve always been a burier, not that there is anything wholly unique about the trait. Humans have always nursed the instinct to bury, to keep safe a thing, to hide secrets from prying eyes. The earth after all is one big hiding place and God and the dead only know what treasures lie buried in the river bottoms of the Thames, the Mississippi or the Nile. Consider the long forgotten pirate booty and outlaw loot that lingers to this day just below the surface. The native arrowheads, the pottery, the soldiers’ bullets and buttons and the dinosaur bones yet to be discovered would fill countless museums to capacity. We bury everything, including ourselves. The ground is full of loved ones and it is comforting to go and kneel on the warm earth above them, to lie in the grass and feel them near. Along with our dearest departed and our wonders and our secrets, we unfortunately bury our horrors too. Pottery shards and broken stone tools were the trash of another age but in our progress we have littered and leeched the land with unexploded ordinance, perpetual plastics, chemical runoff and toxic goo. Just down the road from me is a mound of smoldering radioactive waste that steadily distributes unrealized pestilence with the wayward wind. I would like to think my interments are less destructive, plastic though they may be.

When we moved away from Glasgow Village to Bridgeton my best burying days were mostly behind me. I eventually graduated from burying toys to burying seeds in a little vegetable garden that I maintained next to our shed. I would have been in my later teens at that point but before that transition I can recall at least one other significant burial. In retrospect, it may have been a symbolic burying of my childhood. At about the age of twelve or thirteen I buried in the backyard along the chain-link fence line, the very first GI Joe I had ever owned. I like to believe he lies there till this day and when I return to visit the wasteland that airport expansion has wrought, I walk that empty yard and try to pinpoint his 12” x 6” grave. Silly I know but a small part of the creative, playful best of me is in that ground with him.

Many years later as an adult of dubious credentials, we made the decision to move to a vast empty bean field that would gradually be transformed into New Town. Here from the very beginning I watched, as acres of land were dug and graded, piled up and transformed. It must have rekindled my urge to dig in the dirt. As the amphitheater was being constructed, sometime between grading and sod I buried deep, in an otherwise empty jar, a prayer card portrait I had created upon the death of Johnny Cash along with some rocks from the road outside of his Arkansas childhood home. I may have left a handwritten note of explanation with it too. I believe my intent was to provide positive musical mojo to the site for future performers; consecrated ground if you will. Provided the lid to the jar hasn’t rusted away I have to assume it’s still there some thirteen years later, a worthless relic but notable for the sincerity of the act. As equally worthless and deeply buried at yet another unnamed New Town landmark is a replica Jefferson Peace Medal of the type that our government used to gift the Native Americans as a trinket upon screwing them with another feckless treaty. This is buried in a box along with a dated note, my feeble effort to compensate the long dead tribal elders for the use of the land. There may also be a bauble or two buried in a nearby lakebed but nothing worth risking your life free diving over. Just down the street is more treasure, carefully wrapped and placed in a heavy wooden box that was buried at midnight, Tom Sawyer style. His name is Feisal and he was a prince among cats. His presence at the farm brings me some comfort and every time we check on Jenny’s garden plot we always say hello. His gentle demeanor and regal bearing, even in death, stand in stark contrast to the rapscallion puss that now occupies the sunny patch of carpet in his stead.

I’m afraid my insatiable lifelong predilection for stuff may has fostered my obsession with holes and boxes. I have put way too much value on inanimate objects and mistakenly allow myself to believe they have worth that merits preservation. I am not speaking at all of monetary worth but merely a self-induced sense of worth based on an abiding appreciation of their continuance, engineering, design and obscurity. Some of my obsessing is rooted in the inevitable nostalgia that comes with age but it goes deeper than that. I likewise treasure memories and minutia that were never mine to begin with. If I buy a discarded book of a hundred years old and discover within the decades unturned pages a pressed flower, which has happened on numerous occasion, I find great difficulty in dismissing the humanity that long ago placed it there. The same goes for the funeral cards and the photographs, the handwritten notes and bookmarks. My impulse when I find these things is to catalogue and archive them but I prefer to document them with a photograph and keep them where I found them. A forgotten old book is not unlike a hole in that respect and I don’t feel quite right exhuming the contents buried within. Harvesting, or God forbid trashing these items lovingly placed by long dead hands, would be every bit the equivalent of grave robbery. That being said, Heaven help the poor soul who has to sort my stuff after I’m gone. Too precious to trash and too voluminous to dissect it has become an intermingled cluster of my own memories and those of strangers, intertwined in a tangled fishing line, bird’s nest that could never be undone. It will have to be burned on a pyre or buried in a mass grave.

My fondness for stuff, my affection for misplaced merchandise, necessitates an appreciation for boxes. As I acquire more stuff I therefore must acquire more boxes to hold it. Or if acquire a box of particular distinction I then must find worthy stuff to occupy said box. I think you can see how this might end in a death spiral. In my studio is a cigar box full of contrived treasure modeled on the one seen in the opening credits of “To Kill A Mockingbird”, right down to the Indian head penny. It contains some items of genuine significance; a metal match holder from my Grandpa’s tackle box and a blue Formula One Matchbox car I valued as a child. These coexist in a state of dementia alongside other found trinkets that have no bearing on my experience whatsoever. The more I disturb my puddle of memory the muddier it becomes. My affection for the movie, the book and of the humanity represented within, has in this particular case veered off into an indulgence where I am no longer content to be Boo Radley leaving tokens behind in a knothole. I too now have to be Scout, carefully collecting these ethereal souvenirs for safekeeping. I’ve now degenerated to the point where I view everything as a box to put more things in and while I am organized to a tee, that doesn’t diminish the oppressive weight of the amassed bundle. Riding helplessly in the sidecar of this constructed chaos is my unrestrained sanity. They are about to go over the cliff together.

The list of collections residing in boxes in the basement would stagger your imagination or turn your stomach depending on your level of fortitude for gluttonous amassing. It has become an assault on the senses that has filtered up the stairs throughout our home and has attached itself like a beautiful, wretched mold, thriving in full bloom on the four walls of my studio. Like some Edgar Allen Poe cautionary tale my folly is closing in around me, walling me in.

“Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb nail.” – Henry David Thoreau

The necessary subtraction required to even imagine the breathable air of simplicity is daunting to consider but I hope to begin soon. It is “Down with boxes!” and “Up with holes!” from now on. The way I see it I can either dig a lot of little holes and secret away these collected memories or I can dig one big one and lie down in it. Either way my hands are about to get dirty.