Matchbook Dominoes
HEIDI KLAASSEN
In the summer after I graduated high school, I had a job working for a lawyer. He was the executor of a deceased man’s estate, and he needed someone to clear out his client’s house so it could be sold. My friend D’s dad knew the lawyer and recommended the two of us for the job. He offered up his old, brown Ford Ranchero as a work vehicle to haul stuff to the dump. We were told the job could take a month or more—the house was pretty messy. We wouldn’t be expected to actually clean the house—that would come after we left, when all the man’s possessions had been dealt with. Still, I don’t think any synonym for “messy” could have prepared us for what we discovered on the first day.
There are theories around the psychology of hoarding based on human needs like control and comfort. People hoard things because they are creating a safe space for themselves, or they’re replacing a lack of love with objects, or they genuinely believe the items they keep will eventually be needed. I have kept things for all these reasons. When we assign value or emotion to something, it becomes difficult to part with it. What we keep and what we discard says so much about us.
Stockpiling looks a bit like hoarding. It involves deliberately holding onto resources that could become scarce due to unforeseen events, like when people hoarded toilet paper during the pandemic. Some items, like Québec maple syrup, are deliberately stockpiled to control the price. If this is done on the stock market, it’s called cornering the market, and it’s illegal. But with maple syrup it’s okay. It’s Canada, so it could not possibly be nefarious. In the US, there’s a National Strategic Stockpile of pharmaceuticals and other necessities in hidden locations around the country. It has been deployed during events like 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina. In Norway, the Svalbard Global Seed Vault has a collection of plant life should the world need to be re-grown. In the UK, the CryoArks Biobank is developing the first comprehensive zoological collection in case we need to repopulate the earth with animals after they have all been decimated by human idiocy.
We showed up at the dead man’s house in jeans and T-shirts with rubber gloves, as instructed. The lawyer met us at the front and pushed open the door to the small bungalow, where we were stopped almost immediately by stacks of…stuff. Piles of newspapers were like pillars around the living room. A mound of bread bag ties the size of a bulldog blocked the entrance to the kitchen. There were unopened Christmas presents and stacks of mail dating back years. The smell in the house was pungent, like the windows had never been opened. The three of us climbed over hills of shopping bags and magazines, making our way into the house. I moved toward a closed bedroom door and the lawyer stopped me.
“My client took care of his mother in her final years. That was her room. I don’t think he went in there at all after she passed away,” he warned.
I nodded and turned the doorknob. There was resistance behind the door from the mess inside the room. D was behind me, and we recoiled, wincing from the smell. The bare mattress was deeply stained. The smell of urine was intense. We closed the door.
“As I mentioned, you won’t have to clean anything, but you may want to get that mattress to the dump first thing,” said the lawyer.
A friend of mine passed away suddenly. He was not my best friend, not even a close friend—not that I didn’t see him worthy of being a close friend. We’d shared some good times—a mutual friend’s wedding, some parties and TV industry golf tournaments. We had worked together, on occasion, and decidedly not worked together—a day of laughter that involved smoking up during errands for a talk show we worked on. I’d last seen him at his eldest son’s funeral, after a brain aneurysm took a gifted boy with his dad’s infectious smile. In the days following the tragedy, I had consumed every social media post his dad put out to the world, declaring his son a superhero for the donated organs that saved six lives. His unimaginable loss was a miraculous gift for six families. This man had lost his fourteen-year-old child in an everyday moment, life robbed from him in an instant. Somehow, he had managed to find the positive, to see light in the darkest of times.
Now, he was suddenly gone, taken by a stroke on a regular day at work. His family, no doubt incredulous at the cruelty of this, fulfilled his wishes to donate his organs and again strangers were gifted with life from a tragic loss.
I think about him a lot, wondering about an afterlife, a reunion with his son. I have doubts about this outcome, but it’s soothing to believe it. I wonder about the parts of him that have changed lives, that live on—like his son’s body—in a stranger who needed someone to die so they could live. I think about those videos on Instagram, like the one where the bride is walked down the aisle by the man who received her dead father’s heart, or the clip of the grieving father, an older white man listening by stethoscope to the sound of his daughter’s beating heart inside a young black man. They cry together, overcome by the horrific tragedy that enabled something so beautiful.
Over the next few weeks, D and I made many trips to the dump. We put aside anything of value for an estate sale and everything else was bagged and thrown into the back of the Ranchero. I brought my camera and took black-and-white photos to document our weird summer job, snapping shots of D at the dump or sitting on the front stoop, taking a break from the smell and the heat. We discovered vast collections of objects—stacks of takeout containers, an assortment of odd forks, and hundreds of matchbooks.
There was an element of macabre gloom about sorting through a stranger’s possessions after their death. We were eighteen and invincible, but the idea that what we leave behind could be examined and judged by strangers still felt a little awful. Always interested in a good story, I tried to piece together the life of this man. I knew only that he had been a successful oil and gas executive. It was obvious there were people who had cared about him, at least enough to deliver Christmas gifts, even if he never opened them. There were also large supplies of food items, like someone had gone to Costco for bottled water and juice, bulk supplies of toilet paper and boxes of packaged snacks that remained unopened, piled up in the living room.
Over the course of the pandemic, the world’s billionaires added over a trillion dollars to their holdings while small businesses closed, unemployment soared, and food shortages drove up the basic costs of survival. While politicians and public health experts floundered with inconsistently applied rules, the top 0.1% of households sat atop their $12 trillion and looked down on the rest of us. This unprecedented world health crisis made a lot of the world’s richest people much richer, and their perceived philanthropy provided convenient tax deductions for their growing fortunes.
It’s not just billionaires who hoard wealth. Even the moderately wealthy are okay with watching the world burn from their spacious summer cottages. The super-rich could solve world hunger and poverty with one trip to the ATM, but they choose not to. Hoarding wealth assures the continuation of the wealth. There are no rich without poor, so it is in their best interests to keep a large segment of the population hungry enough to work in their dangerous factories, their shitty fast-food restaurants and cancer-causing mines.
Defenders of the ultra-rich say the uber-wealthy create jobs when they do spend, that their need for real estate, yachts and luxury hotels puts paychecks in pockets. They say the money that billionaires are hoarding supplies banks with capital for small business loans and mortgages for ordinary folks who need to borrow half a million dollars to provide their families with a place to sleep at night.
Chuck Collins gave away his Oscar Mayer family inheritance to work at making the world a better place. He tries to convince the ridiculously wealthy to do good things with their money, showing them that philanthropy for causes like saving the environment can be in their own best interests too. He distinguishes those with $30 million or more as the “oligarch class,” people who have more money than they require to meet their needs, moneyed folk who now focus on using their riches to gain power and grow their wealth. They’re the ones golfing with Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, people who wouldn’t think twice about stepping on impoverished children to get into their private jets.
It was difficult to move through the house. There was so much stuff, we spent the first day clearing a path through the living room, into the kitchen and through to the back door. To open all the windows, we had to clear the way to those also. As much as it was an inconvenience, we both agreed on day one that we would not, or rather could not, use the bathroom in the house. We opted instead to make the short drive to D’s house when one or both of us had to go. We cleared out whatever was stashed around the tub and toilet and shut the door, leaving years of filth for the cleaning company that would arrive after we were long gone.
It was over a week before we ventured downstairs. The basement was as expected—gloomy, damp, and unfinished, with concrete floors and mildew-stained walls. It smelled, but it was different from the pungent, closed-in human smells of the main floor. Where the upstairs felt almost too lived-in, the basement seemed like no one had been down there in years. D took his boom box down there and started in on the endless accumulation while he blasted N.W.A., Anthrax, and Public Enemy. It was in this basement that D coined a term I still use today: dust buffalos (since “bunnies” was clearly inadequate).
Whenever one of us discovered something interesting in the house, we’d call to the other and commiserate over the potential value of the item, or perhaps just the weirdness of it. One day, I heard D calling my name from the basement.
“I found something!”
“Is it good?” I yelled back.
“For some people, I guess?”
I ran downstairs to where D sat on the floor in front of a cardboard box. He pointed at it, saying nothing. Inside were dozens of porn magazines from the seventies and eighties, specifically gay male porn. The colour was a little faded, but the magazines were still in fairly good shape.
“What should we do with it?” I asked. D shrugged.
I was eighteen and it was the before-times, pre-internet. I’d never seen gay porn, so I had to check it out. I pulled the top magazine off the stack. On the cover was a handsome man with dark hair and a handlebar mustache. I flipped through a few pages and quickly returned the magazine to the box. I felt like I’d just learned someone’s well-kept secrets.
Pop-up repair events and local fixing collectives are becoming more prevalent, given the unreasonable cost of living. They’re happening as an effort to save money, but also to save the landfill from wasted items that are fixable. Most people don’t want to spend the time repairing their belongings. It’s easier to toss that toaster in the garbage and buy a cheap new one on Amazon. There’s too much stuff in the world—too much choice and too many old things languishing at the dump. In the UK, one group of repair volunteers carry a box of miscellaneous items called the “Lonely Parts Club.” The fact we need a group of people to organize and volunteer their time to fix our broken stuff says so much about humans. Why are we being taught trigonometry in school, but no one knows how to mend a sweater? A population that knows how to square dance or name the major players in the Boer War seems useless if we can’t repair a lamp or restore a scuffed tabletop. The global pandemic brought so many issues to light, and one of them was exactly this—a dependence on more, new, too much. Shouldn’t the lockdowns have taught us the need to develop a skillset of resourcefulness instead of producing a soft middle class who knows how to bake the occasional loaf of artisan bread?
We paced the basement, glancing at the box of porn. On the one hand, it was a box of old magazines, possibly worthless. On the other, they were well-preserved, vintage publications, and could be of some value to the estate. I knew a little about this man, through my dad, who also worked in the oil and gas industry. There had never been any mention of the man’s sexuality, only that he’d long been single and taken care of his elderly mother. The contents of this box likely would have come as a surprise to everyone who knew this man professionally.
In the end, we decided to put the box into the back of the Ranchero and take it to the dump. Leaving it to be sold or donated could have outed the owner of the house, and this seemed like something he’d gone to great lengths to conceal. He’d been a man of the Silent Generation, and he’d chosen to keep this part of his life quiet.
When I first moved out on my own, at eighteen, I wanted a pet and wasn’t permitted to keep a dog in my crappy apartment, so I adopted a cat from the Humane Society. It was post-Halloween in 1993, and River Phoenix had just died on the sidewalk outside the Viper Room in Los Angeles. I named my black cat Phoenix and brought her home to my new digs. She clawed my second-hand sofa. She scratched the cigarette-burned carpet. She climbed everything with her claws, including my leg and the half-dead Christmas tree I dragged home in December. I made the decision to have her declawed. I was lonely and wanted a cuddly companion, and my hands and arms were constantly getting carved up by her tiny razors.
Over the next few years, I moved three more times, ending up in my cherished fourth-floor studio in The Lorraine Apartments. On a warm September evening, all of my windows were open as I folded laundry and watched Friends on my ancient, eighty-pound TV. Phoenix was sitting on the window ledge a few feet away. It was the episode where Chandler hides all of Joey’s underwear, forcing him to go commando in a rented tuxedo. As revenge, Joey pledges to do the opposite, so he puts on all of Chandler’s clothes and starts lunging in them, still commando. I laughed at Matt LeBlanc and glanced at the window. Phoenix was gone. Cats are known to be stealthy, so I assumed she’d silently jumped to the floor and run off to hide. Still, something didn’t feel right. I looked in all of her usual hiding places—under the couch, deep inside my messy closet, but I couldn’t locate her. I employed the failsafe last resort, opening a can of tuna. Only my other cat, Nelson, came running. There was only one explanation, and it seemed impossible: Phoenix had fallen out of the window.
I grabbed a flashlight and ran downstairs to the parking lot. Phoenix was silent, hiding under a parked car. When I pulled her out, I discovered one of her front legs was badly broken.
The vet told me her leg was likely unfixable. She gave me three choices: I could risk surgery, which may not work and started at $1,500; I could have her leg amputated for $800; or I could have her euthanized for $75. I asked what most people did in situations like this. I was flat broke, but I was willing to do almost anything to save Phoenix. She said most people had the pet put down, that they didn’t like the aesthetic of a three-legged animal. I was horrified—people would rather lose their pets than get them back slightly altered? She said this trend was about the appearance but also the mistaken belief that a dog or cat couldn’t have a full, active life with only three limbs. Owners who did choose amputation usually decided to keep the shoulder because it looked better. I asked what purpose that would serve for Phoenix. The answer was none—it would be a shoulder joint moving as though the leg was still attached, but it would be more symmetrical, and that’s what most pet owners preferred. I decided to go ahead with the amputation, shoulder and all. I would beg and borrow my way to saving my cat.
Phoenix lived to be seventeen years old. When she passed away, I found her on the carpet of the home I shared with my growing family. She looked as though she’d been leaping through the air, having died mid-jump. She’d moved homes with me five more times and learned to catch flies out of mid-air with her one, declawed front paw. I never forgave myself for having her claws removed. At the time, it had seemed like a necessity, to preserve my damage deposits and my stuff. I believe Phoenix may not have fallen four stories if she’d had claws to dig into the wooden window ledge. I hope I made the right choice for her with the amputation, to leave behind what she could no longer use.
Some days, we sat on the front stoop, dreading the dingy, poorly-lit rooms with clutter blocking the windows. We breathed in the last moments of fresh air before crossing the threshold into that place, where it felt hard to breathe, where the smell took over and clung to our clothes and hair like cigarette smoke. Being in that house made us lose our appetites, and most days we skipped lunch. It was hard to summon hunger in a building where everything had been left to rot. We ate at home, after showers, after distance from discovering the fallout of human neglect.
Human organs have become a commodity traded both legally and illegally. The World Health Organization says one in ten organ transplants is a trafficked human organ. In some countries, there’s “transplant tourism,” where you can get an all-inclusive package that features a new kidney installed while you’re visiting. It’s perfectly legal. Most of the time the organs come from people in poor countries and the recipients are from rich ones. A guy in Bangladesh will sell a kidney to feed his family and then end up sick and unable to work. Meanwhile, some white dude is back on the golf course, filtering craft beer through his thrifted kidney.
We were getting paid by the hour, so we tried to stretch the job out as much as possible. We were also trying to add some levity to a weird and gross situation. When we took a break, we’d step out into the unkept yard, breathing in the fresh air. Getting outside helped to ease my low-grade germaphobia. The property had been neglected for a long time, and thousands of ants crawled in and around the dry root system of the pine tree in front of the house. They were everywhere, climbing up our legs if we stood still for too long. It started as a defence tactic. D took a sip of water and sprayed it from his mouth, aiming for the ants. Soon, we were keeping track of how many ants we could bomb with our spit. We invented rules for the game, like having to fire from a seated position on the front steps or getting bonus points for soaking more than one ant in one shot. The concrete path to the front door became dotted in lighter grey, our mouth-water having cleaned tiny patches of the filthy sidewalk.
When I turned twenty-one, my mom gave me a photo album she’d created. It’s a large book with a glossy red cover. She wanted to document the first twenty-one years of my life, as a keepsake. I cherish this album, and I love that she pored over the photographs, likely thinking about each memory as she chose them for the album. As a mom now, I can imagine the mixed emotions of assembling something like this. But there was always something about the album that was missing. I flipped through the stiff pages again and again, looking through the photos of me at different stages of growth. Then it hit me: in most of the photos, it’s just me. The surrounding scene has been cut away, likely my mom’s sweet way of putting the focus on me—but the result is a collection of photographs without context. Now that I’m over twice the age of that album, it’s strange to look back at a collection of images from my childhood without the background to give me clues about the memories contained within them. Without these visual cues, it’s just me, looking younger and then older. There’s no story.
When we grew tired of spit-bombing the ants, we moved on to the backyard with a garbage bag full of matchbooks. We painstakingly laid them out so that each one was opened and connected to the next. We created a spiraling pattern, curving and twisting the matchbooks down the concrete path all the way to the small garage in the backyard. When we were satisfied with our design, we lit the first cluster of matches and waited.
There were a couple of burnouts—matchbooks that weren’t close enough together to catch the flame—but after two or three false starts, the inferno of dominoes lit up. Each one flared and sparked, then died down as the carboard cover burned into the next book. Once burned out, they left a charred mark on the sidewalk in the pattern we’d made. When D’s dad stopped by later that afternoon to see how we were doing, he stood staring at the spiral of char on the concrete, scratching his head.
I wondered why these objects had been saved, for what purpose? Maybe there was no reason, other than just having them. Why the bread bag ties? Hundreds of them, what must have been years of saving. What would this man have thought about us clearing out his hoard—would he be relieved? Horrified? It seemed, despite his prestigious career, he had few objects of any monetary value. His house and yard looked as though they hadn’t been maintained at all. What he did have were thousands of relatively useless objects, like piles of nametags from conferences he’d attended over his well-publicized career.
I’ve always had a problem getting rid of fabric. I enjoy sewing because, like writing, it’s an act of creating something from nothing. Pieces are cut and attached by thread through a machine needle or one in my hand, and the result is a piece of art or a utilitarian object, or both.
Much of my fabric hoarding has come from the idea behind my practice as a fibre artist. I make bags using the discarded fabrics from the interior design industry, repurposed materials like old leather jackets, and the beautiful vintage fabrics unearthed from basements when people downsize. I like the idea that my bags are made almost entirely from materials that would have gone to the landfill.
As a child, I loved interior design sample books, flipping through the fabric pages and running my fingers over the twills and velvets and shiny brocades. I marvelled at the fact these books had no real value because the samples were too small to be useful. As an adult, I began collecting them—collecting being the less alarming version of hoarding. These small pieces of luxury were garbage to everyone else, outdated décor samples tossed in the trash. For me, they were pieces of one-of-a-kind handbags I made from something formerly useless.
In parts of China, the fabrics used to create a new baby’s clothing are sourced from the discarded textiles of other family members, to link the baby to its kin and protect them using the strength imbued in these cloth pieces. Embroidery has long been believed to provide protection using the power of symbolism, the strength of nature through the plant-based dyes used to colour the thread, and the placement of this mark-making onto the entry points of clothing—necklines, hems, and cuffs. The floral adornments and geometric patterns are now seen as mere decoration, but they were first employed to ward off evil and protect the wearer. So much of this power is a result of the strength provided by the former wearer or the hands that did the weaving, sewing, and embellishing. In Hawaiian tradition, the mother’s hands constructing a quilt for her baby transfer her energy and protection into the fibres. The interlocking of the fibres themselves provide strength. This idea is behind much of the sacred power given to something like an Indian sari—the uncut, continuous piece of fabric providing a protective shield around the woman.
As a bagmaker, I created a number of fabric vessels made from favourite pieces of clothing or the cherished items of someone who had passed away. One was for the daughter of a young mother who’d died of cancer. The bag was made from an old leather jacket and a blouse that had been worn by the mother, and the idea that her essence was somehow entwined within the fibres of these textiles seems logical. How else to remain close to the person than to get close to the materials they wore? I had a friend who couldn’t bring himself to shop at a second-hand store for this very reason—he didn’t want to wear the clothing of a dead stranger for fear they remained within the very threads of an old cardigan or pair of jeans. I never asked him how he felt about organ donation.
I thought a lot about what we’d found in that box in the basement. I felt sad for the owner of the house and what seemed like an emptiness in his life that he had filled with stuff. I knew, from my dad, that he would have been a man with a good deal of money. He was well-known and respected in the oil and gas industry. But you never would have guessed this, based on how he lived. Over the course of those weeks sorting through the contents of his house, we found very little of value. When we eventually moved on to the detached garage, we discovered a neglected economy car. When I turned the key in the ignition, the dash lit up with warning lights. The furniture in the house looked like it had been his mother’s, and it was mostly sturdy and practical, no frills. Based on the extreme clutter, the rotting food in the sink and fridge and the soiled bedding, it was obvious the man never entertained. There was barely room to get in the front door. This house was full of stuff, filled to the brim, filling what appeared to be a huge void in his life, a loneliness I felt deep in my bones. As much as we made light of the weird shit we found or joked about the disgusting nature of the job, there was a sadness in the house that we both felt, moving through those cluttered rooms.
With the art of Kintsugi, broken pottery is repaired using lacquer dusted with precious metals like gold, silver, and platinum to draw attention to the cracks and scars. Kintsugi dismisses perfection as an unrealistic goal, and instead highlights the beauty of healing. It embraces the repair, the imperfect, and the asymmetrical. Instead of throwing out the broken pottery, it’s put back together without the need to conceal the cracks. It’s about resisting the urge to discard the damaged.
In recent years, the internet has churned out countless articles, Instagram posts, and inspirational quotes using Kintsugi as a metaphor for growing from failure and surviving through times of difficulty and loss. People are using the principles of Kintsugi on their own bodies, getting tattooed after mastectomies, owning and highlighting the beautiful scars of survival and resilience. It’s interesting to me that people mostly want to hide their scars, that the body’s strength and ability to repair itself is seen as something to be concealed. I’ve had numerous abdominal surgeries, including three C-sections, and one of the first items addressed by the physician in the pre-surgery discussion was the minimalization of the scars. I doubt the doctors think this important, but instead mention it because it’s a priority for so many patients. When you have surgery, you’ve gone through something major. My scars, like photographs, are what’s left behind after an experience in my life. They’re triggers of memory, reminders of great joy, trauma, triumph, and resilience. They’re tallies of my body’s immense abilities, golden lines of repair on the vessel that holds me.
Later that summer, after the job at the hoarder’s house was done, I went to a Pearl Jam concert with D and his girlfriend. It was general admission, and we waited in line from early that morning, hoping to secure a spot close to the stage. It paid off, and we ended up in the front row, right below Eddie Vedder’s microphone. After the band had gotten good and sweaty playing songs like “Daughter” and “Rearviewmirror,” a roadie threw them towels and Stone Gossard wrapped one around his long hair, like he’d just stepped out of the shower. He played the next song wearing the towel, then threw it into the crowd. I still have it today.
One of the last tasks we completed in the dead man’s house that summer was opening the Christmas presents that were stacked beside piles of garbage. The wrapping paper was yellowed, suggesting the gifts had been received many years prior. In one box was a cordless phone, likely from a friend or family member who wished to keep in touch, to stay connected through the chaos of this man’s home. I snuck it into my backpack. I didn’t tell D. I knew he’d disapprove. We’d both been completely on the up-and-up about everything we found in the house, sorting it for donation and putting the items of greater value together for an estate sale. But I wanted this phone. I still lived with my parents, but I felt I needed it more than any thrift store. Two months later, I would be moving into that first, crappy apartment with the cigarette-burned carpet, drunk and high all the time, no longer welcome in my parents’ home. That phone would keep me connected through the chaos.
HEIDI KLAASSEN is a Calgary-based writer and editor. Her work has appeared in Salon, Redivider, The Saranac Review, The Calgary Herald, Westword, The Sprawl and more. Her collage essay, “Bicycle Trees" was nominated for both the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. Her personal essay, “Been Caught Stealing: Life Inside The Lorraine”, was a finalist for the Digital Publishing Awards. Heidi is the executive director of the Creative Nonfiction Collective. She is currently pursuing a Master of Arts - Interdisciplinary Studies degree at Athabasca University, with a focus on literary and cultural studies.
