The tiny clasp on the silver metal box snapped so hard that when my fingers were short and tender and I was adventurous enough to pry it open, my brave forefinger would come away pinched and painful. But I loved to open this rectangular box of slides, a kid-scale suitcase with a handle, which was rather like my father: slim, compact, single purposed.

The box contained slides from my father’s life before he met my mother. There was an entire row of Kodachrome images of his French girlfriend on a beach, at a picnic, on a French city street, her dark hair coiffed. He took no pains to hide these from me, or us, but my sisters were too little then.

The drawer in the sideboard where the box lived was a Pandora’s box all my own. My mother shoved photographs into that drawer, full sets of class pictures we never bothered to cut up and share, except the obligatory pictures for our grandparents. Fat red envelopes of photos developed at K-Mart all during my high school years were a reminder of my own past. I visited the contents of this drawer every time I came home from my life in faraway places because there was evidence of my father and his early courtship with my mother. There was even a photograph of me as a baby, in a lake, laughing. I love that one.

Once my mother rid herself of much of what had been her life raising the four of us girls on her own, both before and after my father left when I was 14 and my youngest sister was 3, this box was up for grabs. She must have known I wanted it and every single photograph in that drawer of the sideboard, which she sold at a garage sale for cheap. She dumped the contents into a packing box and kept it for me in the basement of her new house with her new husband.

Eight years later, when I too married and gained a house, the packing box of photographs and the slide box were the first things I took from that well-ordered basement where everything was shelved according to daughter, or date, just as tidy as the rows and rows of peaches and strawberries they froze in plastic baggies for their winter Grape Nuts breakfasts.

In my basement, the box sat waiting. It waited for my kids to get big enough to shake my foundation, big enough for me to need to get a handle on my childhood, which I sought to do through writing. The slide box became a compass of sorts. I’d grab a slide and peer at it with a flashlight or up against my desk lamp. It felt too consequential to invest in a slide viewer, or better yet, an Epson slide reader which converts these old images to a digital file that I can enlarge on my desktop and see details I never knew existed.

Now I have that.

How my father carried his cigarette in the outer corner of his mouth, smiling around it. My mother was so skinny. How most photographs of me as a baby don’t show me smiling, but with a rather surprised look on my round face. Well, I was smiling in the one I like best, that slide of baby me on a rock in Gilas Lake. I still smile in lakes.

I have digitized most of those images. Peered at the French woman and wondered where she is now. Does she think longingly about her American GI who worked for American Express during the war, who broke it off perhaps when he was dishonorably discharged for something he never mentioned? Does she dream of my father still? I wonder about her, belted skirt, bandeau top, the military parade they watched with gunfire that created gusts of smoke my father caught with his camera. A camera I never knew.

There is one slide of my father at a hunting camp, a bottle of Dawe’s Ale on the shelf above his head. He sits in a bed next to his buddy, who holds a lit cigarette between his toes as he reads, legs crossed in a figure four pose, orange hunting cap slung on his knee. In a grungy white t-shirt, the guy tucks a bottle of Canadian Club whiskey next to his chest with his elbow. My father in a striped pajama top sits beside the toe-smoking reader and strums a guitar, his head tipped. Again, something I never saw him do. The side table is littered with an ashtray, a wallet, and a deck of cards. This is an image I never could make out until I got the Epson, until my fingers where strong enough not to get pinched.

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Suzi Banks Baum is a protector of the imagination, a nurturer of attention. Entirely obsessed with marigolds, Banks Baum’s interdisciplinary work exists at the crossroads of literary and visual art. Her award-winning writing appears in Hypertext, The Dunes Review, The Good Life Review, Walloon Writers Review and the Guild of Book Workers Journal. Her mixed media work is included in Collage Your Life by Melanie Mowinski. Raised in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, Suzi teaches book art and daily creative practice in her studio in the Berkshires of western Massachusetts. Learn more at suzibanksbaum.com and @suzibb on Insta.

Object-ives features flash nonfiction essays of 500-999 words on the possessions we can’t stop thinking about.

Submit your Object-ives essay

Recommended reading on possessions:

“The Archive of Ordinary Lives” by

“Why I Still Keep My Mother’s Lanz Nightgown” by , What We Keep

“I Gave Away My Backpacks, Then Wept at Their Absence” by

“Rocks” by

“Her father hoarded. When he died, she inherited his house.” by Madeline Mitchell, USA Today

“WAGs Love Their Crocheted, Bedazzled N.B.A. Merch” by Alisha Haridasani Gupta, The New York Times

Our July 2026 Open Secrets Book Club pick is Adulting for Amateurs: Misadventures of a Geriatric Millennial by Jess H. Gutierrez. Publisher Tiny Reparations Books calls it “a rowdy and hilarious new collection of essays on life as an elder millennial, filled with life lessons on everything from marriage to parenting to rolling with the punches when Gen Z mocks your TikTok dances.” We wanted to bring some humor to your summer reading while still sharing essays that are thought-provoking, whatever age or generation the reader.

Join us in the Open Secrets Magazine chat to discuss the book, and for a Q&A with Jess on Thursday, July 23 at 8:30 p.m. ET on Substack Live, which you can watch in the Substack app or on desktop. Click here for a reminder; Open Secrets subscribers will be notified when we go live. Please bring your own questions for Jess, which we will ask as time permits. The discussion will be recorded and posted for anyone who can’t attend live.

Below you’ll find an exclusive note from Jess H. Gutierrez, purchase links for the book, which you can also check out or request at your local library, and more info about what to expect.

A note from Jess H. Gutierrez

Hi! I’m Jess H. Gutierrez and I’m beyond excited to introduce you to Adulting for Amateurs. This book is a mess in all the best ways a mess can be a mess. It’s a work straight from my heart and I’m so glad that you’ve taken a chance on it. This is the long version of me, a perpetual stumbler, to say thank you.

Adulting is a funny collection of essays about being a grown-up when it often feels like I missed a step. Suffice it to say, if I had a coming-of-age moment, I slept through it. But here I am, alongside so many of my generation, adulting the best I can (most days).

I was inspired to write this book because I truly believe that we all have stories to tell and that though the details may look different, so many of us have shared experiences tied to pop culture and the age we were raised in. We are a quirky product of the age that brought us up.

We were club kids in sparkly one shoulder tops who now hold full time jobs while we balance kids on our hips while figuring out insurance deductibles. We’re the adults at the helm now, but sometimes we wonder if we should be.

Happy reading. I am so proud to have my book featured by Open Secrets and can’t wait to join you for a live chat about all things ridiculous, memoir, and comedy in July!

Where to buy Adulting for Amateurs

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About Adulting for Amateurs

In Adulting for Amateurs, Jess H. Gutierrez marvels at how—we can’t avoid the fact anymore—her cohort, the millennials, are approaching middle age. While 1998 seems like just yesterday, we are now grown-ups who feel like we’re still growing up. And at forty-two, Jess has quite a trove of stories to tell.

Jess is leaning into her geriatric millennial years and reflects on how growing up does not necessarily bestow one with maturity. When the dinner covers were lifted to reveal vertically posed sausages, hundreds of the fanciest wedding guests, including the mayor, were treated to a demure and refined Jess’s explosive guffaws. While Jess’s brothers now have wholesome families and responsible jobs, she can’t stop one-upping them, even if it gets her brother nearly fired by a potty-brained prank right before he scrubs into surgery. When Jess and her wife booked their first grown-up vacation, they discovered too late that their Hawaiian trip was to a Mormon resort and therefore completely alcohol free. So Jess and her wife bravely put on their big-girl panties—and slunk off in a makeshift escape from this cheerful teetotaler paradise.

Turns out, even as a responsible homeowner with a mortgage, three kids, and a yard of chickens, Jess might not have matured much beyond her twenties. She’s still the woman who in an earlier era survived queer-dating fails and aughts-era pop culture moments—ultimately discovering that an illegal rave cannot heal a broken heart and that vampire-romance franchises are terrible dating manuals for a budding trailer park lesbian.

Altogether these are the makings of delightful material for this bawdy—sometimes poignant and, dare we say, occasionally wise—new read.

What people are saying about Adulting for Amateurs

“As a (possibly geriatric) millennial, Adulting for Amateurs blew me away. Jess’s big personality and honesty shine through in this collection of essays, and I laughed with every page turn.”
—Busy Philipps, New York Times bestselling author of This Will Only Hurt a Little

"In Adulting for Amateurs, Jess Gutierrez has gifted old-ass millennials with a collection of laugh-out-loud essays clowning our shared cultural touchstones. Packed with early 2000's-nostalgia, wild escapades, and delightful dirty jokes (with a few hard-won pearls of wisdom sprinkled on top), Adulting for Amateurs is a hilarious time capsule of the way we were—filtered through Jess's insane (complimentary) comedic voice."
—Caitlin Kunkel, co-author of Inside Jokes and New Erotica for Feminists

“With self-deprecating humor, Gutierrez, who was born in 1984, unpacks the bewildering experience of becoming the adult in the room regardless of feeling mature enough for the job... Wincingly relatable.”
—Publishers Weekly

About Jess H. Gutierrez

Jess H. Gutierrez is the author A Product of Genetics (and Day Drinking) and a humor columnist for Paxton Media Group newspapers. She was an award-winning reporter for the Northwest Arkansas Times and the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, and has written for Out magazine and Electric Literature. She lives with her wife, a fire captain, and three small kids who have already surpassed Jess in both intellect and cunning. They live in Arkansas.

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Fist bump.

Sup.

Fist bump.

Hey, how many sets do you have left?

My wife bought me a few sessions with a trainer at our local YMCA as a Christmas gift. She wants me to live a long, healthy life, so I must sweat. After all, I am a middle-aged man, which means I am slowly transforming into a human cupcake.

I complained at first but then it happened: One weekend, I couldn’t pick up my adorable little niece anymore. Is she 11? Yes. Is she small for her age? No. Did she actually try to tackle me first? Yes. She was excited to see me, and vice versa, but my God, what are they feeding her? She’s strong for her age and I am weaker that I once was, back when I could open jars of mayonnaise with one firm twist.

So, after dragging my feet for a few more days, I put on the sweatsuit my father-in-law had bought me at Costco for Christmas. I used to call them “stainsuits” because I’d sooner get salsa and bean dip on them than sweat. That’s a little joke my wife didn’t find funny. But I went. I went to the gym. Thank you, my love, for caring about my corporeal being.

The trainer’s name was Ahmed, and he was exactly 25 years younger than me. Ahmed is lean and powerful, not too beefy. He’s studying to be a lawyer but he’s not sure. He’s sharp. We tell our best and brightest they can grow to be whatever they want to be, but generally speaking, that’s a nice, mostly dishonest, thing to say. Not everyone can grow up to be whatever they want to be. Luck plays a huge part. But so does talent, and Ahmed could be a lawyer if he wanted, a doctor, or, I don’t know, an Instagram influencer.

He carries himself with confidence. Ahmed loves rap, especially Danny Brown, whose name I recognized because an intern once talked my ear off about him during a coffee where the intern was supposed to pick my brain—a terrible phrase.

No one told me that growing older meant growing heavier, not because of metabolism or late-night nachos, but because of gravity and decomposition. I knew I’d grow hair in my ears, but I didn’t know that years are bricks that crush you slowly.

I wanted muscles. Hell, I don’t even need the plural form of that word. One muscle would do. A show muscle. I wanted to make sure I’d be able to perform feats of strength at the nursing home, like being able to bend over and put on non-slip socks. I needed to learn how to navigate a gym. I didn’t know how to use exercise equipment, especially the large pieces that look like medieval torture devices. I was honest with him: Hotel gyms are intimidating.

Ahmed taught me how to squat. Squatting is everything. He taught me how to properly sit on a workbench and pull down weights. To imagine I was squeezing pieces of fruit between my shoulder blades. I know how to use the vertical pull, the seated row, and the biceps curl. I do cardio now, too. But most of all, he taught me how to act in a gym.

How to behave. The gym is like a fancy restaurant or a ballet. It’s a space shared by all kinds of people, and subtle and not-so-subtle social cues rule it. A nod. A fist bump. A polite question. Don’t stare. It’s okay to grunt, but don’t overdo it. Ahmed was confident and cheerful, so I mimicked him.

Sup.

Ahmed was supportive, even tender, toward me. Even when 20-pound weights tested the limits of my Jell-O muscles, he’d warmly smile and tell me I was doing great, and you know what? I’d believe him. And he’d lightly tap the knuckles of his fellow gym rats as we worked our way around the racks of dumbbells and rowing machines. This was his community, and I was welcomed into the sweaty club. After a couple of sessions, I, too, offered up my fists for bumps. The crew—many skinny teens and local meatheads—were stone-faced but encouraging. They were fond of saying, “You got this, dude,” to each other.

So now I stroll into the gym with a benevolent poker face. There are comedy and tragedy masks, and I wear the workout mask, eyes narrowed and my mouth relaxed. I know what I’m doing. When I’m done, I wipe down the bench and return the kettlebells to where I found them.

Ahmed once asked what I listened to when I worked out. I inhaled and then replied, “Rap.” Small talk is allowed at the gym.

Fist bump.

“What kind of rap?”

“Oh, you know, old school stuff. Danny Brown, too.”

He nodded approvingly and walked away. Before doing 20 minutes of cardio, I put in my earbuds and hit play on my favorite Taylor Swift album, Folklore.

Hey.

Fist bump

What are you listenin’ to?

Podcasts.

Cool.

At any time, in every musky gym in America, at least one man in his forties or fifties, powerlifting or jogging on the treadmill, is listening to Taylor Swift, the incandescently popular singer-songwriter.

Just the other day, it was me. I was on the elliptical, the low-impact exercise machine that does not mimic any real-life activity—you’re walking! running! skiing! hands pulling and pushing, feet sliding back and forth— and to look at me, huffing and puffing, little white plugs in my ears, you’d think I was rocking out to something stereotypically masculine, like Led Zeppelin or Metallica or the sound of chainsaws.

But I wasn’t.

Swift’s story is pretty well known: a young country star turned music-industry behemoth, an autobiographical artist whose life is a widely lucrative global brand. Who listens to Swift? That is also no secret: young women, but not exclusively. You see these people screaming with joy in Swift’s blockbuster concert movie and on social media. They are her followers and enforcers, her sisters. I think it’s assumed that most so-called Swifties are women who, like Taylor, have survived having their hearts broken by mopey men.

But there is a shadow audience for her music, an unlikely horde of listeners who secretly blare her infectious and uplifting power rock while desperately trying to stay fit on the elliptical—an invisible army of dudes who like bubblegum, I guess.

The spectrum of Swift’s demo is vast, but at one end are socially awkward teen girls who do not know what society expects of them, and at the other end are socially awkward middle-aged men who do not know what society expects of them.

Swift chronicles modern love’s primary paradox: We’re all the center of our little universes, and yet none of us are happy. Of course, there is a cure for this profound loneliness: Swift’s music, which connects people. Her songs are hymns we can sing together in the Church Of No One Understands Me.

I haven’t always been a fan of Swift’s work. But during the most suffocating months of the 2020 lockdowns, I listened to Folklore, and she reminded me that confusion, anger, and sudden, unfathomable sorrow can be beautiful, like the woods in the winter, cold and dead and stark, a skeleton standing in the snow, waiting to be kissed by spring.

I have allowed myself to forget those months and years, but I remember how Swift’s heartfelt, exquisitely produced record cooled my fears. I can’t be objective when it comes to Folklore. Is it special? Immortal? Or is it a mass-produced entertainment designed to balance the scales of my heart? I don’t know.

As a writer, Swift is inspired by regret and the righteous path. She yearns for freedom, and goddammit, so do I. Her lyrics are human and vulnerable, but she’s also a myth. Her entire body of work tells one long, complex story about a woman who grew up too fast and endured scorn and betrayal. There’s so much lore. But Swift’s music can also be enjoyed without knowing anything about her; pop songs are mirrors that reflect something deeply personal and universal to the listener. I wear her music like wax wings.

Another popular criticism of Swift is that all she writes are breakup songs. That’s true. But all songs are breakup songs.

They’re all about the one that got away or the one that broke your heart or the one that stayed. All songs are about what was, what could have been, what never was. A song is sung after the fact. It is a story in the rearview mirror, a memory, a love affair that died, or a brief victory. It is how we mourn the passing of time. We sang songs naked, long ago, around fires and under the stars, about our joys and sorrows, and we sing to each other, now, about good times and bad, because in the end, you’ll be thankful for all of it. Even the breakups.

It’s the most powerful way humans know how to connect with and comfort each other. Every heart is different, every crack is different, but every heart cracks. If you boil any song long enough, what’s left behind is pure heartbreak. Even the happy songs. The dance songs. The silly ditties and the bubblegum pop. The songs about fighting and the songs about fucking. The hymns and power ballads and headbangers. They’re all about longing, at different volumes.

Songs trigger tears or dry them with fire. They electrify limbs and make blood pump faster. All artists, not just musicians, transform pain into beauty or laughter, or vengeance. I want to listen to those songs. You do too. Life is about heartbreak. The whole thing, from baby rattle to death rattle. It’s a bittersweet story told in goodbyes: you will lose everyone you ever loved and one day you will let go, too.

I go to the gym now. Once or twice a week. When I’m not at the gym I think “Should I go to the gym?” Is this what brainwashing is like? But it’s good for me? It is good for me. I’m changing. Moving my body. What if I keep it up? Slow the clock? Lower my blood pressure? What would I do with the extra time?

Today is “leg” day. Ahmed would be proud. I stretch, attack a foam roller, then do jumping jacks. After that, leg presses, hamstrings, lunges, and back on the elliptical. In my earphones, Swift is singing her heart out. She’s pushing back. She is triumphant. Sweat leaks down the sides of my face. My legs swing back and forth, and my arms pump to the rhythm.

I’m listening to “Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me”—a song about gossip and justice—and it’s typical Swift, soft and barbed, explosive. When she sings about leaping from the gallows and levitating, I’m panting and soaking my shirt. The elliptical machine is a flying machine, a mechanical pterodactyl, and high up from the clouds, looking down, I see myself and think, “That guy’s trying his best.”

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John DeVore is an award-winning writer and editor whose funny/sad memoir about grief, friendship and jazz hands, Theatre Kids, is now available.

Gomez discusses curating a queer life, how being non-binary relates to their fashion choices, selecting the right clothes for productive writing sessions, the power of wearing fun outfits and accessories in public, why they treasure their grandmother’s costume jewelry collection, and their most beloved outfits and clothing items, including two capes that were owned by Walter Mercado.

“I’m drawn to clothes that exude joy and happiness and gratitude and that don’t feel like I’m limiting myself because of some arbitrary rules that somebody decided about what boys can and can’t do,” says Gomez in this episode.

About our guest:

Edgar Gomez is a queer NicaRican writer born and raised in Florida. He is the author of the memoir High-Risk Homosexual, winner of the American Book Award. Their latest book, Alligator Tears, was called “triumphant, dazzling, and unfailingly stylish” by Publishers Weekly, won a Florida Book Award, and is a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Memoir. Gomez lives between New York and Puerto Rico.

edgargomez.net

Instagram: @otroedgargomez

Substack

Alligator Tears

Finders and Keepers is hosted by Rachel Kramer Bussel and is a production of Open Secrets Magazine. Thank you to Sound Off Network and Dan Schroeder for audio production support. Please rate and review wherever you listen to podcasts to help us reach new listeners. Want to share your own stuff story, tell us who we should interview next, or share your own most treasured possession? Contact us at findersandkeeperspod@gmail.com or leave a voicemail at speakpipe.com/findersandkeepers

For more about our attachments to our belongings, read the personal essays in the Object-ives and Stuff-ed sections of Open Secrets Magazine at opensecretsmagazine.com, where you can also submit your own essays.

Finders and Keepers is hosted by Rachel Kramer Bussel and is a production of Open Secrets Magazine. Thank you to Sound Off Network and Dan Schroeder for audio production support. If you like the podcast, we’d greatly appreciate if you’d leave a rating and review wherever you listen to podcasts and tell your friends about it to help us reach new listeners. Want to share your own stuff story, tell us who we should interview next, or share your own most treasured possession? Contact us at findersandkeeperspod@gmail.com or leave a voicemail at speakpipe.com/findersandkeepers

For more about our attachments to our belongings, read the personal essays in the Object-ives and Stuff-ed sections of Open Secrets Magazine at opensecretsmagazine.com, where you can also submit your own essays.

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“I’m sorry you have to demean yourself like that,” she said.

It was 2020 and I was working as a cashier in a supermarket in Utah. For almost 20 years, I had been a college teacher and organizer in New York City, while this acquaintance had been a journalist. A run of bad luck and worse timing had sent me to the unemployment line and then to the supermarket to make ends meet. When my acquaintance found out that I was working in a store, she was appalled. “The American dream is dead,” she said, trying to console me.

The comment rankled. “Demeaning” was not a word that I would have used to describe my situation. Would I have preferred to be working somewhere else? Sure. I spent my days off from the supermarket trying to forge a path back to the world of desks and laptops and not having to ask permission to take a couple of hours off to run an errand. The journalist was saying that working in food retail was demeaning to me in particular because I deserved better. I had drawn a different conclusion from my story. But it wasn’t until my acquaintance’s comment that I realized what it was.

I saw things differently in part because of my background. In the small Idaho town where I grew up, you might aspire to be a schoolteacher, a nurse, or a small business owner, but there was nothing demeaning about working in a supermarket. In middle school, my best friend’s mom was a cashier. I never once considered that I ought to judge her, much less feel sorry for her. Almost everyone I knew did hardscrabble work that kept the community afloat. My grandfather installed tile roofs on houses, my mom taught junior high school English, and my dad had mopped floors in a grocery store before cashing in his GI Bill, getting a degree, and becoming a school librarian. There was no way I was going to feel sorry for myself for working in a supermarket.

My acquaintance’s comment troubled me because she wasn’t defending the dignity of retail workers. She was saying that such jobs were beneath people like “us.”

That’s not the only reason her words stayed with me. I had to admit that she wasn’t entirely wrong. Retail work was demeaning. My colleagues and I earned shamefully low wages, under $15 an hour the year that I was on the job. Signs of food insecurity were impossible to miss. One cashier came through my checkout line on his lunch break to buy a burrito, but his credit card declined. “I guess I can’t eat today,” he said. The 79-year-old who couldn’t afford to retire, and had budgeted herself only two dollars a day for lunch. One long-time cashier waited a few minutes after his shift had ended to clock out, boosting his pay by as much as ten dollars a week. “That’s at least two meals,” he told me.

My coworkers were hardly alone. A 2022 report showed that three-quarters of employees at Kroger, the second-largest grocery company, didn’t get enough to eat. One out of seven workers said they relied on food aid programs. As the journalist Errol Schweizer wrote, “To be food insecure and to work in grocery stores is quite normal in America.” Workers go hungry while retailers are flush with cash. Between 2019-2024, 100 low-wage companies spent over half a trillion dollars on stock buybacks. If struggling to keep food on the table while your employer is shoveling money to shareholders isn’t “demeaning,” then I don’t know what is.

Another retail industry indignity is lack of access to healthcare. One cashier at my store had a painful toothache that she couldn’t afford to treat. For a while, she ate ice cream for dinner while waiting for a spot to open up at a free clinic. An employee in his sixties who’d had a stroke and had to spend months recovering at home lost his company health insurance. One day, he came into the store with his arm in a sling. He told me that he was racking up medical debt. “If I can’t come back to the job soon,” he said, “I might as well be dead.” Another cashier had a back injury from a prior job as a home health aide. Standing behind her register for hours was so agonizing that she grunted and winced through every transaction. The situation was demeaning for her and sometimes for her customers who felt ignored and mistreated by a surly cashier. Supermarket work was as bad as my acquaintance had implied, just not in the way she had meant it.

Her dismay at my situation also forced me to reflect on my own attitudes and desires. Despite my admiration for the people I grew up with, I’d never intended to be one of them. I spent my adolescence and young adulthood plotting my escape like an Idaho Andy Dufresne digging a tunnel from his cell to the outside. I resisted my religious community’s conservative expectations for women. While no one would have judged me for working in a supermarket, failing to become a traditional homemaker came with a level of social opprobrium that I couldn’t bear. Before I had the language for it, I wanted to be what the writer Barbara Ehrenreich called a “salaried mental worker,” perhaps a lawyer or a professor. Mostly, I wanted to see the world, read and write, and wear business casual instead of a nametag and a smock.

After college, I maxed out some credit cards and moved to New York City where I assumed “salaried mental worker” jobs were as plentiful as the lightbulbs in Times Square. The first years were a grind. I waited tables and struggled to make rent. From the wrong part of the country and with no connections, I didn’t have much to go on. It didn’t help that people who drove across the George Washington Bridge with a suitcase and a dream were a dime a dozen.

What I did have in spades was a near religious belief in education as a path to upward mobility. That was another legacy of my hometown, where a college degree was widely assumed to be a ticket to the upper middle class. A bachelor’s may have failed to catapult me into a salaried job. But a Ph.D. would surely do the trick. Mostly unaware of the distinction between the Ivy Leagues, private universities, and public colleges, I enrolled in the English department at the public City University of New York. Along the way, I taught composition classes to earn money. Student loans filled the gap. I was in debt, but it felt like a step up from waiting tables.

I graduated in the aftermath of a meltdown in the home mortgage market, which led to a global financial crisis. Academic positions had never been plentiful but by 2010, they had dried up. After a grueling three-year search for a professorship, I turned to gig labor. In addition to teaching, I temped as an administrative assistant for lawyers and financiers. I didn’t know then that I had entered into a period of “pink collar” work that would lead me to the service industry.

Around 2012, I turned to activism in part to distract myself from my bleak employment prospects and from the student loan bills that were coming due. I cofounded a union for people in debt. The Debt Collective helped for-profit college students lobby the government and creditors for loan relief. (Our efforts paid off. By 2022, billions of dollars in loans were cancelled.) We also lobbied for polices that would end student debt for good, such as free public college and mass loan cancellation. For a few years, I earned a decent salary. I thought I had dodged a bullet. I had made my own job, following an entrepreneurial ethic that said hard work pays off.

Reader, it did not pay off. It was difficult to impossible to raise money for the organization. Once the philanthropic spigot ran dry, I knew that I had come to the end of the road. In 2020, I moved to Utah to be near family and to make a new start in middle age. But few employers were hiring during the pandemic. I sent resumé after resumé into the void, rarely hearing even a “thanks but no thanks” from the schools and city agencies where I’d applied.

One day, I was shopping at a chain supermarket a few blocks from my apartment when the old blue collar work ethic kicked in. The store employed dozens of people who punched a clock so that their neighbors could buy groceries during a public health emergency. Why shouldn’t I join them? Sure, I would have preferred a job that paid more and didn’t put me at risk of having my breath choked off by a virus. But wouldn’t everyone?

By the time I quit the job 13 months later, I was so determined to share what I had learned that I wrote a book. My store had been far more than just a place to buy groceries. It was a community institution where people accessed resources of all kinds. Customers logged into the Wi-Fi network while waiting in line, or they plugged their phones into outlets while using the restroom. Some left their bicycles near the checkout counters while they browsed the aisles, knowing that employees would keep an eye out. Locals moving out of their apartments came to the store in search of boxes. A Girl Scout troop sold cookies in the lobby.

I was also surprised to learn that customer service could be a genuine pleasure. One shopper stopped me in the aisle to ask which brand of granola to get from the dozen on display. I whispered, like I was sharing a secret, “You don’t want any of these brands.” At the bakery, I handed him a box of house-made granola. “This is the good stuff,” I said. The customer whispered back to me, sharing in the secret: “Thanks for the tip.” We laughed like old friends.

Staffers aided people with physical limitations, assuring that they could shop like anyone else. My colleagues and I accompanied customers in wheelchairs through the aisles, helping them reach items on high shelves. One day, an elderly woman became disoriented at the register. “I can’t find the exit,” she said. The customer lived in an apartment building two blocks away. She gripped my arm as I walked her to the door. “It’s terrible to be 92 and half blind,” she said. I complimented her for shopping without assistance and made sure she made it home.

This was the world of hard, underpaid labor mixed with friendliness and even compassion that I was immersed in when my acquaintance said she was sorry for me. I didn’t want her pity because I knew that there was nothing inherently demeaning about working in a supermarket. Employers had made it that way to enrich themselves at our expense. Cashiering let me in on the secret that cashiering is an important job in society, even if society doesn’t know it.

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Ann Larson is the author of the memoir Cleanup on Aisle Five: Essential Work, Poverty Wages, and the View from Behind the Supermarket Register, a cofounder of the Debt Collective, and a fellow with the Economic Hardship Reporting Project. Ann’s writing on education, debt, and low-wage work has appeared in The New Republic, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Fast Company, and The Nation, among other publications.

I am writing this from my dark bedroom on a Saturday night. I had several plans today with friends, all of which I cancelled because even the thought of another human interaction today seemed insurmountable.

I spent yesterday discussing an idea for a new series I wanted to start at my job at a major pediatric hospital, “LGBTQ+ Office Hours.” As the Outlook invite clearly stated, “This is not a committee or program, but rather a place for employees to gather and discuss all things LGBTQ+.”

This simple idea for a virtual gathering space was rated between an 8 and 9 on the risk scale to send out by a trusted colleague, which has me time traveling to the days surrounding the Stonewall movement in 1969 where it was illegal for “homosexuals” and people wearing clothes of the “opposite sex” to gather. But let’s understand how we got here in 2026.

I once held two titles at my current institution, one of which doesn’t exist at all anymore and one that only exists in title. The former was Co-Chair of LGBTQ+ DEI Subcommittee, which won the Excellence in DEI Award in 2024, and the latter being “Program Manager for Gender Care Services,” a role which landed me one of my institution’s most prestigious employee awards and a feature on their LinkedIn.

I say this one exists only in title now because there is effectively no “Gender Care Services” anymore. Despite being located in a state where there are no care bans, my institution decided to cease “prescribing gender affirming medications”—not to be confused with “stopping care for transgender patients” —a distinction which was very important to our legal team.

I was hired at the hospital in 2020, first as a Patient Navigator, then promoted to Program Coordinator, and now as Program Manager. When they hired me there were five distinct departments providing care to transgender youth, and they asked me to make them one cohesive program. I had ten years of lived trans experience at that point, but no professional experience in a hospital setting, so I spent a lot of time learning about departments, divisions, medications, insurance, and appointment types. But a majority of my day was spent doing intakes, which meant meeting with every new family and referring them to the services that best fit their needs. I was often the first person parents were talking to about their child’s experience and counseled many of them through the broad range of emotions that comes with a child transitioning. Together we navigated their grief, confusion, frustration, and fear. I also joined all their new patient visits and got to meet the incredible young people the parents had talked about. We maintained our relationship throughout their journey, following some patients for years of their transition.

I came into the navigator role with extensive community experience, previous professional roles at some of the highest profile LGBTQ+ organizations, and two masters degrees from an Ivy-League institution where I am currently working on my doctoral degree. For the first three years in my role, I was the only trans-identified staff member working in the gender care space. I gained a reputation early and quickly as knowing my stuff despite being the only non-clinical member (although if I had taken my licensure exam I could have been, as my master’s degrees are in Counseling).

But I served an important role at my institution outside of the gender care space as well, which was to be the general go-to person for any trans related query, whether employee or patient facing. I have gotten calls from about everything ranging from “We have a new employee coming on that needs their name updated in our systems” to “I have a family friend who has a trans kid. Do you have research I can send them?”

I have done presentations and trainings for almost every department of the hospital, spanning the in-patient unit to the call center. Was this written in my job description? No. But I did it because I had expertise and people wanted knowledge. And honestly, if people genuinely want to learn, I’m always happy to share information and resources. I have the utmost respect for the people at my institution who knew what they didn’t know, and asked someone who did. About three years in it became a running joke among my team and supervisors that I could have a full-time position with just the training I was doing. Any within-hospital trainings were unpaid, although I would occasionally get an honorarium for the external trainings with outside organizations, local pediatricians, or community mental health providers.

It was ultimately my “extra curricular” work that led to me becoming a co-chair for the LGBTQ+ DEI Subcommittee. It got to a point where people were asking the DEI committee to complete tasks, which would forward the request to me, so we decided to take out the middle piece and just have requests come directly to me as co-chair.

There was always a trickle-down effect, though. When the political climate grew too tumultuous for gender care or DEI, senior leadership (C-suite) would meet to make decisions, and then our designated C-suite member would meet with me to share what the decisions were so that I could tell my team.

Here’s the part where I’m going to comb very carefully through my brain to remember what exactly and precisely said “Privileged and Confidential”, and what was more of an unspoken “This stays between us” as I never signed a NDA.

When senior leadership realized they were now not only making decisions about a community they were not informed about, but the sheer number of patients this would involve, they finally acquiesced in meeting with me directly. Those months I was in constant meetings with my Leadership, Risk, Legal, and Communications teams. There were times during those months where every one of us in the circle cracked under the pressure and sheer exhaustion. But I only joined the highest management meeting once.

I remember where I was the day in July of 2025 that I had my regular Friday call with our C-suite member and they said to me: “We’ve decided to close the clinic.” What happened to me at that point in time was akin to the moments you see in movies where someone receives devastating news and time slows as the character hears no sound other than a loud ringing despite the other character’s lips continuing to move as they speak.

I was then afforded one gender care team member to work with in the next six weeks that the wheels spun into motion, and was forbidden from telling anyone outside of that. The people in my life saw that I was always working, that I was always exhausted, that I was always stressed, that I was being completely consumed by what was happening at work. They also noticed that whenever they asked me what was going on, I would simply say that I couldn’t say.

Three months after the “ordeal” of the closure had passed, my institution gave me the award. It felt cheapened for so many reasons, and every congratulations felt more like an insult. Some of the reasons were:

1. I knew that I had received a cascade of nominations (around 20 employees), eight months prior. They didn’t know that I knew, but I told the one person who did, “That’s very kind but they’ll never pick me. It’s too public.” The fact that they waited until after the “threat of featuring me” was gone made it feel more like a PR recovery strategy than actual achievement. “See, we support trans people!”

2. The very work I received the award for was no longer in existence. Even during my recording of a video feature, I had to record two different openings. The first with my title, and another that answered the prompt “How you would you describe your role if you didn’t say the words ‘gender care?’” (Do you want to guess which one they picked?) It was also very interestingly edited to remove any mention of what my “community” was, despite me intentionally saying that I was trans and mentioning my “trans community” about 100 times during the interview.

3. The initial “announcement” email they sent out wasn’t an announcement at all. It was a feature about one of our community partners whose sports event I had received tickets and took my dad to because he had been a longtime fan. The feature was entirely about the partnership (including the “Click here to learn more” button) with the words “Award Winner Attends Game” thrown at the top. It was only after carefully reminding them that I was asking to be treated like every other employee who wins this award that they sent out an additional email and posted me on their LinkedIn.

Only the consistent and caring reminders from colleagues and loved ones that I had given everything to my professional role and deserved the award allowed me to finally feel okay even putting it on my résumé or socials. Whenever I was tempted to hide it, I would go back and read the nominations they included that were written by those that truly knew me and my work.

I now exist in this liminal space where I’m employed still, but my role is a mere shadow of what it once was, an empty title with little to no power to effect change and help the people I’m supposed to be helping. All of the joy has been removed. Employees that were part of either the former DEI committee or gender care team are distraught, mistrusting, anxious, and feel unsupported. The happy days of watching a young person cry tears of joy when they get their first gender affirming medication are long gone, and I’m only called on now to address the constant influx of transgender youth who are showing up to the emergency room in crisis. While my heart absolutely breaks for these young people that think they are better off dead than here right now, I get it. What I want to tell them is: You are needed. You are loved. Please stay.

Speaking of staying, people have asked me for almost two years, “Why do you stay there?” My answer has always been and will always stay the same: “I will stay as long as I feel like I can still help.” But the decision was made for me. A month ago, I was informed that my last day as an employee at my institution will be June 30th, 2026. For trans people, it’s not always a loud exile. Sometimes it’s slow, painstaking removal, with trophies and awards as a consolation prize.

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As a trans person working in advocacy spaces for over 15 years, Friendly Neighborhood Tranpa has had the opportunity to share his experience on local, national, and international platforms. He has been featured in Emmy-winning documentaries and was the first out trans man featured in a major fashion ad campaign. His work spans across multiple industries, including academia, research, media, and healthcare. *The views and opinions expressed are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the author’s employer or any affiliated organizations.*

I’m not a sweet, young thing who would attempt a clichéd act of seduction. My demographic is middle-aged, and my get-up was less trench coat and thigh-high leather boots, and more black nylon poncho and-neoprene booties. Still, I was stark naked under my coat as I recently took an early-morning walk of shame.

It was my girlfriend who had encouraged the hobby that led to this out-of-character behaviour. “Just do it,” she said, followed by a dose of the kind of peer pressure that had me dropping acid with her in grade ten. “Everyone’s doing it. Celebrities do it. In my group we even take photos and post them in a group chat.”

Photos? This was supposed to be an incentive?

“I’m out,” I said.

“Agreed. At first it’s hard to get into it,” said my cool friend, “but once you take the plunge you’ll wonder why you don’t do it more often.”

Her enthusiasm prompted a little internet research.

Turns out I already had everything I needed. That is, unless I wanted some accessories to improve the experience—available, with a click of a mouse, to be delivered to my door in nondescript brown-paper packaging.

Proponents say it will cure just about any ailment. It’s supposed to boost mental health. It might lower blood pressure, decrease the risk of diabetes and reduce inflammation. It’s considered a workout. Apparently, all I had to lose was my muffin top. And, as I would learn, my dignity.

Whether any of the benefits are legit, one thing is sure. Athletes are doing it. Real professional and Olympic athletes. They do it all the time.

I’ve always wanted to be an athlete. I was sold.

But my pal lived far away, and I didn’t want to go solo. Nope. If I was going to dip into the icy (okay, cold) Salish Sea, I was going with a posse.

So I went online and found a cluster of cold plungers who meet at a nearby beach every morning at 7:45.

I bought booties and matching black neoprene gloves to hold my Raynaud’s disease at bay; Raynaud’s constricts my blood flow and turns my toes and fingers white and useless in the cold. My tender blood vessels seem to have inherited my hyper-sensitive personality.

I arrived at the beach at the appointed time, where eight other daring souls were clustered in the warming morning sun. The beach gave off the inviting musky, seaweedy aroma that smells like home to this West Coast gal. I followed the flock as they donned toques, disrobed to their bathing suits, and walked straight into the ocean.

Gasping, I crossed my arms tight to shield my chest from the frigid barrage. When my feet just barely grazed the pebbled bottom, I shivered and forced myself to breathe as everyone around me casually chatted.

Finally, at some imperceptible (to me) signal, the little gang turned and made for the shore.

I hunkered in that 51-degree water for five whole minutes—a triumph. That is, until I got to the log where we’d dumped our belongings. As my fellow plungers ducked under pricey swim ponchos to change incognito, I realized the impracticality of my terry beach towel. I’ll spare the details of my not-so-presto-change-o, but suffice to say my new friends have seen more of me than I’d been prepared to show on a first date. Thankfully someone had snapped the obligatory group shot before my Janet-Jackson-worthy wardrobe malfunction.

Early the next morning, any lingering humiliation had been washed away in the wake of my first full night’s sleep in a decade—a podium performance for this menopause-weary woman. Given the result, another plunge was a no-brainer. Still, I wasn’t quite ready to commit to the parka purchase, as I’d learned they can cost upward of $250. Besides, I had a black rain poncho I was sure would do the trick. I shoved it into my bag and headed to the beach. This time it was pouring. Only two other brave souls were waiting at the log. I undressed and followed them into the deep. To my surprise, the water felt warmer. Was I already an athlete?

Back on land, I smiled for the camera and ducked under my poncho. Unfortunately, it was narrower than I’d imagined, and the nylon was as inflexible as my frozen muscles. My newfound confidence floundered as I struggled to wriggle out of my sopping one-piece, finally flinging it into a clump on the sand. As I grabbed my bag of dry clothes, I noticed the other two women were dressed and ready to decamp but clearly too polite to leave me there exposed and alone in the rain.

“Having some issues?” said one, just barely holding back a snigger.

I took in her loose hoodie, sweatpants, and practical flip flops, then looked to the pile of workout tights, sports bra, socks and sneakers I’d brought. I knew I was sunk. I had barely gotten my swimsuit off; it would be all but impossible to tug any of those body-hugging garments onto my damp skin. So I held my head high, wrestled my feet back into the wet, sandy booties, gathered my stuff, and squish-squashed my way to the parking lot.

Ten minutes later, I sat in my driveway laughing as I peeled my bare thighs from the leather seat of my little hatchback, grateful to have made it home without being stopped by the police and arrested for public indecency.

Again, I slept through the night. I was hooked. Cold water immersion may not be the panacea proponents claim, but in our increasingly metaversed and cyber-isolated world, it feels great to start the day in community. Best of all, taking the plunge has forced me not to take myself so seriously. At 60, that’s a lesson long overdue.

My fancy new swim parka is scheduled to arrive at my door in its brown-paper package in three-to-five days.

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Kelley Korbin recently completed her MFA in creative nonfiction at the University of King’s College in Halifax, Canada. She is working on her first book, a reported memoir about medical assistance in dying entitled Exit Stage Rite: Lessons for a Brand New Way of Dying. Kelley recently jumped on the cold plunging bandwagon in her hometown of Vancouver, BC and finds her wet, frigid mornings to be a welcome and surprisingly social accompaniment to her solitary writing practice. She’s been published in the Globe and Mail, CBC, Chatelaine Magazine, Ski Canada Magazine and The Jewish Independent Newspaper.

Eventually, Ferrell’s exploits caught up with her, and she wound up on Utah’s most wanted list. Ferrell documents what her jail stint was really like, from prison riots and relationships to how she and her fellow inmates used what was available to them to decorate their jail cells, and themselves, turning towels into swans, using candy wrappers to make bouquets, and improvising makeshift makeup. She writes honestly and humorously about this time: “We made do with what we had to in order to make things feel a little more like home. I was like a law-breaking Martha Stewart. Oh, wait.”

In this episode of Finder and Keepers, Ferrell goes in-depth about having to part with her suitcase of possessions, how she adapted to the strict rules about which items (and how many of them) were allowed and which were restricted, the creativity fostered by that mandated minimalist environment, and how her relationship with her belongings changed once she was done serving her sentence.

Ferrell also discusses the reasons behind the often draconian rules about belongings behind bars, where even books are closely monitored, the dehumanizing intent of these restrictions, her prison reform activism, and the items she is now most grateful to have access to.

About our guest:

Kari Ferrell is a producer, writer, speaker, activist, and creator. Her work is centered around incarceration and the justice system, mental health, human rights, adoption, and other issues. Kari’s memoir, You’ll Never Believe Me, received a rave review from the New York Times, a starred review from Publishers Weekly, and was named a Goodreads Readers’ Most Anticipated Book of 2025. She is developing a scripted television program with Warner Brothers Discovery and Mindy Kaling’s Kaling International, and is the co-host of the Asian culture podcast Disoriental alongside Youngmi Mayer and Henry Bae.

Kari Ferrell’s website

Instagram: @hotdoghandjobs

Memoir You’ll Never Believe Me

Disoriental podcast

Finders and Keepers is hosted by Rachel Kramer Bussel and is a production of Open Secrets Magazine. Thank you to Sound Off Network and Dan Schroeder for audio production support. If you like the podcast, we’d greatly appreciate if you’d leave a rating and review wherever you listen to podcasts and tell your friends about it to help us reach new listeners. Want to share your own stuff story, tell us who we should interview next, or share your own most treasured possession? Contact us at findersandkeeperspod@gmail.com or leave a voicemail at speakpipe.com/findersandkeepers

For more about our attachments to our belongings, read the personal essays in the Object-ives and Stuff-ed sections of Open Secrets Magazine at opensecretsmagazine.com, where you can also submit your own essays.

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Things were not a thing in my house.

The emphasis was never on accumulating objects, but acquiring experiences. “Your house can burn down, everything can be taken from you,” my mother would say as she tugged my rambunctious hair into a ponytail. “But no one can steal your memories.” You would think I’d been raised by a wartime refugee, not a middle-class English teacher from San Antonio, Texas.

But from the time I could trace the topography of veins on my mother’s chestnut-brown hands, there was one object that transcended experience: a diamond ring whose shine was matched only by its size—2.36 carats. It is, as they say, a chonker. The ring is an octagonal cosmos of cuts and infinite angles. And it carries the weight of the women who’ve worn it through generations.

The story goes that my ancestors were minor royalty (my grandmother Gertrude got a kick out of saying she was descended from a German baron) before they were forced to flee, driven out by the mostly bloodless German Revolution preceding the establishment of the Weimar Republic in 1919. At least, this is what I’ve reconstructed based on family lore and the timeline of my maternal line’s immigration to America. Also, thank you Ancestry.com.

As my mother tells it, the family was tipped off by a “loyal servant” that a mob was gathering to ransack their home and, I’m assuming, do them physical harm. To escape, the women sewed jewels into secret pockets within the folds of their dresses and set out as if on a pleasant ride through the country. They never returned, heading instead for the coast, where they boarded a ship and sailed to America. The diamond ring is the last of this legacy, handed down from one woman to the next until, eventually, it came to me.

I feel the thick gold band with the tip of my thumb and think of my grandmother. Gertrude, or Trudy as she was called, lived through the Depression. Her mother died when she was 15, so she canned spinach at the Del Monte factory in Monterey, California to help feed her brothers. Yet she held onto this precious jewel that told her: You are still worth something.

I don’t know whose fingers carried this ring before my grandmother or how many women gazed into the blinding universe of its Old European cut. But I can feel them, sometimes. They are young, running through the woods on skinny legs, halos of unpinned hair glowing in sunlight. They are rough diamonds, raw and wild, until the world demands they be cleaved, girdled, polished, and inspected—the same process the rock on my finger went through to become something of value to the world.

Was my grandmother wearing this ring when, at 63, she picked up a gun and ended her own life? I don’t know. I do know she was in pain, both mentally and physically. I know she inherited a legacy that demanded resilience. I know each one of us is only so strong. And I know the weight of this ring rests more lightly on my hand than hers.

It was over dinner on my 40th birthday, more than a decade ago, when my mother passed the ring to me. Since then, it rarely leaves my hand. Some would save it for a special occasion, but I don’t believe it was carried this far and at such a cost to live its days in a small, dark box. No one’s going to put this baby in a corner. And, frankly, I need it. It’s the one object I feel naked without. My own personal ring of power.

My relationship with other jewelry? Strictly casual. Necklaces and earrings go AWOL on the regular, with barely a second thought or tear shed. Even my wedding ring is gone. But this ring remains well-kept and coveted until the time comes for me to pass it on.

When it does, my hope is that the next woman to wear it experiences less of the burden—and more of the beauty—than any who came before.

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Laura LeBleu’s life has always revolved around storytelling—either as an actor, a writer, or, now, as the founding editor of Geezer, a print magazine for Gen X. Bringing Geezer to life has easily been the most fulfilling creative achievement of her fifty-something years, and she’s thrilled to share this weird, soulful publication with fellow Gen Xers and the world. Find her at Geezermagazine.com and on Substack at @geezermagazine and @dandelioness.

Object-ives features flash nonfiction essays of 500-999 words on the possessions we can’t stop thinking about.

Submit your Object-ives essay

Recommended reading on possessions:

“Stuff I don’t want to own,” by

“Against Decluttering” by , Geek Out

“Decluttering Is How You Get Your Time Back” by , Marusya’s World

“Daughter surprises her dad with ‘prized possession’ he sold 30 years ago to help the family” by Heather Wake, Upworthy

When I first read Elizabeth Gilbert’s memoir, Eat, Pray, Love, like a lot of people, I thought it was about pizza.

Well, I thought it was about pizza and the agony of uncertainty.

Most people remember Gilbert on the floor of the bathroom asking God what she should do next. Or they remember her describing pizza as “sweet tomato sauce that foams up all bubbly and creamy when it melts the fresh buffalo mozzarella,” and then booking the next flight to Naples.

But I was wrong. Eat, Pray, Love isn’t about pizza or the agony of uncertainty. It’s about a woman who wants to be celibate for a year.

Similarly, I thought Wild, by Cheryl Strayed, was about grief or an attempt at escape from grief.

Again, I was wrong. It’s about a woman who is trapped on the Pacific Crest Trail without shoes. The loss of Strayed’s mother, her divorce and addiction, are all incidental to that story.

I don’t feel entirely bad about “misreading” those books because when I have asked groups of memoir writers what they think those two books are about, they largely throw out similar ideas.

Those themes for Strayed and Gilbert, uncertainty, grief…pizza, are what you might call their “ships hitting icebergs and sinking.”

Let me back up. If you’ve met me, I have probably asked you the following question: What is the movie Titanic about?

You probably answered, “It’s a love story!” or “It’s a story about a ship hitting an iceberg and sinking!” or “It’s the story of a person losing their mind and tossing a priceless blue diamond into the Atlantic for no reason!”

And then I’d go (in a Yoda-voice): “No. Incorrect, you are. It’s the story of a young woman who wants to leave her social class.”

Let me explain. When we think about narrative, some of the greatest ones take one single idea, say, the story of a young woman who wants to leave her social class, and then every narrative beat works in support of that desire.

As follows are some beats from Titanic’s narrative:

STRUCTURAL FIRST BEAT: A group of treasure hunters is trying to locate a shmancy diamond necklace that went down with the Titanic and brings onboard their ship the last woman to have seen it.

ESTABLISHING A NARRATIVE DESIRE: The woman reflects on her Titanic journey starting with the moment she sees the ship for the first time. When her mother admonishes her for trying to pick up her suitcases, saying, “Honey, we have people for that,” the young woman chafes visibly under the confines of her social class. There are rules and you have to obey them. Cue, a perfect Kate Winslet eye-roll.

CREATING TWO OPPOSING SYMBOLS OF THOSE SOCIAL CLASSES FOR TENSION: #1: The cool, handsome starving artist and #2: The rich, asshole, financier fiancé. Each love interest represents his social class. Are there assholes in steerage? Yes. Is Leonardo DiCaprio one of them? Absolutely not. If we switched and made the financier cool, it wouldn’t support a narrative about a young woman who wants to leave her social class.

Incidentally, a ship hits an iceberg and sinks. This beat also supports the narrative. It opens up a possible way for the young woman to leave her social class.

TO END: The young woman lives a life of freedom, outside of the confines of her social class.

BUT THE STORY ISN’T OVER. There’s still the necklace. It’s in her pocket which means the young woman, now an elderly woman, hasn’t really left her social class. The necklace, symbolically, is the social class from which the narrative is trying to emancipate the woman.

So what has to happen to support narrative? The woman must throw the necklace into the ocean, thereby officially leaving her social class.

Narrative desire is what Gilbert also employs in Eat, Pray, Love. Remember? The book about a woman who doesn’t want to have sex for a year? If you open that book to page one you discover Gilbert being dropped off outside her apartment by a handsome Italian teacher and really—and I mean really—struggling not to make out with him. The first line of the book? “I wish Giovanni would kiss me.” Followed by an inner struggle which I am paraphrasing: I must not kiss this person! I want to be celibate for a year!

The subsequent beats of that book similarly support this narrative. When Gilbert eats that pizza, she doesn’t concern herself with packing on the calories because she will not be getting naked with anyone, say it with me, for a year! When she arrives at the ashram in India, she takes inventory: Who might she accidentally fall into bed with? And so on.

Like in Titanic, Gilbert’s divorce, the subsequent uncertainty, those are incidental to the central desire of the book’s protagonist.

Strayed uses a narrative obstacle instead of a desire. She takes a young woman who is not a professional hiker, places her in the middle of the PCT, and immediately has her losing one boot and tossing the other. Her reflections on grief and loss are incidental to the narrative in that they serve to explain why she’s on that trail. But the journey the reader is on is to see how Strayed gets herself out of danger.

Just as Eat, Pray, Love starts with a woman trying really hard not to have sex with Giovanni and ends with her, after a year, having sex with a guy in Bali, Wild starts with a woman stuck in the middle of the PCT without shoes and ends with her walking off the trail.

Titanic starts with a woman wanting to escape the confines of her social class and ends with her leaving her social class.

We are attracted to the narrative equivalent-stories of “ships hitting icebergs and sinking” in our own lives because those are the big stories. The big moments. But often a story about loss or grief or whatever enormous inciting action complicated our own lives doesn’t work as well as the central narrative of our stories, because even if you frame them at the center of the narrative, that probably won’t be the story that would compel your reader.

Narrative desires, narrative quests, and narrative obstacles have another name. They are called a premise. They are the containers for your story.

Let me break it down this way. Say you want to write about the loss of your biological mother. You'll have to start with an inciting incidient. We all know that story. It’s a birth to her death story. There is no structure within that narrative. If you shift the premise to a different container, maybe you are six years old and you are at the playground one day when you can’t find your mother. And you want her, you really really want her.

1. You flash forward to the beats of your life where you pushed your mother away.

2. You literally write an entire book about not needing your mother.

3. Now you flash back to the playground. You have tripped while running around and now you are bleeding, elevating the stakes. Now you need your mother.

4. You jump to your mother getting sick.

5. Now we’re back on the playground. Someone else’s mother is talking to you but she’s not your mother and you describe how and why this other mother is lacking.

6. You flash forward to the experience of your own mother’s death.

7. But you end in a flashback to yourself on the playground, finding your mother.

That’s narrative. You want your mother. You find your mother. The death of your mother is incidental to the story premise.

My memoir, The Family Gene (Ecco/HarperCollins), came with its own narrative package. It’s a medical mystery. But for me, it’s the story of my dad’s death, it’s a story of my family gene, and even a story about the history of medical genetics described in Seventeen magazine language, like I call DNA base pairs, Brangelina and Beyonjay.

And although every single one of those things are in the story, they are my ship hitting an iceberg and sinking.

But my premise is a narrative quest for answers. We didn’t have a cure at the time for the people living with the gene in question, one that only impacted 14 members of my family, including my father, sister, and I, but we did have a plan.

So the story sets up our plan with one question about our gene: Can we stop it?

A story about social class makes for a smart premise for a film called Titanic. James Cameron’s Titanic was a ship that, it could be argued, was a metaphoric floating class system: Upper, where people wear uncomfortable shoes and say boring things in an English accent like, “Did you hear? The Earl of Sandwich put meat between two slices of bread and is calling it a sandwich!”; middle, where the porridge is too cold; and steerage, where people drink beer and dance 24/7.

But he could have just as easily written a story about a young woman who wants to escape steerage and make it to the upper class. In fiction, finding premise can be easier because you get to make it up.

But you can also do it in nonfiction.

In Wild, we have a sense that Strayed was feeling lost, so she got herself lost.

In Eat, Pray, Love, it’s established that Gilbert’s sex/romantic life has left her emotionally hungry, so she searches for nourishment in new ways.

Our infinite lives are filled with metaphoric ships hitting metaphoric icebergs and metaphorically sinking. And as writers, it is our job to figure out how to tell those stories in a way that compels our reader to turn the page, not as victims, but as active players who do our level best to avoid hot Italian men, eat pizza, and safely hike from one end of a trail to the other.

Which begs the question: Not, what is your Titanic, but what is your Titanic about? Whether you’re working on an essay or memoir, figuring out that answer before you start drafting will help guide you through the writing process.

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Joselin Linder is the author of the memoir The Family Gene: A Mission to Turn My Deadly Inheritance into a Hopeful Future and the founder of Prose Playground, a community of six hundred writers who have come together in support of other writers. This summer Prose Playground is hosting a three-month program called Launch Your Book to teach authors how to work with leading book publicists and media trainers; start a newsletter; write companion pieces; reach out to podcasts, book awards, grants, and TV shows; learn how to sell film/TV rights; and so much more.

What motivated Straub to get so extra with her offerings, an expansion from her previous swag? Partly, her past job working for the band The Magnetic Fields and seeing how eager fans were to buy merch, along with her bookstore experience, where merch has become more popular than she ever expected. Her history as a Blockhead (aka, a major New Kids on the Block fan) also played a role.

In this episode of Finders and Keepers, Straub discusses her past novels and their attendant swag, and why American Fantasy, whose research included attending a New Kids on the Block cruise, is different, why she loves stuff that represents her interests (and which NKOTB items she still owns from childhood), and the larger rise of BookTok and social media influencers on book swag and merch. You’ll also find out which New Kids on the Block member is her favorite and has played a role in the novel’s evolution. Straub also delves into the surprising role merch has played with regulars and visitors to Books Are Magic, thanks to the design skills of her husband, bookstore co-owner Michael Fusco-Straub, and why it feels good to express fandom of any kind by wearing it proudly.

Mentioned in this episode:

VistaPrint

The Magnetic Fields

Boybands Are Magic hat

Books Are Magic hat

About our guest:

Emma Straub is the New York Times-bestselling author of seven books for adults: the novels American Fantasy, This Time Tomorrow, All Adults Here, The Vacationers, Modern Lovers, Laura Lamont's Life in Pictures, and the short story collection Other People We Married. She is also the author of three picture books: Gaga Mistake Day, which she co-wrote with her mother, Mama Hug, and Very Good Hats. She is a Guggenheim Foundation Fellow and her work has been published in more than 20 languages. Emma and her husband own Books Are Magic, an independent bookstore in Brooklyn, New York.

Emma Straub’s website

Emma Straub’s Substack

Instagram: emmastraub

TikTok: emmastraubwriter

American Fantasy

Books Are Magic

Books Are Magic online merch store

Instagram: @booksaremagicbk

Finders and Keepers is hosted by Rachel Kramer Bussel and is a production of Open Secrets Magazine. Thank you to Sound Off Network and Dan Schroeder for audio production support. If you like the podcast, we’d greatly appreciate if you’d leave a rating and review wherever you listen to podcasts and tell your friends about it to help us reach new listeners. Want to share your own stuff story, tell us who we should interview next, or share your own most treasured possession? Contact us at findersandkeeperspod@gmail.com or leave a voicemail at speakpipe.com/findersandkeepers

For more about our attachments to our belongings, read the personal essays in the Object-ives and Stuff-ed sections of Open Secrets Magazine at opensecretsmagazine.com, where you can also submit your own essays.

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The attic is chilly in a cloudy New England spring, the sunlight almost grey. It is sometime in the early 2010s and I am standing in a sea of paper that fills most of the room, piled across the floor in boxes and bins and bags. Behind me, just beyond the door to the hallway, is a growing collection of big black trash bags only half-filled because paper is heavy and I’ve still got to move them down two steeply Victorian flights of stairs. The friends whose house I’m in are somewhere else, probably at work. That’s okay. I’m in their home as a guest for a week not so much to spend time with them—though that part is lovely—but in my guise as Psychopomp of Clutter.

I have given my friends this week as a gift, a birthday present to one member of the couple, in fact, partly because our conversations have let me know that they need some help and know it, but also because sometimes people can only tolerate being helped with a thing if it’s offered explicitly and without prompting by someone they already trust. I’m aware that for years, a range of Stuff has been shoved into the conveniently gigantic maw of their thousand-plus square-foot attic with a shrug of “this’ll do for now” and a vague idea that it’ll all get dealt with someday. One of the best gifts I have in my power to give is to be that Someday, so I stuck a bow on it.

I had seen plenty of attics like theirs before, and closets and cupboards and storage rooms and basements way too full of themselves, all junk and disorderly. I have certainly seen them many times since. Familiarity has not bred contempt but rather equanimity. I am neither appalled nor surprised. Stuff can get the better of people. This seems to be a constant of the human condition, at least in the stuff-filled high-consumption era in which we live. There’s nothing to be done for it except face down the results.

That’s what I’m doing up there in my friends’ attic, quickly assessing the contents of yet another box (utility bills from the 90s) and another bin (job onboarding materials from four jobs ago, vet records for a long-deceased cat) before consigning them to their big black trash bag. Before I head back home, a commercial shredding company’s truck will come park out front for a bit, noisily ingest bag after bag of paper via a hatch in its roof and drive off in a small cloud of its own confetti. My friends and I will also go to a nearby state park for a field trip involving a picnic area, a rusty metal grill, and the burning of a few things that deserve a pyre instead. For a solid week, a dislodging, space-making energy whooshes through the high-ceilinged rooms and up and down the staircases in my wake. It’s terrifically disturbing, in the original sense of the word.

Transition is inherently disturbing. You can’t simultaneously have things be different and have nothing change. That’s why I show up to these events the way that I do, cheerful as a border collie and as pleased to work, high-functioning and matter-of-fact. It’s why I’ll often take the time to ask what should become of an old half-filled notebook even though I could just pitch it, and why I’m calm when explaining for the ninth time that day that while one can always choose to keep a thing, one cannot always choose to keep all the things.

I am not a professional who goes in and cleans a place out. I am a psychopomp, a person who walks someone through the borderland between one sort of world and another. When I become the Someday the clutter gets dealt with, I’m showing up for people, not things. A space might get emptied a little more or a little less than I might find optimal. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that the space gets witnessed for whatever it is, and becomes more available to be whatever the people who live in it might need it to become.

Psychopomps are not judges. Their role, traditionally, is to shepherd someone between the land of the living and the land of the dead. Think Anubis, Charon, the Valkyries. The dead often meet a judge somewhere in the afterlife. “Psychopomp” is just a fancy name for a buddy system that gets someone through the walk between the known and the not yet known.

I have been dealing with the Stuff of people’s houses as long as I can remember, a girl child trapped between two domestic extremes. My mother was an unsentimental no-nonsense Midwesterner whose attitude toward hard household work was an uncompromising combination of “Okay, time to roll up my sleeves” and “This is one of the reasons I had children.” My father’s was a similarly uncompromising but far less viable mix of passive-aggressive demand avoidance and the credo “dealing with that shit is for dupes and idiots.” The divorce was inevitable.

At my mother’s, cleaning out closets and cupboards and neatly replacing their contents was a thing that happened once or twice a year, much like washing the walls and woodwork. Both were matter-of-fact processes, a little strenuous but not too bad. It looked nice when it was done. Every so often I would be taken somewhere as part of the all-female teams of relatives and friends who rallied when someone’s relative died or was forced into a nursing home and did the necessary. I turfed out musty sock drawers with mouse nests in them, scrubbed down bathroom grout with a bleach-dipped toothbrush until the mildew succumbed. At home, handwritten to-do lists in penciled schoolmarm cursive governed everything from my after-school routine to the proper way to use an old screwdriver to scrape weeds out of driveway cracks.

At my father’s, a frosting of dog hair and dirt coated most things, inevitably including me. The shower drain in the shadowy bathroom—burnt-out lightbulbs were only grudgingly replaced—backed up past your ankles, and somewhere in the murky soup swam something that brushed up against you like a drifting jellyfish tentacle now and then, so showering was terrifying. I might find ten pounds of potatoes rotting on the pantry floor or mosquitoes industriously breeding in the toilet in a little-used bathroom, and the only thing that kept the rotting garage from collapsing was the sheer quantity of crap crammed inside it. In out-of-the-way places, dried up, hard dog shit peppered the floor.

Whenever my father threw his back out, he’d use an empty milk carton as a urinal, setting it on his bedside table until it was full. I was sometimes tasked with emptying it, then putting it back in the little square marked by evaporated piss drips. Years later, as a graduate student, I would encounter the term “excremental assault” in Terrence des Pres’ searing An Anatomy of Life in the Death Camps, and think “Oh, that’s what that’s called!” The city eventually condemned his house.

The weekly transition between these households was rough, my mother’s bitter snarls on one side and on the other, my father’s relentless willingness to mock me as “prissy,” and “precious,” clearly a control freak like my mother. We shall draw a discreet curtain over the questions of why my mother kept sending me there so enthusiastically and why my father found it preferable to ridicule his child’s misery rather than, say, clean dog shit off the floor. The households of my childhood matter because what made me a psychopomp of clutter was the car rides from my mother’s driveway to my father’s. From the back seat of a car, I looked out the window and wondered: Which version of reality would I find behind the door of that house?

The households of my childhood left me unfazed by domestic disorder and completely equipped to deal with it. In college I was the person whose dorm room door people knocked on when they’d never had to do their own laundry and now they were out of clean underpants, and the person they’d ask to come help when a roommate’s debris field was overcoming the room. When someone I knew, on the eve of moving out of their off-campus apartment, suddenly realized that their dubious bedsheets, thrift-store kitchenware, and mixtape collection hadn’t miraculously packed themselves and all they had to pack them in was the end of a roll of kitchen-size trash bags, I got a call.

Every once in a while, it was something heavier, something harder: My father died, no one found him for three days, I have no money and my mother refuses to get involved, I have to clean out the apartment by the end of the month of the landlord’s gonna charge me for it plus an extra month’s rent. I had no money either. I took the Chinatown bus to New York that weekend, slept on a dead man’s couch, and learned the subtle art of sneaking dozens of bags of trash into other buildings’ dumpsters because this one was already full.

I get these calls far less often now. In middle age people either become less feckless or better at hiding it. They also tend to have more options for solving problems. But the people I love know this is something I do without hesitation or rancor. As our parents have begun to die off, my role has found new relevance.

At the point where I become the Someday the job gets done, why and how a household’s gotten choked on its own Stuff matter less than the bald fact that it has. Some cases are simply due to refused responsibility, just like good old Dad, but mostly that’s not it. There’s also disability and chemo and surgical misadventures that take years to heal. I know all too well the mire of depression and the heightened gravity of grief; in time I will probably share the compromises of age. In other words, sometimes people could have done much better than they did in dealing with their Stuff and sometimes not. The results are not so different. The need to fix it remains.

In myths, a psychopomp never asks whether the person they’re escorting could’ve prevented their own death. They just say “You are here; I will take you to your next destination.”

That destination, in my case, is a household with more space and less Stuff, a place where there is room to move around and do things easily and a person can find the things they already have instead of thinking, I’m pretty sure I already have one of these but hell if I know where it is, I’ll just order another. Getting there takes sorting and sifting, bending and lifting, finding things buried and forgotten and sometimes learning there was a reason a person never wanted to see it again.

A mixture of detachment and practicality is key, plus the ability to hoist a full contractor bag high enough to tip it into a dumpster. But brute force is a smaller percentage of what’s necessary than you’d think. It takes something else entirely to hold the memories and the regrets and to sit quietly with someone who is mourning all the people they thought they would become when they got that thing or this one and wow, those boots, what was I thinking?

It stirs shit up, the transition out of clutter and disorder. I know going in that there will be frustration, even anger, and once in a while it will end up right in my face. But why wouldn’t that be true? It’s my hands that are stirring shit up and my voice that is insisting, kindly and firmly but repeatedly, that so much of it needs to go. It is also my presence and my doings, no matter how sincerely I have been invited to be there and do them, that furnish the rough surface against which shame strikes matchstick after matchstick. They are ferociously reliable, shame’s matches, each one bursting into bright, hot flame.

Astonishment, apology. Sheepish laughs. Hugs. We crack open another box of trash bags.

In the intimate, sacred, mundane spaces where a person lives out the intimate, sacred, mundane parts of life, the Stuff they’ve brought in there with them becomes intimate and sacred too. “Dirt is matter out of place,” anthropologist Mary Douglas famously wrote in Purity and Danger. But a person’s Stuff, even when it holds a household hostage, is matter in its place. A badly Stuff-strangled home may be breathtakingly dysfunctional, chaotic, even unsafe. But presuming that everything you find in there is just trash is also unsafe. I can’t truly know what I’m sorting through and discarding when I toss old pickle jars crammed with Chinese-takeout chopsticks and sort drawers full of crumpled receipts and pocket change and pens. I try to be rigorous but also to tread lightly. It can be hard to know if I’m succeeding.

It is never not reassuring, at least for me, to beat back entropy a bit and feel something dammed and stagnant become something with space to flow. Even when I get scorched, it is never not heartbreaking to see someone I care about burn with shame. It is never not satisfying when someone I help looks stunned and surprised that after so long things are suddenly different, and maybe they like how that feels.

That is the shore on which leave those I escort. When I get back to my home—well-maintained, uncluttered, but scarcely immaculate—I’m tired and calm. I have gotten someone to a clear, open place where they can stand and get their bearings. I resume my life. They start whatever’s next.

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Dr. Hanne Blank Boyd is a writer, editor, and book coach and the author of a number of books including Fat (2020, Bloomsbury), Straight: The Surprisingly Short History of Heterosexuality (2014, Beacon Press), and Virgin: The Untouched History (2007, Bloomsbury). On Substack, she writes Reasons Not To Quit and Developmental Edits. She has some bones to pick with Marie Kondo.

Four years after my 14-year-old daughter died unexpectedly, I started tangling. I kept telling my therapist I should be “over it” by now. She disagreed. My brain, once organized and sharp, was tired of wandering. I wanted to be done. Maybe not “done” with missing my daughter but DONE with the brain-mess. That part needed to go.

I learned about the Zentangle^® method from a client. “It’s kind of like doodling, but with a more mindful approach. I think you might like it.” I felt called to go.

I was coaching execs through big decisions, volunteering for theatre at concessions and backstage, planning family vacations. My life kept moving. I did most parts well. Then I’d stare at an open space on my calendar, confused about what to do next despite the lists upon lists of things that needed my time. I wasn’t used to that.

I told my new tax person, “I used to be really good at math and for some reason, now I can barely add two numbers. You’re gonna have to be patient with me.” I hired an assistant because it took inordinate energy to schedule clients through the snarl in my brain. I couldn’t even read a book.

My therapist told me my brain had changed; it was real. “You suffered a trauma, Ellen. You’re right that your brain isn’t working as it used to.” I didn’t believe her. I asked if I could get an MRI to prove it. Secretly, I wanted to believe her. Then it would all make sense and I could cut myself some slack. I feared no one would believe me if I said my brain had changed when my daughter died. That sounded like an excuse.

The founders of the practice created it to bring calm and beauty to all. “There’s no right, no anything, just patterns,” a certified instructor said. Showing up on Sundays and Wednesdays gave me something to do, an anchor around which I could swirl, something solid to come back to through the week. Even when I told my therapist I didn’t know why I kept going, it moved from “something to try” to a calendar block I scheduled around.

It starts with gratitude, something I needed. Then, marks on the page—four dots in four corners of a 4x4 tile of cardstock. Those marks are just that, a start. When I felt stuck, I learned I merely had to begin. I didn’t have to do everything. I could start small. Breaking the blank page was sometimes enough to take me somewhere. On weeks I couldn’t even comprehend an email, I could make four dots.

We connect those dots with lines, forming a border around the tile. One teacher liked to inhale before she started drawing a line and exhale slowly as she drew it. Deep exhales did drop my shoulders. My therapist had been trying to get me to breathe more deeply. This was a magic door to her dreams.

Next we make a string, a simple swirly scratch or a few lines, anything that divides the square into smaller containers for tangles. Tangles are what it’s all about. There are hundreds of them. Small marks that don’t look like anything until they nest together when something beautiful starts to emerge. I had the sense that was happening in me; maybe if I could wander through the fog, something beautiful would show up.

One instructor started class by saying, “Whatever is going faster than slow, let’s slow that all down.” Her words were a permission slip for me, freedom to stop performing my A-game.

Zentangle’s motto is: Anything is possible, one stroke at a time™. That became true as I walked through grief. When I tangled, I learned to hold the card up and look at it from various angles. Perspective shifted. I saw things hidden in different views. Over time I recognized different expressions of grief in my living daughter and in my husband. An instructor said, “Every so often, pause to look at the big picture to see the beauty forming.” Yes, slowly, there was beauty forming in my smaller family of three.

Then shading: the shift from flat, two-dimensional drawings to 3D designs floating in space, optical illusions pulling me deeper into the craft. “Darkening the background helps us see the thing as it is,” my instructor said. That’s probably true about grief. I don’t know what I really am yet, though.

When the leader said, “We are never too far gone to get us back to center,” I softened. I wrote those words on the back of the card, wanting to remember. Maybe grief wasn’t pulling me away from every single thing I thought I knew about myself. Maybe it would drag me somewhere better. I could hope.

We finish the hour and I have a beautiful something that invites me to stare. I rotate the angles and choose my favorite. “How do you know it’s your favorite?” my therapist will ask. “I don’t know.” That answer is my brain’s frequent response when she wants to know about my body—how I feel. I still don’t know.

I put my chop, my initials to say I made this, at that favorite angle. It reminds me I’m a creator, not only a messy-brained mom, missing a daughter. We turn on cameras and share our work. That’s the final step: sharing and appreciating the creation.

After we close Zoom, I show my husband. He holds it. Turns it. Considers something new. I show my living daughter. She gazes deeply. Tells me she likes it—or not. They look at every square. In the middle of the chaos, they pause to see another version of me, one with a little less mess. A better version of what I used to be, emerging from the shading.

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Ellen Ranson Moore is a recovering executive and Executive Leadership Coach. She’s at work on a memoir, but not for an hour on Wednesdays and Sundays. She lives in Maryland with her husband and daughter and has 36 Zentangle tiles framed in her guest bathroom, plus hundreds more like breadcrumbs through her grief. @EllenRMoore

I was raised by magazines. As a child, nothing beat the thrill of the day’s new mail. The glossy sheen of the latest issue gleaming atop a stack of bills and coupons that bared little meaning to my adolescent mind. I’d pore over “spot the difference” spreads in Highlights and collage bedroom walls with celebrity crush-laden pages of Seventeen. I could rattle off the names of dozens of defunct titles I adored, but one subscription outlasted them all: TV Guide. A fresh issue was like catnip to my as of then undiagnosed autistic mind. The magazine was a highly organized, perfectly structured manual that aligned itself with my hyperfixations on pop culture minutiae. I couldn’t get enough.

After all, this was the 90s cable heyday and channel surfing was an art I had no mastery of. I’d randomly stumble onto a Lifetime movie of the week, one already halfway over, without knowing its title, or when it began and when it was ending. Or I’d catch a Nick at Night rerun of Bewitched with a special guest star whose name would forever elude me. Not knowing was beyond inconvenient. It was a maddening, meltdown-worthy frustration, one that could lead to brain-bending rumination and skin-picking fury. One which could be rectified by referring to that life raft of a magazine, the almighty TV Guide.

The gridded schedules of shows spoke to my needs for not only structure and routine, but also expectations and predictability. To know not only the lineup, but the exact plotlines of NBC’s “Must-See TV” Thursday or ABC’s family-friendly TGIF was a balm. Would the week ahead have a Kimmy Gimbler-centric episode of Full House? Was I stuck with a rerun of Seinfeld? Who was the musical guest on SNL, on the off chance I could stay up til midnight that weekend? I took solace in finding the answers in those perfectly packaged pages. It was more than a reference guide. It was a road map.

The annual fall preview issue was a behemoth. Double the usual length, filled with picks and predictions for the television season ahead in an age when the fall held real meaning and significance to the cycle of a show. Laden with splashy art deco graphics and a colorful layout, it marked a time of transition in TV that coincided with the start of a new school year. A season symbolic of new starts, one that could lead to surprise hits and inevitable flops for both the networks and me.

How I envied the treatment those shows got. If only my fall could have a “preview” reassuring me that I’d ace chemistry, like Frasier sweeping the Emmys, or that fifth period lunch wouldn’t be a social disaster tantamount to ill-conceived, short lived Friends spin-off Joey. I craved the power of critical prediction only America’s leading entertainment publication could provide to soothe my anxious mind.

Decades later, several issues still remain on my bookshelf, surviving moves from college dorms, first apartments, and an eventual home of my own. Each one is a reminder that no matter where I end up, I’ll always have a pocket-sized piece of pop culture nostalgia to guide me on my way.

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Jessica Gentile is a writer and librarian based in New Jersey. Her work has appeared in The Atlantic, Slate, and Esquire, among other publications.

Object-ives features flash nonfiction essays of 500-999 words on the possessions we can’t stop thinking about.

Submit your own Object-ives essay

Recommended reading on possessions:

“The “problem” of too many books” by , LIVING SMALL

“What an Heirloom Is For” by

“Take a picture. It’ll Last Longer.” by

“My Super Very Much Most Prized Possession” by , Super Very Much

Objects Quarterly Volume IX: Other people’s objects, litter assemblage, creative tools by , The Art of Noticing

First piece of art hung in new apartment (Note), , Room to Grow

“The Objects We Keep for Love” by Tammy LaGorce, The New York Times (via Objects Quarterly)

“I Tried the “Wheel of Chores,” and It’s the Smartest Decluttering Trick I’ve Ever Tried” by Lizzy Francis, Apartment Therapy

“Smartphones, Dumbphones, and Delusions of Platform-Building” by Maggie Mertens, Scratch

“Dmitri Young built a legendary card collection then sold it all — his tips for collectors” by Caleb Mezzy, The Athletic

Thursdays in my twenties were for poetry. After my workday as a teaching artist at a small arts academy ended, I’d flip a switch in my head and remove the idea of labor from my love of words. Those days were enjoyable, don’t get me wrong. Alongside a painter, I co-taught a weeks-long course on poetry and watched as my co-lead helped the students design a corresponding large-scale mural. On days I wasn’t in the classroom, I wrote every kind of arts review I was assigned as a freelancer, wrote for newsletters, sold chapbooks, and sold art, too. Every creative pursuit in my life, except for Thursdays, was about keeping my head above water while I worked my way through school. I was starving, exhausted, and stressed, but I was creating massive amounts of work, paid or not.

But no matter what, Thursdays were for poetry. They were for my own work with no expectation of production or profit. Those nights I’d stand on a stage and recite my newest pieces to a crowd of friends and community members or I’d nod and clap as I listened for a new source of inspiration. Thursdays were important for what they were and not what left the halls of the venue. This wasn’t networking for future opportunities. There were no donations or honorariums. I could have charged for custom poems, set up my chapbooks on the same table where someone else sold incense and oils, or spun those nights into a business, but I didn’t. Even when a group of us started our own offshoot and did readings around the city, no money exchanged hands. We did it for the love. I resisted making Thursday nights anything potable. I wanted those feelings, those connections, to stay right where they were. In those hours, with those people, with that version of myself.

For years, I kept up the tradition of Thursday night. No matter how many times the venue or the faces filling them changed. Even when I finished my degree. Even after a breakup that caused me to move out of town. I can’t say when the last Thursday occurred, but my best guess is sometime during graduate school. Those two years sucked the joy out of poetry. My voice never seemed good enough or my stanzas deep enough. I hunkered down and tried to fit into the box that meant I was serious and that meant Thursdays were a waste of time. But I didn’t just lose my voice and my confidence during those years, I lost the thing that made me happy, that made me curious and excited to sit down and play around on the page. That change cost me my third space, too.

Those nights at the open mics were full of friends who loved me and people I wanted to know. We crowded at tables and in booths facing the stage. We’d cheer for the poets making their way to the mic and shout out favorite poems for them to recite. For those few hours we were detached from expectation and most responsibility. It didn’t mean those things ceased to exist. What it meant was that this thing, this open mic, was wholly ours.

There were those who tried to turn our collective into profit by hosting events where people had to dress up and pay a cover charge, where guest poets not in the fold were brought in and paid to be “professionals.” Those events had some success, I suppose. But we always came back on Thursdays with no cover charge, no hierarchy, no faux importance. I miss it dearly. I’ve lamented the death of my third spaces. I’ve lamented the death of any true hobbies I’ve had. At some point in the many years since graduate school, hobbies and third spaces became just another thing on my to do list. A hobby became another skill to master and excel at. A third space was a way to make connections with seemingly little competition and at least some common ground.

Now on weekends, I hunker down at my desk editing or writing or responding to requests and messages. I don’t venture out to work at a coffee shop or a co-working space. I don’t make an effort toward community. I end up working a full eight hours or more hidden under the guise of passion. Don’t get me wrong. I am passionate about writing. It’s built into the very fiber of my being, but far too often recently that passion has been pushed out by production.

On my Instagram stories one day I groused about how I’ve sucked the fun out of writing. Long gone are the days of me crafting fanfiction for nothing but pure joy and the comfort of being in community with people who felt exactly the same. I’m still innately curious about the craft of writing, but fun has been swallowed up in word counts and deadlines. If I could just get back to the joy, I muse, all would be in order. But that’s a lie. Fun can’t be just another tool. It needs to stand alone. If I think about getting back to fun with no other thought, I know what comes next. I’ll find a bit of unstructured joy for a little while until sooner than later fun will be nothing more than a trope that I try to squeeze myself into.

Nothing has ever truly replaced Thursday. I’ve joined writing groups and attended retreats. I’ve painted and gotten into photography and reupholstering furniture. But a common thread has always popped up. Those writing groups and retreats, no matter how great, always eventually circled back to producing new work that I wanted to sell and publish. And the photography and painting and refurbishing were good too, but I wasn’t a master at any of them and so eventually the pursuit of those hobbies, and the communities that came along with them, ended up being about excellence and perfection and sometimes competition.

I haven’t found the balance yet. The one between feeling like I’m making the best use of my time and doing something just for experience or the pleasure. I still approach my hobbies like an excited little kid, wanting to shout, “Look at me!” For validation. For community. For fun. I find myself in the midst of posting on social media about what I’m doing, where I am, then backtrack. I ask myself what I’m hoping for. Is this sliver of my life just for me or is it for public consumption? What am I yearning for? An algorithmic boost? An ego stroke? A way to show I’m more than what my feed already conveys? So I end up deleting the half-baked drafts and then obsess about them until I finally settle on keeping things to myself or for the physical or virtual third spaces I’m trying to curate.

Some things are worth sharing but in a small way—personal or intimate. And even if I’ve yet to fully reconcile what I’m looking for, what’s important is that I recognize the yearning for these connections and activities just as much as the need for them. Because those are two different things, right? One is the catalyst to seek out something to hold in your hands or your head. Something weighty that can anchor you when everything around you feels out of control or out of reach. The other is recognizing that something in you requires more in order to thrive.

Maybe I need to find an open mic. I know they have to exist in Philadelphia. The arts scene was one of the things that drew me here and I’m already in the orbit of so many great writers. It’s been years since I’ve written a poem, even longer since I’ve performed one on a stage. I can’t imagine myself walking into a reading and making my way to the mic on day one. It would be like the first time I attended a poetry gathering in undergrad. I’d linger at a back table, nervous and hoping I don’t look like it. There’d be a notebook open in front of me and a pen between my fingers. I’d be planted in that seat, afraid to scrape the chair across the floor or clear my throat.

And if it happens like last time? One of those poets wouldn’t care that I was shy and would take a seat next to me to chat until I came out of my shell. Maybe that’s what I need—a blank space to rebuild something new and the clarity to hold it close.

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Athena Dixon is the author of essay collections The Incredible Shrinking Woman and The Loneliness Files and her work appears in publications such as Harper’s Bazaar, Shenandoah, Grub Street, Narratively, and Lit Hub among others. She is a Consulting Editor for Fourth Genre and the Nonfiction/Hybrid Editor for Split/Lip Press.

Because Nick was so detailed in his pitch, we’re going to share the heart of it here:

“There’s an incredible amount of fiddly equipment, multiple rods (I don’t keep count of mine, because it’s scary), reels, lines, tools, apparel, etc. And that’s not even counting tying your own flies, which entails a mini-Michaels-level commitment to buying threads and fur and feathers and hooks and all sorts of new sets of tools to start a little cottage industry devoted to making more gear for yourself.

The average fly angler spends $1,200 a year on gear, and that’s not even starting to count all the hand-me-downs from parents and aunts and uncles.

If this is at all interesting I’d love to explore this with you. I think the broader themes are:

a) Buying stuff as a fantasy and substitute for actually fishing, e.g. I can buy a $120 fly line today, and get a fantasy of fishing, even if I only ever fish with it once or twice months from now, or even if it never leaves the closet.

b) The notion that limited experience in the sport (i.e. I only go fly fishing for one week a year in Belize) induces a sort of “must have everything to be ready” mentality, which is a kind of weird inverse scarcity mindset, an acquisition pattern that’s fear-based, versus “eh, we’ll figure it out, we don’t need to bring everything”. I’ve heard this described in survivalist circles as “Two is one, one is none.”

c) Competitive aspects tied to being “the best.” When I used to go to Montana every summer growing up with the Michigan Fly Fishing Club, there’d be two informal prizes: Top Rod, for who caught the most fish, and Top Wallet, for who spent the most money. The same sort of acquisitive mindset that drives people toward quantities of fish catching drives them to consume more gear.

d) A “horses for courses” false need for precision tools based on mostly industry hype. Golfers can have one set of golf clubs that work around the world, at every golf course, give or take a few clubs. But I’m told I a different rod / reel / line setup to fish for trout in the Catskills, salmon in Newfoundland, bass in Oregon, musky in Wisconsin, carp in Oregon, etc.

I’m interested in this because a younger generation of anglers are re-evaluating this over-acquisition pattern, fishing the same sorts of spots closer to home rather than going abroad, and there have been subsequent industry moves to think more sustainably about all this.”

We get into all of this and much more in the episode. Whether you’re an experienced fly fisher, curious about finding a new hobby, or just want to hear about a sport where people can spend large amounts of money before they’ve even gotten started, we hope you enjoy this conversation with Nick Parish.

About our guest:

Author, editor, and angling educator, Nick Parish has helped dozens of people to catch their first fish on a fly rod. Born in the Great Lakes state, worked in a series of media jobs at the nexus of the Hudson and East rivers before heading west to the Columbia River drainage and greater Cascadia. He leads fly fishing instruction at Portland Community College and writes a weekly fly fishing newsletter at Current Flow State.

Current Flow State weekly newsletter

Essential gear guide

Instagram: @currentflowstate

Bluesky: @nickparish.bsky.social

Finders and Keepers is hosted by Rachel Kramer Bussel and is a production of Open Secrets Magazine. Thank you to Sound Off Network and Dan Schroeder for audio production support. If you like the podcast, we’d greatly appreciate if you’d leave a rating and review wherever you listen to podcasts and tell your friends about it to help us reach new listeners. Want to share your own stuff story, tell us who we should interview next, or share your own most treasured possession? Contact us at findersandkeeperspod@gmail.com or leave a voicemail at speakpipe.com/findersandkeepers

For more about our attachments to our belongings, read the personal essays in the Object-ives and Stuff-ed sections of Open Secrets Magazine at opensecretsmagazine.com, where you can also submit your own essays.

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In 2022, I got paid for the first time in ten years when I was hired to teach a four-week “How to Podcast” adult enrichment class for my city’s community education program. During the first session, I showed a dozen eager adult learners how to record a conversation. I fairy dusted podcast knowledge all over my students until one of their hands shot up like a canister vacuum attachment, ready to suck up all of my sparkles.

“Yes, John?” I knew everyone’s name because I studied the registration list ahead of time.

“How do you bleep out a swear word?”

Fuck! I could import audio tracks, fade out theme music, and edit “um”s. But I didn’t know how to bleep. On the smart screen behind me, my cursor fumbled through menu options. The audio editing software I demonstrated was called Audacity, as if a patron saint of insecure community education instructors dramatic irony-ed the name. My shimmery confidence faded into matte insecurity.

“Uh,” I intoned, covering up my experience void. Then I showed John how to cut out a swear word. But John didn’t want a work-around. He wanted to throw a tonal blanket over a swear word, not eliminate it. Leaving profanity in a recording with a bleep on top can be funny, dramatic, and useful to the story, like a tiny toupee balanced on a bald head. I promised to show him next time.

Before the second week of class, I added a new visual aid to my slide presentation about how to bleep in Audacity. Then I recorded a few audio samples to play for my class. While I created my podcast curriculum, I gleamed with professional satisfaction glitter. Teaching adults to DIY their own audio was the perfect convergence of all of my life experiences. I earned a library science master’s degree in my twenties and taught database research workshops when I worked as a reference librarian. In my thirties, I developed active listening skills and infinite reserves of patience while parenting my three kids. Plus, I had co-hosted a hobby podcast with a friend for several years.

I wished it was a bigger job with full-time hours, but it was the only job I could get. A decade earlier, I became a stay-at-home mom, intending to spend a handful of years as a full-time caretaker to my children when daycare for three little kids cost more than my take-home pay. I thought I’d get to pause my career until they reached school age, then hit play right where I left off.

But careers don’t start and stop as easily as podcast episodes. In 2019, when my kids were all in elementary school, I applied for reference librarian positions, but my applications stalled in HR screening. Library bosses didn’t equate parenting with work. Even though I worked hard. All the time. Domestic labor never ends. My failure to finesse my unpaid activities into a bulleted simulacrum of a professional position dragged my thin resumé beneath the surface of the job candidate pool. Then, in 2020, the pandemic and distance learning drowned my fledgling search for a full-time job.

I got the part-time community education teaching job because it required a proposal, not a traditional cover letter and resumé. My submission included an outline for a four-week class and some sentences about my podcast. As for my lack of audio editing expertise, I didn’t lie about my qualifications. I just didn’t know what I’d need to know to teach podcasting. Maybe it was silly to worry about losing a job that paid me for just two hours per week. But it wasn’t the money that I was working for; it was the title. Having a job let me call myself something besides stay-at-home mom.

When it was time for the second class, I wondered what other questions my students might ask that I couldn’t answer. The media center’s shelves of graphic novels and picture books mocked my unemployability with their colorful earnestness, accentuating my inability to land full-time library work. I worried that my students would complain to my boss, who would realize that I was an audio engineer imposter, not a real professional. If he fired me from my consolation prize community education job, I didn’t see how I would ever get paid to work again.

My students liked the bleeping lesson and I regained some shiny self-assuredness. Then Margie raised her hand.

“How do I monetize my podcast?”

Ad revenue and sponsorships? Teaching the class was the only way I ever monetized podcasting. When I divided my wage by the unpaid hours I spent preparing my course objectives, lesson plans, visual aids, and handouts, I only earned nickels per hour. I told Margie about the non-monetary benefits of podcasting. How podcasting, for my co-host and me, was a fun way to spend our limited free time. Like most independently produced podcasts, we didn’t have enough download numbers to join a distribution network. But our recording schedule helped us stay in touch with each other while living in different cities, gave us a space to vent about our kids’ media use, and improved our ability to speak and joke extemporaneously. I promised Margie a better, more lucrative answer in next week’s class.

Before the third class, I made a robust slideshow about content creation and revenue. I didn’t want to feel like a phony, undeserving of my paycheck. Even if it was barely enough to cover a fraction of my family’s weekly grocery bill. Working so many hours for so little money felt like an inverse calculation to how, ten years earlier, I had decided to quit my librarian job and become a stay-at-home mom, rather than keep a job I didn’t like very much and spend my entire salary on daycare. Even though the takeout dinner I bought to feed my kids on the nights I taught podcasting cost more than what I earned from teaching, the paycheck wasn’t the point. I didn’t need to turn a profit on my time investment. The title was enough to make me work hard to keep it.

For my family, it made financial sense for me to stay home. But because there’s no status in domestic labor, I felt compelled to keep pursuing paid employment. Back in my twenties, when I was formulating my feminist identity, I bought into the idea that I needed to get paid for something other than housework and childcare to be taken seriously. I felt bad about being a stay-at-home mom not because I disliked parenting, but because I compared myself to my peers with distinguished and impressive job titles. While I was supporting my husband’s career as the primary parent in our family, my neighbors and friends earned tenure, made partner, and published books.

If we lived in a society without misogyny, with gender equality, with societal support and affordable childcare, I could have weaved in and out of paid employment to full-time parenting and back without being punished by a resumé gap or unemployment stigma. But instead, I had a hard-won, two-hour per week job that covered up my stay-at-home mom shame like bleeps hide profanity.

Before the last class of the four-week session, I pulled open the heavy school door. My boss stood in the hallway. With a clipboard.

“Can I talk to you?” he asked.

He must have discovered that I was a hobbyist without any ad revenue. A podcast poser. An unemployable former librarian. What would I do if I couldn’t say “I teach podcasting” anymore? I would have to go back to mumbling, “I’m just a mom.”

“I want to check on the winter session schedule,” he said. “Can you teach the class again? Everyone’s loving it. This will give the waitlisted people a chance to take it.”

A waitlist! With that kind of demand, my class would remain my class. I looked forward to hearing more student stumpers in the next class. The more hard questions I encountered, the better I got at responding to them. I could keep teaching the class! Maybe, someday, I’d even feel fully qualified. I added the winter semester dates into the calendar app on my phone, then skipped up the stairs to the media center.

I wished all the employers who’d rejected my librarian job applications could see how hard I was willing to work, how nimbly I learned new skills, and how deftly I taught them to other people. But was it work? Was I working working? Teaching podcasting took me away from my real full-time occupation—managing my household and parenting my kids. Teaching podcasting was definitely not work in the conventional making-a-living sense. I didn’t commute or get a hefty ACH deposit. Teaching podcasting, however, gave me a glinting confidence boost. It wasn’t diamond-level sparkle, or even costume jewelry gleam. It was a mirror-encrusted, dollar-store party favor version of a job. And I loved it.

Teaching podcasting made me realize that, for me, work isn’t really about money or time. It’s about dignity. I wish that being a full-time parent could be considered a real job, but it’s not, so “I teach podcasting” became the bleep that covered up my professional disappointment. It was a little noise that disguised my decade-long caregiving career break and all of the domestic labor that made me worthless in the conventional job market.

At the end of the fourth class, I flipped to my carefully prepared last slide, happy to wrap up the class, feeling like a low-paid, very part-time, back-to-work success story until Joanne raised her hand.

“How about theme music? What do you know about copyright law?”

Shit. Bleep!

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Deborah Copperud is a writer and podcaster in Minneapolis, MN. Her work has appeared in Current Affairs, Glamour, The Rumpus, HuffPost, Open Secrets Magazine, and other publications. She co-hosted the It’s My Screen Time Too podcast for seven years and independently produced the Spock Talk podcast in 2023. With degrees from the University of Minnesota and University of Wisconsin—Madison, she has worked as a reference librarian and has taught for Minneapolis Public Schools Community Education and The Loft Literary Center. She recently launched the Read Minnesota Books podcast.

No new hobbies! I already had too many projects. The cuff of a sock dangled from my knitting needles, a stretchy T-shirt waited to be seamed, an essay begged to be finished, and a piano part required practice.

But then, three years ago, I needed a birthday gift for my adult daughter Elizabeth, and I remembered a cute crossbody bag pattern I’d spied on Facebook. Everyone was making it. The slim, classy beauty looked perfectly modern, useful, and wearable.

Despite my oath to forego new hobbies, I bought the pattern to try it. I bought the hardware. I bought canvas for the body and leather for the flap. When I discovered trendy webbing, I bought that too, for the straps. This is not a new hobby, I told myself. I’ll make one bag, stuff $100 in the cute little zippered pocket, and return to my other projects.

I gave it to Elizabeth, and she loved its hook closure, multiple compartments, and, of course, its bonus bills. She slung it across her chest and used it every day for both work and play. Her friend Kassie admired it, so when the holidays arrived, I made one for her. Kassie’s friend Stephanie liked it too, so I made one more.

With each new bag, I experimented. Nickel shouted modern and hip. Bronze said antique. Woven webbing spoke boho. Making artistic choices satisfied my creative instinct, and thinking about a potential recipient added to the joy. What started with one bag morphed into a collection and became the hobby I didn’t think I needed.

I explored designs and bought patterns for larger totes. I sourced fabrics and linings, and soon oodles of purses and bags dangled from hangers in my closet.

Was my unintended hobby now an obsession? What would I do with all these bags? Years ago, my family stopped exchanging holiday gifts in favor of family time and shared meals. But when my sister-in-law made a festive dinner, I gave her one as a hostess gift. And when my niece brought me a present from her travels, I gave her one too.

Elizabeth discovered my stash of bags and said, “Oh, they would be perfect for the symphony orchestra raffle!” I gave her three.

Why couldn’t I abandon this new endeavor? What kept drawing me back to my sewing machine with new ideas for one more bag? Perhaps it had to do with where the bags ended up.

I’ve said for years that I should do more volunteer work. My only acts of charity are blood donations and participating in rallies. With my new hobby, generosity felt more accessible. I could work at my own pace, without uncomfortable tourniquets or harsh partisan politics. Each bag required thought, time, and energy, but the real satisfaction came from imagining who would receive it.

My other hobbies—sewing, knitting, piano, writing—benefitted only me. With a few hours of work, I had a new T-shirt, a pair of socks, a piano piece to play, or payment for an essay. Bag-making, however, turned my attention outward. When sewing for a specific person, I thought about their style. What colors do they like? Are they practical or romantic? Do they tend toward minimalism, or enjoy big and bold? Once I gifted the bag, my reward was watching them enjoy what I had made.

A few months ago, my cousin hosted a gathering at her house, so I brought a bag for her. Last week, Elizabeth picked out three more for this year’s symphony raffle. Eventually, each bag has found a home.

But what happens when everyone I know has been given a bag? Will I stop making them? I peeked at a favorite website last night, noticed a new design that would be perfect in linen and leather, and thought of a friend with that aesthetic. Now that bags have wrapped their way around my life, I realize giving one gift is nice, but two or three could be better.

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Nancy Jorgensen is a Wisconsin writer, educator, and musician. Her essays appear in HuffPost, Business Insider, Next Avenue, The Offing, River Teeth, Wisconsin Public Radio, and elsewhere. Her most recent book is a middle-grade sports biography, Gwen Jorgensen: USA’s First Olympic Gold Medal Triathlete (Meyer & Meyer). Find out more at NancyJorgensen.weebly.com

Slippery Soap, a character from Blue’s Clues, still lives on the edge of my bathtub. He is smaller than he used to be, worn down from years of use, his lavender color faded and his edges rounded smooth. My son is college-aged now, but if I pick his figure up with wet hands, he still slides easily along the tub, as if motion is his natural state.

When my son was three, baths were hard. He was afraid of the tub, but he was even more upset by what came after. When the tips of his fingers wrinkled in the water, he panicked. He didn’t like how his fingertips looked. He didn’t like that his body changed without warning. Each bath ended in distress.

So I made up the Wrinkle People.

The Wrinkle People, I told him, only came out after a bath. They were shy and kind and only appeared for a short time. They lived in the wrinkles at the tips of his fingers and disappeared as soon as the skin smoothed out again. The only way to meet them was to get clean. If you waited quietly, they would come.

I kept my hands in the water while he bathed so the Wrinkle People would visit me too. At the end of each bath, I lifted my son from the water, wrapped him in a towel, and we waited together. When the wrinkles appeared, we touched the tips of our fingers together. I told him how lucky we were that the Wrinkle People had come for both of us, that they could feel connected, that they were part of our family too.

The problem was getting him into the tub in the first place. My son loved Blue’s Clues. He watched it closely, memorized it, acted out all the characters. Slippery Soap was his favorite. He would imitate him, shouting “Whoa!” when things slipped or fell. I noticed this, and I followed it.

I bought the little Blue’s Clues bath toys so Slippery Soap could come into the tub with him. Slippery Soap was how I got him into the water at all. We both knew Slippery Soap loved baths. I gave him a voice. Slippery Soap slid along the porcelain, shouting “Whoa!” when the water splashed. He needed company. He needed a friend. He knew about the Wrinkle People and could help us find them.

Once my son was in the water, the conversation began. My son talked to Slippery Soap. Slippery Soap talked back. “Whoa!” my son said. “Whoa!” Slippery Soap answered. I kept my hands in the water the entire time so the Wrinkle People would visit me too.

Baths stopped being a battle. Slippery Soap did his job quietly and well. The Wrinkle People came and went. My son grew older. The rituals changed.

Slippery Soap stayed.

Years passed. My son found new ways to move through the world. He learned how to stand on a stage, how to listen and respond, how to trust timing and instinct. He is now enrolled in a comedy improv B.A. program at Columbia College in Chicago. I don’t trace a straight line from Slippery Soap to where he is now, but I know the Wrinkle People belong to that story too.

And to tell you a secret, sometimes even after all these years, when I’m sitting in the tub, I pick up Slippery Soap and softly say, “Whoa,” just to remind myself of all that we’ve been through.

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Nettie Reynolds is an essayist and playwright based in Chicago. Her work explores caregiving, family life, and the quiet rituals that shape how people learn to live with one another. She writes personal essays about attention, adaptation, and the ordinary objects that carry memory. Nettie is finishing her MFA in Creative Nonfiction through The Sena Jeter Naslund-Karen Mann Graduate School of Writing at Spalding University.

Object-ives features flash nonfiction essays of 500-999 words on the possessions we can’t stop thinking about.

Submit your Object-ives essay

Recommended reading about possessions:

Ode to a wax cherry gift by , AFTER/WORDS (Note)

“Your Kids Will Inherit a Beautiful Archive of a Childhood That Never Happened” by

“Five Ways I Remember My Mother” by , Bite-Sized Storytelling Boost

“Family Stuff” by , The Loneliest Places

“What I Really Want for Mother’s Day is a Tray” by , Our Amagansett House

“The Art of Gifting Thoughtfully” by , Folded Napkins

“I paid $1,000 to get my house under control” by Julie Kling, Business Insider

“The perfect shopping day in New York” by and , The Scumbler

“Isabel Allende and Her Mother Told Each Other (Almost) Everything” by Anna Martin, The New York Times’ Modern Love podcast

“Lost and Found in the Subway: Dentures Galore” by James Barron, The New York Times

In our conversation, she talks about her lifelong relationship with miniatures, what drew her back to the hobby during the pandemic, and how humor and tiny things turn out to have more in common than you’d think. Note: This interview was conducted in spring 2025.

Here’s more of what you’ll find in the episode:

1. The past has a way of finding you again

Sara’s obsession with miniatures started in childhood, where she used to play with her sister’s dollhouse. Around age eight or nine, she got her own dollhouse and spent years collecting miniatures but, over time, she became too busy, though the dollhouse lived with her for her whole life.

But then, in 2020, she and her partner downsized, and she was finally forced to deal with the crumbling childhood dollhouse she’d been carting around for decades. Instead of tossing it, she decided to renovate, and that’s when something cracked open inside her.

Within months, she was building miniatures from scratch, opening an Etsy shop, incorporating tiny scenes into her standup show, and launching her YouTube series. That falling-apart dollhouse she couldn’t bring herself to let go of was the gateway to a whole new facet of her career.

2. Removing the audience changes everything

Sara has spent her career making people laugh via everything from live storytelling shows to standup specials to late night TV and Emmy Award-winning writers’ rooms. She knows what it feels like to perform and be judged.

Miniatures, she says, feel nothing like that: “I feel way less pressure doing miniatures than, say, writing or being funny because I’m just doing it for me really, and there’s no audience.”

That freedom is what lets her voice come through most clearly. Without the pressure of a live room, she started making things with actual social commentary, like a miniature murder board complete with string and thumbtacks, and a tiny comedy club with hand-framed headshots on the wall. The audience, or lack thereof, gave her the opportunity to dive deeper than she would have been able to otherwise.

3. What we can’t let go of tells us who we are

When Sara moved cross-country, the question wasn’t just what would fit in the moving truck, but also what was too important to risk losing forever. For her, the answer was a handmade quilt sewn from her late mother’s clothes.

That same instinct that kept her from throwing away a ruined childhood dollhouse has her saving every padded envelope to reuse for Etsy shipments and still holding onto miniatures her sister owned before she was born.

These collections are about so much more than the objects themselves, but what they’ve meant to her, and what they might become someday in another form.

Tune in to this week’s episode to hear about this and much more!

About our guest:

Sara Schaefer is a critically acclaimed stand up comedian, writer, and artist. Her Comedy Central Stand Up Presents half hour special debuted in November 2019 and she was the co-host of MTV’s late night show Nikki & Sara Live. Sara published her first book, Grand, in 2020 with Simon & Schuster. She has written for numerous television programs including Who Wants To Be a Millionaire, The Mark Twain Prize for American Humor, Would I Lie To You, and The History of Swear Words. She won two Emmy awards for her work at Late Night with Jimmy Fallon. In recent years, Sara’s satirical sketches have been viral hits, and The New York Times called her new solo show Going Up “ambitious and nimble” and “a feat of comedy.” Her new show, Crafting Through It, debuted on YouTube in 2025.

Sara Schaefer website

CraftingThroughIt.biz

Miniature making tutorials

Instagram: @saraschaefer1

TikTok: @yaysaraschaefer

Facebook

Online shop

Crafting Through It YouTube show

Finders and Keepers is hosted by Rachel Kramer Bussel and is a production of Open Secrets Magazine. Thank you to Sound Off Network and Dan Schroeder for audio production support. If you like the podcast, we’d greatly appreciate if you’d leave a rating and review wherever you listen to podcasts and tell your friends about it to help us reach new listeners. Want to share your own stuff story, tell us who we should interview next, or share your own most treasured possession? Contact us at findersandkeeperspod@gmail.com or leave a voicemail at speakpipe.com/findersandkeepers

For more about our attachments to our belongings, read the personal essays in the Object-ives and Stuff-ed sections of Open Secrets Magazine at opensecretsmagazine.com, where you can also submit your own essays.

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All Finders and Keepers episodes

Read our Object-ives essays

Read our Stuff-ed essays