Another Great Move-In cranks up in Boston this week. Fifteen U-hauls on every two-block stretch. I have no choice while I am stuck in traffic but to watch the parade and think.
It seems that for our first seventeen years we hang things up on our walls or put them on our shelves because they are cool, or funny, or inspiring. Some are memories, some are reminders of who we think we are, or want to be. A ticket stub from the Red Sox game with your Dad smiles from your bulletin board. A blue ribbon from camp. A vintage photo of the Dalai Lama on your bedroom ceiling demanding that you think different
The calendar page from the day your braces came off. Old scratch n’sniff Barbie stickers. Tattered posters of Jimi Hendrix, or Kurt Cobain, or Dale Ernhardt Junior. Jars of pennies. Our shrines. It is all about us.
By the time you’re ready to pack up for the freshman dorm, the biggest logistical crisis is not the truck rental, but how you are going to move the entire Pez dispenser or Hello Kitty collection … Simpsons figures … Transformers … plastic dinosaurs … miniature porcelain rabbits. How to move the posters without wrecking the corners? I have to take my cool stuff with me because it is who I am. True, I am going to a shared room the size of my third grade lunchbox, but my cool stuff has to come along. It will tell people who I am, so I don’t have to until I am ready. 
Then soon the next step is an apartment somewhere, paying way too much money to live in way too little space with way too many people. Once again, the walls are bare and waiting. Five or six roommates have a lot of cool stuff, and soon the apartment has a jungle-theme in one room and a casino motif in another. The refrigerator door is covered with crazy stuff. Nothing quite matches. It is dirty. Empty pizza boxes. Empty bank accounts. But it is still all about them.
Then, an unfortunate thing happens. The next apartment, a serious job with a regular paycheck, a step up the ladder, and we start to think about creating impressions. We watch HGTV. Study Pinterest. Read decorating magazines. Paint the walls in grown-up neutral colors with names like Weimaraner. We buy fake ficus trees. We buy framed photos of sea shells and trees. The beer cans are replaced by chrome and glass martini sets. We order glass coffee tables, miniature Eiffel Tower paperweights and leather-handled letter openers. Reproduction French vermouth posters. We shop from chain stores and catalogs. The shrines of individuality morph into formulaic tableaus of hip young things, carefully arranged. The big jar of bottle caps turns into trendy matchbooks. Everything has become quite tasteful. Beige. Bland. Boring. Blending in. Welcome to Apartment G, for Generic.
Exceptions do exist. One young woman I know has managed to grow up graciously while keeping a firm hand own her personal style. True, she owns eight pairs of black pants and spends way too much on sunglasses and tattoos. But she holds on tenaciously to the value of surrounding herself with meaningful images and objects. Yes, she bought a poster and had it framed. But it’s from the culinary school she went to for pastry making, and when she finished she had all her teachers autograph it with a big fat black magic marker.
There are thirty-two likenesses of Benjamin Franklin arranged under the glass top of her Pier One coffee table, with the adoration of her personal hero further celebrated by a large and lovely kite
suspended from the ceiling. Every night her wallet and cell phone get plunked down on a shelf made from a piece of driftwood she found on the beach in North Carolina. Above it hangs a small square collage made from every key she’s ever had. A continuous line of pink index cards, each with a handwritten quote, is neatly tacked around the dining room at chair level, so that anywhere you sit there are words and thoughts ready to provoke conversation. She uses old bandanas for napkins, with no two the same color. The painting over her mantel of four-and-twenty-blackbirds-baked-in-a-pie was a graduation gift, done by her ten year-old stepbrother. Each room is filled with the things that define her, make her feel happy, safe, fulfilled. It is all about her.
Can you say that about what’s in your U-Haul?