Reflections on a Bobblehead

Cleaning out sixty years of my predecessor’s accumulated stuff from my latest rectory was a matter of triage: what could I clean and use, what could I sell on eBay, and what should go in the 40-cubic-yard dumpster I quickly filled to overflow.

One item that went immediately into the eBay box was a bobblehead from the 60s: a generic NY Giants football player, number 00, kitschy, smiley boy face, with an odd coin-shaped hole cut into the underside of the base as if it had been repurposed as a bank or attached to something else. Sports memorabilia can be worth money. I didn’t give it another thought until the time came to sell it.

First, I had to photograph it from every angle, reveal every flaw for honesty’s sake. That required a fair amount of focused attention. Then, I had to look at those photos several times a day as I tracked the progress of the sale. For some reason, I found myself becoming fond of this plaster toy, although I am not a football fan and have strangled any urge to collect anything as I have grown old cleaning out other priests’ hoards. That silly face charmed me. I started calling him “little guy” in my head. He — I mean “it” — sold for five times more than I expected. And as I wrapped him — IT! — carefully for shipping, I was feeling these little pangs of something like sadness at parting. But why?

And then it hit me. I had just such a bobblehead on my dresser as a boy of 7 or 8 or 9. I’m sure it was a Mets player and I suspect it was a gift from my father. Like so many things I have owned over the years, I have no idea what became of it. I don’t recall particularly treasuring it, but it was there, right next to the hairbrush, the butchwax and . . . the statue of St. Patrick that my mother bought for me in the Medical Center gift shop in the early 60s, while my father was upstairs visiting his mother, who would never be coming home, and whose apartment he had just combed for mementos and documents.

I did treasure that statue. I conflated Patrick with my Duffy grandfather, whom I never knew, and with my own identity as Irish and Catholic. That statue was still on my dresser when I cleaned out my mother’s house in 2013 and, in one of those manic moods that possess me when I have to work through clutter, Patrick got smashed into unrecognizability (out of respect!) and relegated to the dumpster. After half a century of living as a Byzantine Catholic (by choice, not by heritage), there was no place in my devotional life for statues. Or so I thought.

Maybe five years later I was at it again, cleaning out the absolute hoarder hell left by my parochial vicar. A clinically compulsive buyer of books and religious articles, he had crammed away in the corner of an overflowing closet a plaster Patrick, not nearly as fine as the one I had loved and trashed, in fact missing the hand that would have been pointing the snakes toward England, but Patrick nonetheless. This one I spared, guiltily, and he now presides from the windowsill in the basement office of the townhouse to which I will retire, God willing, and from which my heir will have a much easier time disposing of my earthly goods.

Although my relationship with each was different, the bobblehead and the bishop point together to a truth about raising children and building identities. I still call myself a Mets fan although I have only been to two live games and haven’t watched one on TV since 1987. I am a Mets fan because my father was, because he raised me to be one, and the bobblehead and a series of caps and even a warm up jacket in seventh grade were all his gifts. It had been important to him to pass on to me one of his greatest loves. Both my parents also fostered my awareness of being Irish and Catholic, and I gravitated much more eagerly to that identity from my earliest childhood. St. Patrick on my dresser was part of that casual, domestic process of tradition.

Those two plaster images were abiding, formative presences in my daily life, always there, simply part of my little patch of significant reality. Would we do a better job of raising Catholic kids if we populated their world more intentionally with objects that bespeak our faith, objects they could grow used to, even fond of? Things that might make them feel nostalgic (even guilty!) enough to think about returning to Church at 30 or 40 or 50? Things their heirs might decide to treasure, or at least to question before tossing them along with the Tupperware and the throw pillows?

The pangs I felt for the “little guy,” that bobblehead I sold to help pay my new parish’s bills, are complicated — nostalgia for my childhood, for a lost innocence, for a simpler time, perhaps a bit of long-displaced grief for my father. Such a once-cheap toy helped make me who I am. I’m glad someone thought he — IT! — was worth $51.00 plus shipping. I hope the new owner realizes just how powerful a bobblehead can be.