Response to: E.B. White: "Good-bye to Forty-eighth Street"

In “Good-bye to Forty-eighth Street”, E.B. White reflects on the trials of moving house. He begins the passage by explaining to the reader that he has “for some weeks now” been “engaged in dispersing the contents of” his apartment. White discusses that moving house is not an easy task. He and his wife have been meticulously spent evenings trying rid themselves of unnecessary, for lack of a better word, junk. He tells an anecdote about a man who came to purchase some of he and his wife’s many books, only to leave their home with what seemed as “as many books as before, and twice as much sorrow.  E.B. White then moves on to talk about his tactic of clearing out. Every morning, as he left for work, he would try and take one item away with him, just to have his wife explain that “a man could walk away for a thousand mornings carrying something with him to the corner and there would still be a home full of stuff”. The author goes on to defend, or explain, his hoarding by discussing a man/woman’s connections to trophies or awards, and is essentially unsuccessful at parting with some of his more useless accolades. White moves on to explain how he had at one point come to the conclusion that they should go on a trip, to leave the woes of purging behind. They plan a trip to the Fryeburg Fair, in Maine, where White came close to purchasing a heifer. In the final words of his essay, White reflects on his time left in his apartment on forty-eight street. He speaks of the people he will miss, his very own “cast of characters” that would walk down the street every day, and how he will yearn for the garden in back and the animals that inhabit it.

When it comes to packing, I am a disaster. About three weeks ago, I packed up my life eight hours away, put it into boxes, and moved to Oklahoma. I can honestly say, packing was one of the most stressful times of my entire summer. I spent three days sorting out all my clothing into piles and staring at them. What do I bring? Do I need this? Will I ever wear this? Should I just throw this out? It was awful. I do not consider myself an indecisive person. Usually, when it comes to decision making, I am fast and sure of myself. When my mom took me shopping for dorm items I picked out a comforter set in the first ten minutes of being in Sears, and I stuck to it. I am not disappointed in it one bit. I saw something I liked, it was affordable, no second guessing here. But it was the personal stuff that got me. I asked, “Do I bring my student council shirts from high school?” and “Which photos of my friends do I print off?” As I read E.B. White’s essay I could feel exactly where he was coming from, because that was me three weeks ago. The indecision, yet desire to just have the task complete was something I could entirely connect to. I also knew exactly what he meant when he decided some time off from the apartment would do him and his wife some good. While packing myself, I constantly found reasons to go hang out with friends or go get ice cream, because I just needed to take my mind off of the looming piles of clothes stacked on my bed at home.

While reading Good-bye to Forty-eighth Street, there were moments when I found myself disinterested from the reading. In retrospect, the anecdote about the state fair makes sense to explain White’s burning desire to avoid his situation, while reading I felt a large sense of confusion. I feel as though the story within the story may have gone on a little too long and distracted from the point of the essay. I would love to ask the authors opinion on his own writing and see if, in a look back, he could explain the significance of the entire flashback. The essay did, however, leave me wanting more: Did he pack up a lot of unneeded junk? Did his wife throw out his ridiculous trophies? ( I would have). And please tell me he said farewell to that “chip of wood gnawed by the beaver”. More than anything, I just have questions about this point in the man’s life, so I guess his essay did its job.