As part of the whole, moving back in to the house and getting rid off all our crap, exercise in frustration and tedium my wife and I have agreed to get rid of the excess mementos we have collected over the years.
Old Playbills, ticket stubs, thank you notes, notes thanking you for the thank you notes and so on. My lovely bride, G*d bless her heart, is a total freak when it comes to that stuff. She saves every little scrap. So when she agreed to the clearinghouse she was really making a commitment.
On the other hand I know that most of the crap is hers so I haven't been taking the whole process very seriously. At one point this morning she became irate with me because I hadn't thrown enough stuff out.
"I have thrown out eight bins of my stuff and you haven't even cleared out one. EIGHT!"
To which I replied "I only have two total."
"That's not the point," she rebuffed "and that's not true, you also have two bins of computer crap"
At this point I will stop my little narrative and begin to spend some time analyzing.
Unlike my wife I don't have a rich social life or intricate network of close friends. I have a few very close friends and lots of acquaintences. I have very few mementos. I don't have much in the way of childhood, adolescent, teenage or collegiate memories or memorabilia.
For the most part my formative years were not my favorite. I didn't really start to enjoy life until I was in my 20's. Consequently, going through the bins of yesteryear isn't particularly fun or enjoyable. Depressing is probably the most applicable adjective.
Reading old correspondence and looking at pictures just re-hashes unpleasant memories.
All the loss. All the betrayals and hurt. All the forgotten promise.
There are certainly little gems. The love note from a high school girlfriend letting me know that her mother was excited that I might be a son-in-law, although she was concerned about the religion of our children. How adorable.
There were the senior wills, the list of stuff you bequeath to your fellow classmates upon graduation. Knowing me as you do you have to be wondering about my entry. I willed to the staff and administration of Lebanon High School "A bullwhip and chair because those tools may be more useful in taming a social misfit like myself than the your current methodology of detention and suspension."
I was always snarky.
I also re-discovered my adolescent dribbling. The literary magazines, school newspapers, creative writing assignments. Some of it is still quite amusing in a "to know me is to love me" kind of way. If you're lucky I'll share some of it with you.
Getting back to my original point...Digging through this stuff isn't enjoyable and it is really beginning to give me a headache.
And my two boxes of non-memoribila don't count. Those are for the computer museum I am building in the basement.
Currently I'm listening to Bring It On Home To Me (1965) from the album "The Complete Animals CD 2" by The Animals
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