My Archives

As any of you who've moved in recent years can attest, we keep a lot of useless junk.  In the past few days as we've prepared to move, I've thrown away reams of receipts, tape recorders, a knee brace, a pretty ugly beer stein, and some really hideous gifts (yes even the ones that we were keeping in case the giver ever showed up at our house), and files and folders of documents that were kept in the event we ever needed to reference them.  We never did.  Ever. 

We gave away several seasons' worth of clothes and boxes of cookware and other kitchen items that we kept for that fancy dinner party we thought we'd someday host.  Closet after closet, box after box of stuff I haven't used, needed, or even seen since it was stowed.  And now I have to spend endless hours sorting through the detritus of my life.  It's gotten to the point where I have begun to loathe my material possessions more than I do that orange-faced John Boener.

And yet, amongst the boxes piled high with dust on remote closet shelves are a few hidden treasures.  I've managed to keep about ninety percent of the personal mail I've received since I was about seventeen years-old: letters, cards, wedding invitations, notes, and postcards.  I have several shoe boxes of photos, the actual printed kind that came from something called "film" from high school right up to the present digital era.  I lost a lot of valuable packing time today sifting through those photos, which as per my lackadaisical filing system were in no particular order and thus compelling for the mystery that awaited me in each sleeve of images.  

Like a time warp, I'd whisk from a summer drunkenly cavorting on the Lower Cape to the nervous time my nephew was unexpectedly born two months early to an impromptu ski trip in Aspen with three people I haven't spoken to in ages.  I was also heartened by the many photos of people I still call friends.  Randomly selecting a picture or two from each envelope was like playing "This is Your Life" only with no large television audience and no one but me interested in the details.  I showed a few pictures to my wife who indulged my affection for the life I led before we met.  She was naturally more engaged in the pictures that featured her.  There was a whole packet of photos from a holiday party of the restaurant I worked at in grad school.  I hadn't thought about some of those co-workers since, well, probably the last day I worked there.  And yet, I still couldn't bring myself to throw those pictures away.

I like to fantasize that one day some graduate student working on their dissertation will sift through all my pictures and letters and put together a story that's far more grand than the life I really led.  Or maybe some aspiring writer will comb through my belongings and find a compelling tale to write, something that will portray me in an honest - and but hopefully not too honest - light.  I imagine my son reading the notes and cards sometime after my passing and discovering sides of his dad he couldn't have begun to imagine.  And yet, I know that for all the troves of personal effects there is much that can't be put together in the way that it truly occurred.  Having lived the life reflected in those pictures and words, I don't even know all the reasons behind the sequence of events.  And we all know that our own interpretations of the Who, What, Where, Why, When, and How of life is colored by what we want to be the truth and that the truth itself is ultimately someone's interpretation anyway.

To me, the worst part of keeping all this stuff isn't the schlepping of it from city to city, the burden of its physical weight, or the hours lost in revisiting it. It's the knowledge that keeping it is ultimately something to feed my ego.  The ego exists to place you at the center of the world (a world, by the way, that is fast approaching 7 billion people - to say nothing of those come and gone and those yet to arrive).  It's only natural to want to save the mementos of life, almost as a way to prove that it all happened and that it meant something, if only to you.  But it's also so patently self-indulgent, an attribute that is easily despised, if only in others....

What will become of the archives?  Perhaps I'll sift through them again one day, perhaps in retirement, maybe even organize them chronologically.  And then I'll make flash cards so that when my memory begins to fade, I can make myself insane trying to recall why I thought it was so important to keep all this stuff in the first place.