Goodbye to Yesterday
The crushing sound was more than I could bear and I had to look away.
I hadn’t expected a demonstration of the compacting ability of the garbage truck when I rented a Dumpster to dispose of things saved over most of my life. I thought they would just quietly haul it away and tenderly lay it to rest after a respectful ceremony.
But it was inevitable. Catherine and I knew we would be moving someday. And downsizing is what you’re supposed to do when you reach retirement.
So now we are going through our vast collection of stuff and parting with things we always believed to be invaluable. That’s what happens when you have an attic large enough for floor hockey and a basement large enough for basketball. Stuff accumulates. I was saving it for my presidential library. (Mom told me that anyone could become president and she was right.)
The kids don’t even want the things we saved for them. Who wouldn’t want their baby shoes and art projects they created in elementary school? Nope, no place to store it and who cares?
But going through everything was literally a revisit of our lives. I had saved everything from Kindergarten art projects to high school reports, to college and grad school books, notes, and papers. I saved textbooks that weren’t of any value the minute the courses were completed. So now I had the privilege of carrying them from the third-floor attic to the Dumpster. I even found the steer’s head I made in Mr. Lecy’s 8th grade woodworking class. I’m saving that for show and tell at our next class reunion along with a list of 9th grade football plays and a mouth guard.
For me, the toughest thing to go through was my photography work. Through many of my teen and early adult years I took an enormous number of pictures. It was really cool getting those great shots and printing them in the darkroom. Photography differentiated me and few people really got into it because back then it cost a fortune to buy film and get it developed. Working for the R-E and getting your pictures printed in the paper was an additional success. But while they bring back memories for me, they are just old grainy black and white photos now and of no interest to anyone else.
Then there are the negatives and slides. Catherine had painstakingly catalogued thousands of negatives over the years and I threw them out with some camera equipment and even a couple unused flash cubes still in their container. I’m keeping the slides to scan them in. I don’t need the negatives because I can scan in the prints. Today you can take a thousand pictures in an afternoon and send or post them to the world and it won’t cost anything more than your time.
Then there are the cassettes, VHS tapes and LPs. Gone. But what about the many sets of baseball cards my brother-in-law said would be really valuable some day? And the Twins memorabilia from their two World Series wins? It’s mostly just cardboard for the recycling bin.
We still have a lot to go through. Thank God for the Salvation Army. And don’t get me started on furniture.