Our town issued each resident a rolling tall recycle bin. Somehow we ended up with two that are emptied on a biweekly basis. Plus the green one for trash that is collected every week. Because of a trip to Maine, we missed one recycle event. It ended up we were clearing stuff from the basement and the boxes and now useless paper scraps filled both blue bins to capacity. The absence of any real work schedule has made it easier to chuck old files. I even found a syllabus from 1993 that I decided I could now discard. But it had to wait until this Friday morning because there was no room at the bin. Saturday, I returned to the basement and making considerable progress with again filling the bins.
Some stuff has to be kept. Now I could probably scan in the old photos of me with Cleveland kids, or with four nieces and nephews on my lap (now all high school graduates) and even before that, photos of my adult Boy Scouts in Illinois. And since some pictures were a little stuck together, it would make good sense for me to spend a day converting those to an electronic format.
Otherwise, when I'm in the retirement home, I'll have no way to recall what color kerchiefs the men in uniform wore nor how cute and innocent the third graders were at the time. I also found a small moose antler and a jester's hat in gold, green and purple … a great deal of junk. Even random pages from an old Far Side calendar. If I don't decide what gets trashed, those dispositions will be determined by some other force, either human or mildew.None of these feel like cares and woes. But it is strange to find bits that remind me of experiences I might have otherwise never recalled. I'm not sure whether those reminiscences are valuable. Truly, it's more of a curiosity to stumble across, for example, the list of words distributed during a conference Buzzword Bingo game. Again, nothing profound or revealing. At best, it confirms I was here and maybe indicates that I can appropriate the eulogy offered by Frank Turner: "But on the day I die I’ll say: “At least I fucking tried!”, and that’s the only eulogy I need."
