Archive for June, 2003

I was hunting for the user manual of my old fax machine today. I couldn’t find it on any of my bookshelves, so I decided to look in some boxes that I hadn’t unpacked since we moved into our house nearly three years ago.

While I was rooting through those boxes, it occurred to me that I could just go ahead and sort through the stuff as I hunted. So the search for a manual became a trip down memory lane.

I found an odd assortment of bits of my life in those boxes:

* Papers, some important, most not. Old address books with filled with people who used to be my best friends but whom yesterday I couldn’t even have told you their names. Photos of Tiamo in her puppyhood and of family in younger days.

* Definitely dead, nonrechargeable batteries. Definitely dead, rechargeable batteries.

* Small toys, such as action figures, a pocket-sized kite, and a foam frog. Accessories that came with those toys that I don’t want but never could bring myself to throw away.

* Paperclips. Lots of paperclips, plus some screws, nails, and safety pins. I have a lot of things that need holding or fastening, I guess.

* A 25-pin gender changer. (Extra points if you know what that is.) A microchip. I’m sure it did lots of cool things and that’s why I kept it. Read/write heads and one platter from a disassembled hard drive.

* A slingshot. BBs for the slingshot scattered at the bottom of the box.

* Things I kept because they were important at one time but not now, such as a piece that broke off of a long-gone printer.

What do you do with all the flotsam and jetsam of your life? Do you just throw it out and not look back? Do you box it up and go through it every decade or so? I doubt I’ll ever need this stuff. But even as I threw out 90% of it today, so many memories came rushing back that I just couldn’t bear to let go of all of it. So I boxed some up again (four boxes consolidated into one) and put it back in the closet.

I wonder who is going to go through all that crap when I die? I hope nobody thinks they need to. Maybe I should put a note on those boxes:

“Sentimental crap that you don’t need to go through.”

However, that would be a red flag to my family that something juicy is in there and they would paw through it anyway. Of course, all they would find is sentimental crap that they didn’t need to go through. On the other hand, wouldn’t that be the ultimate practical joke?

Oh, that manual? I finally found it at the bottom of the fourth box.