In preparation of a move in four short weeks, Steve and I are throwing away vast quantities of crap.
IKEA furniture that can't suffer another move. Gone.
Four Boy Scout uniforms that Steve's mom lovingly wrapped in paper. Gone.
A box of baseball trophies from 1979. Gone.
4 boxes of folders of xeroxed articles with notes and underlines used for two dissertations and intended for use in VERY IMPORTANT scholarly books. Gone.
It's surprising how little we care about this crap that has occupied our home for seven years. We even found one box of stuff that was never unpacked when we moved here seven years ago. Why have we kept all this crap?
We're definitely in a tossing-out sort of mood. Really, all I need in life is my contact case, my iPhone, and the kids. Can't toss out the kids. They have laws. I don't even need my computer, because everything – pictures, address book, drafts of articles — is backed up in virtual space.
However, in the midst of this mad pitching frenzy this weekend, I came across one box of old letters. Back in the days, children, people wrote letters to each other, instead of texting. Phone calls cost money, so chums didn't have long chats on their cellphones on the way to the Freshman college classes. They wrote letters.
I saved every letter that people sent me and wound them up with string. I briefly waded through the box of old letters yesterday. Should I pitch them or should I send them back to their owners for laughs? I have letters from my artsy friend, Sue, who sent me funny notes about getting nearly thrown out of Harvard. Her doodles on the margin later appeared on the cover of Harvard Lampoon. I have letters from a friend at West Point detailing the ways that he got around the mandatory drug testing.
I also found at the bottom of the box two letters from a girl who later died at Lockerbie. She was a couple of years younger, so I perhaps too casual with our friendship. She sent me long letters as I went off college, but I was too distracted with college festivities to maintain our friendship. Three years later, she took a flight to Europe for a college travel program and never came back.
Her family still lives in the area and I spent the weekend wondering if I should track them down and send them the letters. Would they be happy to see a snap shot of their daughter, who they lost so long ago, or would it open old wounds?
The letters are sitting here on the desk. I still haven't decided what to do. They feel like a horcrux, but a good and honest one. There's a bit of the girl's soul in those envelopes.
Those letters did put a damper on the mad pitching-frenzy this weekend. I sealed up the box of letters, along with some old diaries with three pages of writing in them and a photo of The Who. They'll make the move with me.
Apt. 11d 
One of the best surprises I received last summer were two notes I had written to my friend Beth, one when I was 13 and another from when I was about 16. They were so embarrassing, I laughed so hard I cried as I read them to Pesto. One of the notes I wrote said, “Party naked”….really? I think to myself. That’s what I wrote? I say SEND THEM 🙂
LikeLike
“Her family still lives in the area and I spent the weekend wondering if I should track them down and send them the letters. Would they be happy to see a snap shot of their daughter, who they lost so long ago, or would it open old wounds?”
As long as there’s not too much “I hate my mom,” send them to her mother. The problem with people who die young is that all too often, when they’re gone, they leave barely any trace at all.
Go minimalism! (Although I think the use of electronic media allows us to cheat quite a bit.) I’m currently plotting to pry a borderline hoarder in my family away from her stuff, and I think one of the nicest things you can do for the younger generation (aside from paid college educations) is to keep your stuff under control.
LikeLike
“The problem with people who die young is that all too often, when they’re gone, they leave barely any trace at all. ”
Yes, my thought too. You could send a note saying that you were moving house, and found notes from their daughter when she was in high school, and ask if they would like them. Then they’d have the info, and could decide for themselves whether they want to respond or not.
I believe in minimalism in theory but fail in practice. Electronic storage helps a lot. I suspect it also means that it helps survivors (a lot easier to throw away a hard drive than a bundle of letters that have been touched by hands). I try to remind myself that information is only useful if it’s been effectively archived, but fail when I can’t get over my fantastical belief in the value of data, even the most minute.
bj
LikeLike
I still have all the letters from my first year of college. Such a great laugh.
I agree with BJ. Track them down and ask if they’d like them. They would likely be incredibly touched.
LikeLike
I agree with Amy, the worst thing about someone dying young is that there is so little that remains of them. Additionally, I think there is nothing worse for a parent than to believe that others have forgotten their child (after death).
I know that I would treasure something like those letters and also the knowledge that my child had not been forgotten by the larger world after their death.
LikeLike
“I try to remind myself that information is only useful if it’s been effectively archived, but fail when I can’t get over my fantastical belief in the value of data, even the most minute.”
We’ve caught up on managing our photos (we do a yearly photobook for ourselves and family), but are half a decade behind on our video editing. Until the raw material gets turned into a 60-minute video consisting of short clips, it might as well not exist. Nobody’s going to sit down and watch a 10-minute take of baby video. (Thank goodness that my husband is now doing much shorter video clips using a digital camera instead of a video camera–we’re no longer generating this enormous clips where you have to sit through the whole thing to see if anything eventually happens.)
LikeLike
I had a hard drive failure right before we left for Europe, and it was so much trouble to get Mozy to restore my files that finally my husband ordered a drive enclosure, and I managed to get all my most important data back in about an hour or two. Ridiculous.
Re sentimentality of stuff: I wasn’t able to dump a lot of my stuff till I reached a certain point in my life. It was a psychological thing, a giving up of some sort of idea of what my life would be like that enabled me to chuck everything. It was very freeing. My husband isn’t at that point yet, but I have hope.
LikeLike
“I wasn’t able to dump a lot of my stuff till I reached a certain point in my life.”
Right. It doesn’t have to happen right away, but say 5 years after a formative life experience, you can figure out what genuinely has sentimental value (I recently chucked a 10-year old TESOL pin with zero remorse, which I couldn’t have done in previous years when I was more ambivalent about that particular chapter of my life.) If you can’t remember who these people are, it’s OK to discard the stuff. I keep a drawer for stuff to put in the kids’ scrapbooks and we don’t do the scrapbook right away. When you have a year of drawings and certificates and so forth to pick from and a finite scrapbook to put them in, you have a bit more perspective as to what is actually a keeper.
I notice the same need for time with my kids. For a while, I was afraid I was raising junior hoarders (do we really need to keep every drawing we have ever produced?), but after a couple years of riding herd on their rooms, something magical happened. I saw that while certain things were precious now, if you check in three months later, the kid will toss it out with no regrets. My youngest has been particularly ruthless with his recent purges of baby, toddler and preschool toys.
LikeLike
I just want to add absolutely send those letters to her parents. As others have pointed out, not only will they be happy to have another snapshot of their daughter’s brief life, the realization that, many years after the fact, some one else is still thinking about their daughter will make touch them in really important and profound ways. I have not lost a child and cannot imagine that pain, but I did lose my father when I was a child. Almost 20 years later, to have people whom I wouldn’t expect out of the blue let me know they still remember and miss him is one of the kindest most comforting things people can say. Even if it brings up sadness and pain, recognizing others share that pain with you is often better than just forgetting something ever happened.
LikeLike
I threw out/ recycled/ donated over half of my books this Spring. I had gotten a Black & White Nook, realized I love it and could access nearly any book I needed, and suddenly all of those books I was holding on to “just in case” I wanted to read them again, or I might want to reference them some time, and — boom — good bye Brothers Karamazov, David Hume, William James, etc. Haven’t look at them in 20 years, and if I need them in 20 more, they are free or 99 cents on Nook format. Transferred half of my magazine subscriptions there, too.
Now, the only paper books I need to buy are ones with pretty color photographs in them.
LikeLike
“…good bye Brothers Karamazov…”
Those heavy books are especially easy marks for the Nook and Kindle. (By the way, I understand that you can put Kindle software onto other devices.)
I haven’t gone electronic yet, but I’d really like to be able to get Russian books on Kindle and then if there’s a word I don’t understand, be able to click on it and get a dictionary entry. Ideally, I’d like to have a couple of different dictionaries (Russian-English, Russian-Russian, an encyclopedic dictionary, etc.) hooked up, with maybe the possibility of automatically creating a running list of the words looked up. My husband already has something like that set up for English texts. It would be a totally different reading experience to be able to look up new words in a foreign language with a touch of a stylus.
LikeLike
(By the way, I understand that you can put Kindle software onto other devices.)
Nook has the same features. There’s a Nook “App” for the iPod, so we can both read the same book at the same time on different machines. (I don’t like reading on the iPod, because of the backlighting, so the Nook is MINEMINEMINE), and it also has the dictionary function.
It will do everything but tell me that Alyosha, Lyoshenka, and Alexey Fyodorovich are all the same guy.
LikeLike
I had a horrible problem with nicknames in Russian novels. I assume the translators hate their readers.
LikeLike
Send the letters to her parents. They need to know they are not the only ones who remember and miss her. The wound is always there, you cannot reopen it ‘nor can you heal it. All you can do is say, yes, she lived and she was wonderful’.
LikeLike
Nook & Kindle & Google Books all have apps for the iPad. Pre 20th century books are largely available in the public domain. The text of many many books is available, but since Google started scanning books, many of the scanned originals are also available (for example, the original printing of Wind in the Willows). 100+ of these books takes negligible space on an iPad in text format, and even in scanned format you can have a lot of books on a device the weight of one heavy hardback.
Some of the books (mostly in iBooks or App format) even have gorgeous photos.
I think keeping books has definitely reached the stage of needing to be “loved or useful” (rather than for hypothetical use).
LikeLike
“I think keeping books has definitely reached the stage of needing to be “loved or useful” (rather than for hypothetical use).”
One subcategory under “useful to keep in hard copy” is “books I might need during long electrical outage/natural disaster.” Examples:
1. a large medical reference book like Merck
2. an emergency preparedness book (with information on improvised heating, cooling, water purification, cooking, etc.)
3. a how-your-house-works book
LikeLike
Late to the party, as always, but I am having the exact same issue — whether or not to toss my collected correspondence (which I thought was two large file boxes but turns out to be three). I haven’t looked at it ever (and looking now wasn’t very interesting); I don’t have kids to pass it on to; and I’m unlikely to be famous. Why am I lugging it from house to house? Or, in this case, from office to home? (And how on earth did the boxes end up in the office?)
LikeLike
“…whether or not to toss my collected correspondence…”
I’ve got the same three boxes waiting for when the kids go back to school in a few weeks. I also suspect that most of the letters aren’t of great historical interest, so I’m anticipating tossing out at least half. I also need to toss out any with too much of my correspondents’ personal information. I’m hoping that will leave something–at least some griping letters from a friend who taught English in South Korea while hating Korean cooking with a passion.
Now, what to do with diaries? That is another question.
LikeLike
Amy: Luckily I was always a wretched diarist, even at the nadir of puberty. I was always more in love with the book than the process, just as I loved dollhouse furniture but hated dolls. A born materialist, perhaps.
In the throes of converting office crap to home crap, I don’t think I have the energy to weed through the collected correspondence of M. Worley, but in the next move, it gets reduced by half, for sure. Or maybe everything will go except my dad and the particularly well-spoken ex-boyfriend.
LikeLike