We just finished cleaning out my office today* and in the process found, remembered, laughed about, conquered, and parted with 20 years worth of memorabilia that we’ve come to realize doesn’t mean as much to us today as it once did. Ancient, embarrassing love letters; old photographs; 80s year books; high school and college notebooks.

Lots and lots of dust.

We compared 8th grade year books. At one point, we were actually lying on the floor laughing about it all.

A lot of it just didn’t have any meaning to us anymore. I mean, we knew what it was, we knew it used to be important to us, we knew we thought it would always be important to us—but it’s just not anymore. Our bin is overflowing with stuff that my teenage self couldn’t part with.

Some of it we kept. The yearbooks contain too much sheer comedy to give up. I think I’ll scan some of the pages to give you younger kids a look at what teenagers had to work with in 1986. The photographs are in a box, now labeled “photographs,” that I’ll go through someday. And we’re donating a lot of it—old books, mostly.

I realized today there are so many things that I’m over, finally. I feel like I’ve closed a chapter of my life and it feels great. It’s definitely more than I bargained for when I woke up this morning.

[* Cleaning the office was the first step in my plan to remodel it. I’m going to dedicate an entire wall to a built-in desk that will be used by myself, my kids, and my wife. I’ll put up before and after pictures when it’s done.]

Comments

1. fyngyrz on 2007-07-16 10:45:34 wrote: Ouch. Next time you have the urge to do this, don’t. You may be more interested when you are older (and you can’t remember things as well.) Your kids may be interested. Even more so, THEIR kids may be interested. You will eventually be “ancestors” and the people to come will care about you, even if only for short times and when feeling nostalgic. Throw this stuff in boxes and store it somewhere, make sure it is marked as genealogical material and put a paragraph in your will about it. I’m serious. Don’t throw out stuff because YOU don’t care. You’re parents. Think longer term. Think more generally. I do the genealogy for my family – I run one of the largest family-specific sites on the net, data-wise (www.blish.org), and if there is one sad note about all of it, no question it is the lack of information, diaries, yearbooks, etc that belonged to various family members. Our own personal familiarity with things is not an accurate index of the value those things may have to others. Trust me on this one; I know whereof I speak.