This weekend I had the unenviable task of cleaning up my side of the bed.
Really, it wasn’t too monumental of a task, though you probably couldn’t tell it by the put upon sigh I let loose after my wife informed me of what we would be doing. She was tending to her side and I would tend to my own.
For me, the bulk of the work lay in going through stacks of unopened mail, old paperwork, little notes, receipts and the countless other bits of paper a packrat like myself inevitably accrues as he navigates this paperchase we call modern life.
Most of it was old, useless, out of date or otherwise needed to be disposed of, though with so much vital information on so many slips of paper I was really living up to my packrat identity by shredding up all that vital info by hand, transforming nice, relatively neat if somewhat crazily leaning stacks of paper into confetti-like shreads suitable for some rodent’s nest.
As I went through it, I realized just how much of my life and that of my family was contained in those slips of paper. Here there was an old receipt for my eldest daughter’s t-ball equipment from seven plus years ago. There was the stub of a movie ticket from my middle child’s birthday of only a month ago. Then there was the entry pass for Sea World from the girls' Girl Scout trip. There were old checkbooks full of carbon copies of payments to a storage space I held onto for too long, money I had loaned relatives and in-laws, payments on taxes, and so much more.
Why did I keep all this stuff? In what way did I ever think it would be useful? Granted, some forensic accountant could probably construct a reasonable timeline of my life from all this stuff, but why would they? Perhaps if I were some noteworthy wit or famous author, these things might have been of use to a researcher or biographer. If I was a daring criminal or man of mystery, these scraps of paper might be used to reconstruct my movements. Alas, the only life of intrigue I live is vicariously in the pages of books or an hour or so watching a movie.
It was, is and likely will remain a regular, ordinary life, but it’s mine and something about all those slips of paper prove it was there, that it happened.
They don’t capture any of the flavor, none of the emotion nor any of the liveliness of it, but somehow those dry figures and dates provide a framework to all the stuff that really mattered.
A medical bill can’t capture the forced, steely calm of a father racing his child to the emergency room nor the nervous acidic worry bubbling just beneath.
A gas station receipt doesn’t say much about the silly jokes and games peculiar to those trapped together on a long car ride to some vacation spot.
The doodle in the corner of one page might let me know I was bored while stuck on the phone or in a meeting, but it doesn’t explain if the bipedal platypus has coffee or a bracing slug of bourbon in its mug.
Into the memory hole it all goes!
Not to obliterate some damning evidence nor to remove something that might contradict a later, revised version of history as in Orwell’s . No, just to make space, to clear a spot for other things—a new book, a 1984 curio, some pocket change or whatever else might need a landing space on my beside shelf until the next great purge.
Though I do wonder how much of that stuff I will actually remember without the little paper reminders. The light sheen of dust frosting the papers, and the memories they stirred up, was briefly disturbed. Minor, perhaps inconsequentual details are briefly revealed and refreshed. A good half of the papers which inspired the brief reminiscences are gone, consigned to the memory hole, never to return.
My wife looks at the ones I•have elected to keep, a fat little parcel barely held together by a gamely struggling clothespin. “What are you keeping those for?”
I make some flimsy excuse about needing to check a few things, though I have little intention of doing so. The bills were mostly tossed. If someone wants money from you, they will send another one without fail.
I look at one of the ticket stubs. It is for one of the rebooted movies. My wife and I went to see it at the Historic Strand movie theater in Jesup. I vaguely recall one of our kids was so young they slept quite peacefully though all the simian shrieks and huge explosions.
It’s a good memory. I need to keep it a little longer.
Planet of
the Apes
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