What is that song that goes on endlessly? No, not “The Twelve Days of Christmas” — the other one. The Beer on the Wall song that is funny only to middle schoolers on a bus with their poor, trapped driver and teachers/coaches. Well, right now I’m the one driving that bus, but I’m also the one singing the song, and it feels like a circle of Hell all unto its own.
We know how much I like math, so help me with this problem: if I sort through one-quarter of one box per week, and I have 5,000 boxes, how many weeks will this take?
I know there are those of you out there who will counsel that I not sort any of these boxes. Straight to the landfill with them and be done. You know, that old advice about if you box stuff up and don’t look in the box for a year, then you clearly don’t need anything in it.
Here’s the problem: I need all kinds of stuff I know I put in boxes two-three months ago, but I can’t find any of it. I can’t find anything at all, and I grow weary of this status. So I am sorting boxes.
Now, the one I have opened for this month started with papers dated 2021, so you might think I could chuck that one. But, over a quarter of the way in — look at me go! and only on Day Two — I found my high school letter, and I know you don’t care about it, but I’d like to keep it.
I got my letter in the days when we prized athletics but not academics. Now I’m pretty sure Gunnison High School issues letters for academic achievement as well, and probably other extracurriculars, but in those ancient days of yesteryear I got my letter for track my freshman year. I didn’t go out for track after that, so my letter has the one winged foot, plus I added my NFL (not that one; the National Forensics League) pin for my three years of Speech & Debate. I helped backstage with several plays, but nothing to show for that other than the Woodstock pin I added to fill in space.
So it’s kind of a sad little letter, with no jacket to back it up, and I’ve had it buried in this box for a minimum of four years, but I want to keep it so I’m going to. Who knows what other treasures lie below the letter?
My mother laughed at me the other day because my aunt located a binder my uncle (my mother’s brother, who I have been compared to my entire life) had saved, six inches thick, filled with all his records of achievement, including his high school report cards. I know somewhere I have my college grades, plus I at least used to have my tuition bills — I have no idea why people say I take after my uncle.
My mother gave my aunt her permission to toss everything in the binder, and I’m just going to give all of you this blanket permission: when I am gone, you can take all of my boxes, my file cabinets, my cluttered desks, my bookshelves, and you can shovel it all into however many roll-off Dumpsters it takes without looking at a single scrap of paper (or admiring my high-school letter), and I will not only forgive you but give you my blessing.
You will not be overlooking any Antiques Roadshow finds; no rare coins worth millions; probably not, even in my thousands of pages of scribblings, anything worth preserving for posterity. Just toss it all and be done.
I, however, am not going to be the one to do that. I am going to go through my boxes piece of paper by piece of paper, and I will hang onto too much of it and consider it victory when I move a scant few to the shred and recycle piles. I will be happy to see my old high school letter, and then I will probably promptly store it in a file or drawer where I won’t see it again for another four-plus years.
But it’s my life and that’s how I’m going to live it, in defiance of all of you.
Except that I’m not convinced it’s really all, or perhaps any, of you. It’s easy to throw other people’s things away and feel that you disposed of unnecessary clutter. If you have a big enough house, you can spread out your tchotchkes and not even notice you have many more than I do. Or, like friends I used to visit, you can keep your upstairs remarkably spare while stacking books three deep on shelves in the basement.
I also started noticing, when I walk the alleys of Gunnison, that nearly every house has a shed or some sort of storage facility in the backyard. Nearly every house!
Even out here, in this upscale neighborhood. We build houses that have to be a minimum of 2,400 square feet — at least one so far clocked in around 4,000 square feet and the ones currently under construction look even larger — and suddenly there’s a shed placed near the brand-new house. Including ours.
When I moved 27 years of stuff out of Pat’s, I tried to find a storage unit anywhere in town (because the shed at our house is already full with stuff we mostly haven’t used since we put it in there six years ago). But every single storage area has a wait list, unless you want outside storage. So it’s not just me hoarding stuff, and while that doesn’t make me feel virtuous, it does make me feel like part of the club.
I found storage space in a kind friend’s garage, naively thinking I would have things there one month, two months tops. I did take one pile to electronics recycling, and I have a larger pile to go to Recla Metals in Montrose, but the only other thing I’ve done is bring a couple boxes home and plunk them in Lynn’s great room. They’re supposed to help me organize the other boxes, since they have folders and storage trays in them. We’ll see.
Five thousand boxes of paper on the floor. . . I’m getting closer to zero by the century, I can feel it.
Okay, 18 minutes long and the guy is booking it. This could be a contest — I made it 1 minute and 36 seconds.
Garbanzo Beans for Breakfast 