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emotional paper
Oct. 23rd, 2011 09:34 pmI am finding my scanning project to be a hard, long slog, kind of like losing weight — I am pleased with the results, but the interim sucks!
I am the daughter of what we used to call packrats and now call hoarders. They were never house-condemning-worthy, we never had sailcats or bugs or gross food or anything, but we always had a huge mess of stuff everywhere. My parents were creative musicians with lots of interests, Dad had a thing for saving newspaper articles, and neither of them was particularly interested in cleaning or organizing.
So if hoarding has any kind of environmental OR biological link at all, one would assume I might have tendencies thus. Add in my very helpful father who carefully taught me the importance of saving things like empty boxes and course catalogs, well, you might imagine I have a lot of stuff to struggle against, wanting to be a normal girl the way I do. And mostly I am successful. But paper has always been my personal failing. I keep everything. I mean, until fairly recently I had every pay stub that was ever generated in my name. I've had a job since I was 16, and was almost never out of work in all that time — and many of those years I had multiple jobs at once. I also had every check I ever wrote, every bank statement, almost every bill I received. Neatly filed and safely stored. Not surprising I went to library school, right? I should have taken the archivist track.
Those things are easy to deal with, though. I don't even have to think about those, just process. For the bank statements and the pay stubs, just sort, put in date order, and scan (NOTE: I am completely aware that I don't need them for anything, ever. But I've kept them this long now, dragging them from apartment to apartment. It's almost like I owe it to my past self to at least scan this stuff before I toss it.). Easy. For the bills, trash them. Other things like the repair receipts for cars I no longer own, scan for nostalgia so when I'm 80 I can reminisce about when an alternator cost $250 to put into my 81 Rabbit. Whatever. Hard drive space is cheap, and I have loads of time.
But then there's the hard stuff. My Dad, clipper of articles, didn't just save for himself, no. Anything he'd read in the paper that he'd think would be interesting for me he'd clip and save for the next time I'd be home. He didn't have a great filing system for himself, but somehow he always could put his hands on the stuff he wanted me to have, so after a visit home I'd go back to Amherst or whatever on the bus with a file folder of new stuff from Dad. Sometimes I'd read them and toss them, but mostly they'd go in my filing cabinet, to be read "later".
This stuff isn't hard to part with at all. I mean, Hiawatha Bray articles from the Boston Globe from 1999 or whatever, about the latest trends in technology? There's no question that I'll recycle it immediately. But after a few hours, where I randomly find an article every few minutes or so, carefully trimmed with the paper cutter, the date neatly written in the corner in Dad's unmistakable hand? It gets to me. He'd sit there in the kitchen reading the paper every day, and he'd find something that he wanted me to know, or wanted to talk to me about on the phone, and he'd get enthused enough to carefully cut it out and date it and tuck it away for me. I can feel his excitement even now, decades later.
His little gifts of love, crossing over time and space.
I am the daughter of what we used to call packrats and now call hoarders. They were never house-condemning-worthy, we never had sailcats or bugs or gross food or anything, but we always had a huge mess of stuff everywhere. My parents were creative musicians with lots of interests, Dad had a thing for saving newspaper articles, and neither of them was particularly interested in cleaning or organizing.
So if hoarding has any kind of environmental OR biological link at all, one would assume I might have tendencies thus. Add in my very helpful father who carefully taught me the importance of saving things like empty boxes and course catalogs, well, you might imagine I have a lot of stuff to struggle against, wanting to be a normal girl the way I do. And mostly I am successful. But paper has always been my personal failing. I keep everything. I mean, until fairly recently I had every pay stub that was ever generated in my name. I've had a job since I was 16, and was almost never out of work in all that time — and many of those years I had multiple jobs at once. I also had every check I ever wrote, every bank statement, almost every bill I received. Neatly filed and safely stored. Not surprising I went to library school, right? I should have taken the archivist track.
Those things are easy to deal with, though. I don't even have to think about those, just process. For the bank statements and the pay stubs, just sort, put in date order, and scan (NOTE: I am completely aware that I don't need them for anything, ever. But I've kept them this long now, dragging them from apartment to apartment. It's almost like I owe it to my past self to at least scan this stuff before I toss it.). Easy. For the bills, trash them. Other things like the repair receipts for cars I no longer own, scan for nostalgia so when I'm 80 I can reminisce about when an alternator cost $250 to put into my 81 Rabbit. Whatever. Hard drive space is cheap, and I have loads of time.
But then there's the hard stuff. My Dad, clipper of articles, didn't just save for himself, no. Anything he'd read in the paper that he'd think would be interesting for me he'd clip and save for the next time I'd be home. He didn't have a great filing system for himself, but somehow he always could put his hands on the stuff he wanted me to have, so after a visit home I'd go back to Amherst or whatever on the bus with a file folder of new stuff from Dad. Sometimes I'd read them and toss them, but mostly they'd go in my filing cabinet, to be read "later".
This stuff isn't hard to part with at all. I mean, Hiawatha Bray articles from the Boston Globe from 1999 or whatever, about the latest trends in technology? There's no question that I'll recycle it immediately. But after a few hours, where I randomly find an article every few minutes or so, carefully trimmed with the paper cutter, the date neatly written in the corner in Dad's unmistakable hand? It gets to me. He'd sit there in the kitchen reading the paper every day, and he'd find something that he wanted me to know, or wanted to talk to me about on the phone, and he'd get enthused enough to carefully cut it out and date it and tuck it away for me. I can feel his excitement even now, decades later.
His little gifts of love, crossing over time and space.
