Why do we save things?

Last weekend, the newspaper offered a “free shred” day. Bring your documents to them, they’d put them on the shred truck and they could be safely disposed of without fear of identity theft or just general nosiness into one’s business.

We’d been talking about cleaning out things – boxes of old documents in the attic, dead legal files from cases long ago (some dragged across state lines), old receipts and tax returns and generally things that are no longer needed. The paper is just a precursor to books (11 boxes to the Habitat Store so far, and still counting), kitchen gadgets of unknown purpose and excess furniture that is crowded in the house but too good to just sit by the curb.

The hardest of the documents for me to ditch were the personal letters. I’ve long kept letters, some organized neatly in files, some still in their envelopes and just pitched in a box with the idea that someday I’ll organize them and put them in nice neat files.

We all know that day won’t ever come, but sometimes you have to look reality right in the eye and deny it.

Why do I keep these? If I’ve not opened a document to look at it in over 10 years, what’s the chance of actually needing or wanting to look at it in the future? Some of them, of course, would bring back nice warm fuzzies – we’ve always been a family of letter writers, so I had correspondence from my parents and grandparents going back to the time that I left home and went to college. I’ve had wonderful pen pals over the ages, some of whom lived right down the street but who needed the written word for our relationships to truly develop and blossom.

I’m not any less or more loved by the possession of those bits of paper, nor is anyone likely to read them after I’m gone. My presidential aspirations having waned, it’s unlikely that they’ll be needed for my memorial library in the future.

There are some exceptions, of course.  About what I decided to keep, not the chance of a library.

There’s a letter that my maternal grandfather wrote to me the day I was born.
There’s one from my paternal grandmother when I graduated from college.

Most of them, though, are the mundane. They talk about who’s visited, who’s getting married (or divorced), how the garden is doing and the weather. They offer no unique insight into 20th or 21st Century America, and in reality little about our lives other than the superficial.

Philosophy is pretty short, other than the inquiry, “Did you go to church last Sunday?” (Usually coming from Mom or my Grandmother.  That question doesn't come up any more). There’s occasional allusion to local politics, but it’s pointed out more in the nature of human interest stories (Do you remember X who was a class behind you in High School? He’s running for Y.”) Big picture politics are entirely absent, since my correspondents are sometimes on the other side of the great divide and nothing is to be gained by stirring each other up.

The only thing that would have happened with the majority of the documents is that someone would eventually have to do the same thing that we did this weekend – box them up and take them to the shredder. That’s what eventually happens to everyone’s stuff. For some people it happens when you move; for others, it’s after you die. Either way, the documents stay in the boxes and envelopes, the sheer magnitude of the task of going through them overwhelming everyone involved until they just give up and trash it all.

So we braved the attic, tried to do a quick sort to make sure there weren’t any $100 bills tucked in anything (there weren’t) and hauled 6 big bins of stuff to the shredder.

Only to find out that they were full up. Yep, the demand for the program was so overwhelming that by 10:30 in the morning they had reached capacity. Our noon deposit didn’t have a chance. Apparently more people than we thought are watching “Hoarders” and have determined that they have no desire to be on national television. They’re cleaning out before someone with a camera can come in to splay their lives across the small screen throughout the English speaking world.

So all our bins came back home. It’s in the basement now, rather than the attic, which makes it easier to move them around although that may be a detriment since it’s cool enough to work down there comfortably. The problem is that the lure of the hunt is there, the urge to go back and “make sure” there’s nothing that I need to keep that was overlooked the first time.

It’s like that last piece of chocolate cake that calls to you through the dark at 2 in the morning when you wake up and instantly realize that it’s still there. There’ll be no sleep until you get up and eat it. The only way to beat that urge is for it to leave the house entirely, so there’s no hope of reconnection.

I only hope they have another shred day before I can’t resist the urge and decide that I really don’t want to part with some particular items and have to dig in to try and find them.

In the meantime, can anyone think of a constructive use for Graduation cards from 1979?