Oh, the silly things we worried about as teenagers! I've just spent an hour going through old school notebooks and such, and if my biggest source of angst today was whether Joe Schmoe liked my new Members Only jacket, I'd be in good shape. Selective ignorance only goes so far anymore.
As amusing as those notebooks are, they're all getting tossed, along with anything I've saved for reasons I've forgotten, toys too beat-up to put in the yard sale, birthday cards from people I don't remember, and love notes from anyone prior to my husband. Hubby claimed all my NASCAR memorabilia so I suppose we have to haul that home with us. I can't gripe; I have half a dozen moving boxes full of horses- plastic, ceramic, glass, you name it- that will be making the trip as well. A box of bones and fossils, a pile of photos, several gumball machine toys from the days when they had cool stuff in them, and two sketchbooks (of many) are in the "Keep" pile. I've started an "eBay" pile too... fortunately for my already crowded apartment, the "Dump" pile is the biggest so far.
Why do I keep the things I do? Some of it, I can look at and know, but most are WTF items that must have meant something at some point but I'll be damned if I remember why. Several promo coasters and gizmos from St. Patricks Day at bars that went out of business years ago... pictures cut from magazines... oh let's not even start on the magazines themselves, unless someone wants eight years' worth of Entertainment Weekly and Art News and Beckett trading-card price guides... Panini stickers... I still hate to throw out unused stickers, but the pro wrestling ones? Yeah those need to go... a dried-up corsage from Junior Prom, which I attended with a guy I didn't like then and like even less now... a box full of graduation invitations... photos of people I met once and promptly forgot... one Japanese Marlboro in the pack, saved because it had a charcoal filter and foreign writing... Mardi Gras masks, even though I haven't made it to Mardi Gras yet... a box of Pepsi bottlecaps, back when they had glass bottles and pry-off caps... all that crap is going to fill a dumpster tonight.
Oh, and then there's the baseball cards. *Sigh* My mom never threw mine out (she collected them too), but faced with the task of sorting and cataloguing and eBaying them, I almost wish she'd hauled 'em to Goodwill. The potential for one card among ten thousand being worth a couple hundred bucks is all that keeps them where they are, carefully stored in archival boxes, divided by brand and labeled by year. OCD does not run in this family, why do you ask? Packratting on a marginally organized scale is what we do, meaning we save stuff and almost always know where it is when we want it.
I told my husband the other day that what I'd love to do is have a mini-museum or nostalgia room in our future house to display the things we've decided to keep. Pop's bottles, my horses, his racing stuff, all those things that may or may not be valuable monetarily but meant enough to us to hang on to. I might briefly regret tossing certain things, but the older I get the more valuable storage space becomes and the more often I pass on things I'd formerly HAVE to have for this collection or that one.
For now, though, I'm limited to whatever amount will safely fit in the bed of the truck. And the redneck's idea of "safely" means it can be secured under a cargo net and two ratchet-straps and the truck will still fit the height restrictions of most underpasses. Whee... back to packin!
Grape Nehi still rocks. That is all.
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