CoME: Episode 8 - Slash and burn...

The DW gave me a little present on Wednesday – a box of old papers and mementos from God knows when that I have collected over the years. My mission was to go thru it and figure what I wanted to keep. Sounds harder than it really was but still, a difficult mission
So this is some of what I found in the box:

Letters from my brother as a young teen, when I went off to college; mostly it was reports from home about what trouble various siblings had gotten into and the like. After a short think I realized that neither he nor I would ever want the contents read by other people, especially our other brother or sisters so out they went.

Letters from an old acquaintance, an artist who was the lover of my college roommate; she and I hit it off and continued to correspond for a while after he and my college buddy broke up. Mostly they were thoughts about what she wanted to do in her life – she was an artist. Not really relevant in my life any longer so they hit the recycle bin too.

Letters from a couple of friends who went to college with me and then went on to other things in their lives; one became a reading trainer and spent some time in the Virgin Islands in a school, the other was a machinist who always wanted to be a writer, who became a newspaper reporter, who went to work for a security firm. I still have occasional contact with the two of them but it is just occasional as we have drifted apart over the years. Gone, out you went.

A couple of letters from two guys I knew who became priests; I was on that track for a while. They wrote a few letters after I left New York for Massachusetts. I have talked with each of them once or twice in the last 5 years but we are not close and the letters were not kept.

A package of my college report cards, old school with the marks to prove just how close I came to getting kicked out of college in Freshman year. There was a transcript too, to prove I did graduate with a 3.0 after settling in and settling down. I kept these, at least for a while. Just in case someone says I am too dumb to have graduated from college.

Some old wedding cards, mostly from people we do not have contact with anymore. The only one I kept was from my grandmother because it was written in her hand and seeing that just reminded me of her. There were also a couple of short notes from her. I think I will put all of them in my wooden box.

In the box I also found the old drawings of mrsfabp and my wedding rings. We designed them ourselves and had them made by a jewelry maker in Binghamton. A few years ago I had a finger infection that necessitated having the ring cut off. I found the jewelry maker who did them originally, in another state (thank goodness for the internet, you can find almost anything on it!) I kept the drawings and the original letter. I have to send the ring back to him to have it re sized and thought I would copy those things to send along. I might frame the original too. Still thinking about that, but they are a keeper.

(Not my actual book but an internet facsimile, click to embiggen and bring back your memories)

Finally there was the 8th grade autograph book I had. In my day (gee, that makes me sound real old doesn’t it…) we didn’t have yearbooks but got these autograph books instead. You know the type? In it was scrawled the wisdom of 8th graders – "roses are red, violets are blue, my feet smell and so do you…” It is filled with gems like this, a real pre-facebook, facebook type of thing. A couple of teachers signed too and basically I tossed it out. However, CollegeBoy saw it and started to go thru it, mocking me and my classmates. Then he saw the notes penned by my mother, father and grandmother. I had missed them, the first time thru but his gasp led me to realize that this was an important memory. I have so little written by my father and mother and only those cards and notes mentioned above. As he handed the book back to me he said. “I want this book later…”

Thanks CB for the lesson about what is important or not. Sometimes memories are like that, until you look at them in a different light, they don’t seem important then you turn them over and wonder why you didn’t see it that way in the first place.