As I mentioned, I cleaned my office closet and discarded shredded some old papers (but not the box of old, printed out letters that I sent to various family members over the decades and the emails that my beautiful wife sent me when she initially reached out to me in 1997).
Well, I discarded some things I’ve had for decades as well.
First, Mark the monkey.
I received Mark as a gift for my 10th birthday from my sainted mother. She’d gotten a similar, albeit blond, puppet like this, and she and a fellow divorcée took it to a bar one night, and a fine time was had by all. Mark was torn at a joint birthday party for our birthdays at the home of family friends when two cousins of the kids who lived at the house tugged at him for a turn–so he had a navel very early. He lost an eye sometime in or after college, and I fashioned an eyepatch for him. But that was lost a long time ago, along with his nostrils, string lips, and velcro pads on his hands. He was too worn for the boys to play with and rode the pine in closets for decades. Good-bye, Mark. What I’ve learned about ventriloquism, I learned with you.
Clearly, or probably not, I got this MRE from my brother while he was in the Marine Corps in the 1990s. I never ate it, and it represented the first bit of my emergency stocks. However, as it got older, I thought about wrapping it up and giving it back to him for Christmas, but I saw that was swollen, so out it went. I hope it doesn’t explode in the trash because I don’t want to get fired from another trash company. I keed, I keed. I am more likely to get fired for putting too much used cat litter in the bin at once.
I gave myself this Caddyshack Dancing Gopher around the turn of the century, and it was atop the shelves in my office until my children were old enough to apprehend it, at which point it was unboxed, slept with one or both of them for a long time, and eventually was broken so that it would not dance. I kept it because I thought I might open it up and fix it, but, c’mon, man, I don’t do hardly as much of that as I think I will. So maybe I ought to put this into my DeReifiedPotentialination category. So ought he goes. And although the boys were excited to hear Kenny Loggins sing “I’m Alright” on the radio for the first time, they haven’t wanted to watch Caddyshack, and I’m not sure how much they would get from it anyway.
What else did I divest myself of?
- One of those lung exercisers (Rx Only) where you suck in on the tube and try to get the balls to hold at a certain level. It had been my mother’s when she was dying, and I kept it to use it as part of my workout regimen. But I didn’t too much. Trashed.
- Two unopened bag of stuffing/batting. I must have thought I would do more pillow making when I was younger, as I had these bags plus a trash bag of reclaimed batting from reclaimed pillows. As the bags are unopened, I think we will donate them.
- Numerous envelopes, including padded envelopes that Amazon sent things to us or cardboard envelopes that school pictures came in, and many small pieces of cardboard that you could put in with photos to send them. The impulse to save these was a relic of my Ebay selling days, but I have not sold anything on Ebay for a long, long time. So I’ll use the bits of cardboard as kindling if my fireplace replacement ever get finished and if the replacement does not burn the house down on the first try.
- A bunch of black cardstock–like two packs of fifty sheets. I think I might have thought of using this as backdrops for things I framed, or the boys needed one for a school project twelve years ago and I bought in bulk. As this is not in the trash but rather the box for the Lutheran school, I am feeling the reified potential in them even now. So whether they go is TBD. I set aside some three-ring binders for the school, but have returned them to the closet as I do use those for saving paper mementoes.
- I did discard a bin of reclaimed sheet protectors. When I brought the bookshelf in from the garage last August, I culled the binders full of manuals we for items we no longer own (I hope–we had a bunch of children’s and baby’s stuff, some old appliances, and computer manuals from the 1990s to today). I kept the sleeve protectors, but most of them were wrinkled and/or adorned with insect parts, spider webs, or the varied other detritus they encountered in the garage over fifteen years and other storage locations before Nogglestead. Since I have discovered I have hundreds of unused, unboxed sleeve protectors, I just threw these away like a modern American.
Again, it’s not that I’m going Marie Kondo over here, but I’ve taken some baby steps to eliminate some of the useless and completely worthless detritus from my life. And to clean my closet so that I can actually see easily the audio courses.
Sorry to be a Debbie Downer, but I’ve been reading about Lileks downsizing all year, and recently, Neo lost her ex-husband and is in charge of disposing of his things, and he sounds like me. When my mother died, I took the easy way out: I picked out some things for myself and let my brother have her house and the majority of her possessions.
Not Marie Kondo. Not yet.
