Not-So-Ancient Relics

Excavating your own life while civilization crumbles...

I’d bet good money that I’m one of the few people who can take a simple spring cleaning project and decide that we’re a dying civilization.

I don’t mean that our civilities are dying. (Those were gone once Facebook made it possible for your high school friend’s cousin to tell you that you should be raped by ISIS.) I mean “dying civilization,” as in the kind that bored kids are forced to visit the relics of in a museum.

But such is my mind set and our current events.

As previously mentioned in these digital pages, I’m in the midst of a massive clean out spurned by fires and fascism. The fires inspiring me to become more familiar with the possessions I had been carting around, and decide what I truly value; the fascism inspiring me to jettison as much as possible in the event we have to flee. (To be fair, so did the fires. Christmas decorations have now been split up into those labeled “Christmas” and those labeled “Christmas: To be saved in fire.”)

I know that throughout my life I have purged a large amount of possessions. I remember some of it vividly: Bags of clothing; boxes of books; sets of dishes; and every year boxes of papers to be shredded. And yet you would think a hoarder lived here if you saw some of the things I was holding onto. In some cases, I have become the keeper of the family heirlooms: everything from Grandparents’ Love Letters to Brother’s Favorite Snoopy. I can’t even tell you how I ended up with some of it. Amongst all of the stacks of letters people had written to ME, I found a stack I had written to someone else. It confused me at first, but then I had some vague memory of said person handing them back to me when they did a purge, under some guise of “You’re a writer. You should have these.” It was a strange gesture given that they could have tossed it all and I never would have known. It was as if they didn’t want it, but they didn’t want the idea that it no longer existed either. They put the burden on me which seems unfair; don’t I have enough between grandparents’ love letters and brother’s favorite Snoopy?

But it does bring up the question: Should a writer hang on to all of their writing?