I've triaged what I believe is the last container of my mother's stuff. She'd kept many copies of things and even copies of annotated copies of things. Those copies and copies of copies, some of which date to the early 60s, when a xerox copy was a Xerox copy.
The theory which is mine is that people generally don't leave time capsules - collections of items that they expect future generations to find and think about. Most of the things that we have in our lives are things that have some utility. The table where I write, the clock that's ticking on the wall, the yellow mobile that casts moving shadows over my keyboard - these are all things that have some practical or aesthetic purpose. They are settled business. People who find these things later will get to decide if the things have utility for them. Do they need a table? Do they want a wall clock that must be wound manually once a week and changed when the gummint says that sunset will be an hour later? Do they want a colorful presence over the table?
What won't be so easy for them because it's not at all easy for me is the broad agglomeration of files (paper and, even more so now, electronic) that mean a great deal, but goodness knows who or why.
My mother kept a grad school paper that had a B- and critical comments about her disorganized writing. She had copies of her resume from the mid-70s, identical content, but with addresses from Amherst, Northampton, and Ann Arbor.
A short while before he died, my father's father was working on a grandfather's clock. "I guess you'll have to finish this," he said to my father. It was a finicky clock that my father passed along to us and we to Adam. Something of value that lets the generations have a one-way game of Tag.
I found a couple of photographic negatives of my parents' wedding celebration along with a copy of their wedding certificate. Today would have been their anniversary. My birthday is in October of that same year.
Saturday, March 13, 2010
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