I’ll never forget seeing the headline of this post on some notepaper of a fellow packrat friend. It has stayed with me for years, and I’ve gleefully used that line often…and often at my own expense.
If you want to skip the personal history set up, scroll to the bottom now for the payoff…
Still here? OK.
In case I haven’t mentioned it before, I come from a family of packrats…it is a trait that we learn at our parent’s filing cabinets, so to speak. One of my great aunts lived in a pack rat heaven–it had shoulder-width trails between the “essential” rooms of her house…the rest (really…every room!) of the space was piled floor to ceiling with…um…stuff…mostly old newspapers. Never could figure that one out, but you know they say everybody collects something.
When my maternal grandfather died, he had a huge rock collection. Purportedly it was among the biggest private collections in California at the time. Rocks everywhere…in display cases, boxes, you name it. Here’s how it worked when he died: his children (my parents’ generation) tried to sell it (this was in the 50′s folks…no ebay, no craigslist…), then tried to donate it (no institution–I’m talking museums, etc.–was willing to deal with the space needed for the intake, let alone the display), then tried to give it away (hey! rock collectors have friends too…), but nothing. Nothing. So the parents generation snagged what they wanted (a tigereye ring here, some agates there) and then came the big day. Each of the kids in my generation were paraded into the collection and allowed to choose one thing. ONE! I took a blue, abstract-shaped object that I had been told was glass that had gone through the San Francisco earthquake and fire (the big one, folks, not the Loma Prieta in 89). Each of my cousins got something, I presume, although we haven’t talked about that in any of our recent reunions.
The rest? To the dump.
An adult life’s hobby/recreation/obsession (I remember travelling with my grandparents in our car–they didn’t drive–and we’d stop by the side of the road if grampa (or my dad, on his behalf) saw something promising) laying, as I write this, in a landfill someplace near Sacramento, California. I can just imagine the reaction of future archeologists when the excavate that trash heap…
Before everything got away, my dad decided that we would take the huge companion shell collection that accompanied the rock collection. So my parents house (and garage, and storage shed) had boxes of shells. When we cleaned up my dad’s house after he died, there they were…thousands upon thousands of shells, many with my grandfather’s cramped handwritten notes on tiny labels. Most of them were still in the boxes, and one large steamer trunk. So we decided they were too beautiful to discard, and home they came with us. This wasn’t so long ago, so I remember saying (or was it that somebody said it to me? hmmm…), “do you really want this stuff?” but, again, it was lovely to look at (once you opened the box or trunk) so the answer was, well, “we can sell it on Ebay.” Great.
So Ebay in those days was much more work than it is now, and there came a day when we were downsizing because of a move from a 2700 square foot house with a 3 car garage and a backyard storage shed to…let’s say considerably less space (man do I miss that one extra garage bay), and it was “we’ve got to get rid of these shells.” OK. Oddly enough, I had no real attachment (other than intrinsic beauty) to them. So we washed, rinsed, and repeated the rock cycle above. Kids didn’t want or have space for them. We saved a managable number. Friends who were into marine pursuits, luckily, took the rest.
Then there’s the books I’ve accumulated over the years of schooling, teaching, and learning about things that I didn’t get a chance to investigate in formal educational surroundings…
At one point, my daughter and I drew lots for the stamps and the coins my father collected…I’m not sure, but I think she got the better end of the deal…
Oh, and I’m a musician, so there’s the 1000+ vinyls, and the 1000+ cds…but that’s nothing compared to my cousin Rob, who has a blues collection that is staggering in size. And the music: full scores (anybody need the full score to Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde? I don’t think there’s a chance I’ll conduct it before I die…even has the analysis markings in it), piano music, and hundreds (and hundreds) of pieces of choral music.
And, of course, as a result of owning a magazine, I get products for review. In fact, I just finished the latest issue, and the editorial work to find 20 anthems to review consumed about 300 or so “rejects” in the process. That’s out of the about 3500 pieces of music I get in my mailbox every year. Then there are the books, the cds, the videos, the piano and/or organ collections, instrumental music…and the list goes on…
But that’s not why I wrote the headline.
IF YOU’VE SCROLLED DOWN…START HERE…
I’ve owned computers since 1980. And digitally stored things since that time. I’ve got boxes of old backups from systems that bit the dust literally decades ago. I’ve got those real 5″ floppys, the 3″ smaller ones that are really “hardies,” a few internal hard drive “cards,” and a whole bunch of zip disks, which are temporarily useless because I can’t make my zip drive work. Plus the cdrs and the 1TB “always on” (man does that drive me crazy) external backup.
Unlike books, or rocks, or shells, or stamps, or music, you can’t look at your digital files to see what’s there if you don’t have the system to read the disks. But I can’t seem to throw them away.
Here’s the bad news…I’m apparently not the only one, and the news is not good for any of us. Read it and weep…
Leave me a comment (please!) and let me know how much digital data you have hanging around the house…and whether or not you’re brave enough to throw it away…
(how long are you supposed to keep those tax records, now?)
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
We also have drawers full of CDs and floppies, most of them are unlabeled. I also have a stash of 8mm tapes that started after I had my first child. My first camcorder is long since dead, and I had thought about getting the tapes transferred to DVDs. My Grandmother passed away last month and my family spent hours going through her photo collection dating back to the 1800′s. My kids are going to be trying to figure out how to even find out what is on all my CDs. If they do manage to access the data nothing is labeled. Great…I thought the world of digital info saved me from scrapbooking mania. Perhaps I need to go oldschool again.
I completely understand…at least my parents (in most cases) labeled the back of those aging photographs…
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