Treasure or Trash
My daughter was born an historian. She looks at old things — objects created before her time, starting in, say, 1980 — as worthy of study and contemplation, some now and a great amount more in the future.
Take the love letters John and I exchanged during our year of dating and courting, and the following first year of marriage. (Why write during marriage? Because it happened that we were apart that first year, having inconveniently fallen in love after a blind date. We missed each other horribly but decided to be true to our separate educational paths: He had already committed to graduate school on the other coast, while I still had one year of undergrad to finish.)
Our weekly phone call, to the phone booth on his campus, cost us $10 in 1964 dollars, or about a million dollars today. We limited ourselves to 30 minutes. And otherwise we wrote, daily I suspect.
And we kept our letters. (Lovers like us are the sort that produce historian daughters, no doubt.)
Now we have a ream-sized box full of those letters, about 500 sheets.
Our daughter contends that they should be saved because historians in the future might find they shed light on our unique moment on the planet.
This may be true, but I am also hesitant to expose our drivelings to the public, however small that public might be.
As for interest in what we wrote about, those were interesting times, according to our thinking now, nearly 60 years later. We had the Civil Rights Movement, the beginnings of Viet Nam, and my favorite, the Folk Music Revival.
But I don’t know how much of this we wrote about. A random quote I just pulled out of the box, halfway through, says, “I’m taking group theory now in Molecular Structure.” (A letter from me to him.) And then in his next one, “I bought us a dresser.”
See? Certainly worth keeping for the ages.
It was with this deep background that I found myself contemplating how to dispose of a book I had as a baby. I was 1-yo or so. It was during World War 2. The paper is thin, cheap. Two colors were used, black and orange. Would anyone miss it if I put it in the trash, along with the other four books from my earliest years?
I doubt it. For one thing, no one would know.
No one would know that I had thrown it out. Also no one would know about the shortage of good paper, the impoverished visuals, or the odd little story, typically didactic.
But two additional thoughts come to mind. First, it was my first book. Isn’t throwing it away like throwing away part of a life, my life? The part where the Mom read to the little girl during the long days when there were just the two of them?
What about the part where the little girl, grown up now, carried this book with her through many moves?
The part where a memory is triggered by this book, when no one else on Earth would experience this particular event?
We can’t take it with us. But we haven’t gone anywhere so far. Is it necessary to pre-dispose? To erase a life before the life is ready to be erased?
When we look at old things, I think we all ponder who made them, who used them, who purchased them after a lengthy decision, or impulsively.
I’m thinking of my grandmother’s sewing machine, an old Singer treadle machine made in 1903. These are not uncommon. The one I have is because I fought my mother for it: she was going to give it away to the cancer society for their bandage-making project. That was in about 1953, best guess.
I remember saying to her that she could NOT give away MY GRANDMOTHER’S sewing machine.
My historian-daughter has it now.
The point I was trying to make to my mother was that this was a piece of my grandmother. I had never had her, just this.
My mother had no such nostalgic feelings about it. Her mother had had one, her mother-in-law had had this one, and now she was blessed with an electric one, and let’s get rid of the old stuff.
Likewise, let’s get rid of the old letters, I have been thinking.
But not yet. John and I are still around, sometimes we read a few. But sure, dump them when we’re gone.
And my mother’s and father’s letters back and forth during the war? NO! Don’t throw those away! They are precious! They tell the story of an era! And of people caught up in an awful war!
Old stuff is tough. I don’t want to be erased. And I don’t want to erase my parents. Or my grandmother.
But it’s a burden, too. Some people are good at unloading. For me, I want these old things as intimations of immortality. Yeah, old stuff is tough. My kids will hate cleaning all this stuff up. No one will have time to stop and ponder. So — out to the trash it goes. Now. At least they won’t be able to accuse me of being a hoarder.
But I am. A hoarder of memories. While I’m alive. After that they can say, “What’s this old thing? Does anyone want it?” Only one will say yes, I think.
Peg Lewis is a great-grandmother, a linguist, and a life-long writer and scientist. She was born in New England. She also lived in San Diego, Spain, Switzerland, Beijing, New Zealand, and the Pacific Northwest. She currently resides in Tucson in a 3-generation household where she is next-to-oldest.
Peg believes in Old Love, a rich genre not to be confused with young romance. Old Love is about relationships, deep, enduring, and complicated. She knows: she has been married to space scientist and author John S Lewis for 57 years, and if she is old, he is yet older.
Read about Old Love in Peg’s Always Maggie Series, beginning with Maggie Awake. Or check out this free sample chapter, Mussels for Dinner.
