What to keep
When I was little, my mom kept a bushel-size apple box for each of us, with our memorabilia in them. When I was a young teen, about the time my sister was firmly in upper elementary, semi-independent, and my mother had no more children at home during the day, my mom got to work putting photos into albums and papers into scrapbooks. We’re talking physical prints into physical books, by the way; online albums did not yet exist. This meant labeling each and every photo by hand, in ink (we did have ballpoint pens, not quills—dude!), with names of people in the photo, date (at least an estimated year), and the location. Then each photo had to be affixed to a page or inserted into a plastic sleeve, with tape or some fixative. Most fixatives were not yet archival. They broke down so quickly, within a few years, that archive-safe materials are in demand now.
Periodically in childhood we went through our boxes, usually as a family, each with our own box. I enjoyed seeing my drawings from the past. It annoyed me that some I wanted to keep were not in the box, and some my mother liked were kept. My mother sometimes cleaned my room while I was at school, probably because I had not cleaned it for weeks. She invariably got rid of some papers I desperately wanted and kept inconsequential ones.
At one point I came home to a super-clean bedroom; I sobbed and sobbed as I got out my bead collection and mounded them in the middle of the floor. I was so angry I wanted to make a mess, but I loved my jewel-color beads so much that I carefully cleaned every last one of them up afterwards. I was fully aware of the irony, and afraid I would lose them to the vacuum.
She encouraged us to put our memorabilia into scrapbooks; I did this during the summer after my high school graduation. I knew I would not be returning to stay, and I had seen my mother and father give each child one of their bushel boxes whenever they visited from out of town. I didn’t want to leave any boxes in their garage.
Anyway, I worked as a dishwasher and sorted my boxes. I had more than one by then; I had learned to restrain my papers to more orderly piles. I wrote and drew a lot, plus produced papers for school and won awards. There was a row of trophies. My mother suggested taking a picture of me with them, based on advice from Don Aslett, her favorite uncluttering expert. Then we could get rid of the trophies and keep the picture. I agreed. I didn’t particularly care for the trophies, except for one.
My brother had his name on the school’s plaque for the John Phillip Sousa Band Award. My name went up there, too; I was proud of that. I kept that one trophy for years, plus five pins for five years of perfect spelling test scores. The trophies for lettering in swimming and speech, the trophies for placing at state in speech, the jazz award for jazz band, didn’t speak to me the same way. I had had awards practically thrown at me for years. I was a hard worker in things I committed to, which included showing up, doing excellent work, and being consistently a good citizen. It amounted to following their clear directions.
