The Purge: Ancient odds and ends I have no clue why I have

Why do I have an old City High French textbook, drafts of high school love letters, and a UI campus mail folder filled with material from my freshman year of college in a box?

I don’t know, but I’m getting rid of all of it.

My purge of unnecessary and unwanted stuff continues. I recycled a bunch of old posters recently and am now cleaning out boxes that had likely been unopened since my parents moved house in 2004. Along with the French textbook, very embarrassing letters, and college orientation material, the boxes contained a trove of ancient odds and ends. While some items were cringeworthy and embarrassing reminders of the past, others were gems I plan to keep.

This recent find underscores once again the fact that I have way too much stuff and don’t want any more. Bobblehead mentioned recently that he is less interested in acquiring stuff as he gets older, and I feel the same way. In fact, I’ve felt that way for a while, ever since I lived in California. Limiting my personal possessions to whatever I can easily fit in my car taught me how little I need.

However, my material austerity does not do anything about the stuff I have already—much of it I’m unsure why I have.

In one box I unearthed recently, I found pieces of wood I broke off the cheap, makeshift outfield fencing at the Napoleon Park softball fields in 1995 (I was 12 and bored at my sister’s softball games). Why did I keep those? I used one to push nails and tacks into the walls of my room when hanging posters, so there are nail and tack indentations on one side. Did it have such sentimental value that I kept that piece and its brethren, souvenirs from the summer of ‘95? Perhaps they were pushed to the side for later cleaning and were boxed when my parents moved. That’s how my mom has accrued so much crap, why the storage and computer rooms at my parents’ house are filled with Xerox boxes full of all kinds of useless stuff: She puts everything in boxes when cleaning, puts the box somewhere out of sight so she can sort through it later, and forgets about it. There are years’ worth of boxes like that.

My memory of the French textbook is fuzzier. Printed in 1985, it’s an interesting blast from the past complete with the names of students who used it each year, marginalia in pen and pencil, and juvenile humor:





But it’s unfamiliar to me. I’m sure I never used it as a student. (I’m pretty sure we used the On y Va! series of books, because I remember discussing the meaning of the phrase. I think the closest translation is “let’s go!”) More than likely, the foreign language department cleaned house and my French teacher offered the books to us. But why did I take one? Deep in the throes of my awkward eighties phase, did I think the books were a rare, cool relic? If I did, I don’t feel that way anymore. The textbook is another thing I don’t need or want, so I will recycle it. (Interestingly, it is one of two French textbooks I have. The other is from college, and I have no clue why I’ve kept it. Perhaps I’m keeping it in case I want to dust off my French.)

I shredded the love letters and recycled just about everything from my freshman year of college, though I may keep the resident guidebook for its pictures of contemporary UI students dressed like characters in Dawson’s Creek and working on beige Macs. I doubt I will keep the Far Side calendars from the nineties (one is a 16-month calendar for 1989-1990), and I have no clue what to do with the Los Angeles Raiders fabric sling left over from a chair I broke in 1997. It may be my first sale on eBay.

But I don’t plan to get rid of everything I’ve found. Inside one box was a bag full of papers from my sophomore year of high school, stuff I clearly intended to recycle at the end of the year since it included schoolwork from friends and classmates (I always recycled my friends’ old assignments and worksheets for them). Instead of being dumped in the library’s recycling bin, it ended up in a box in my room. Among the biology homework, spelling tests, and book reports (which will finally be recycled) were the syllabus, lesson guides, and stories I wrote for my Foundations to Journalistic Writing class. What a find! I will definitely save those.