I've never tried to hide that I'm a pack rat. The summer after high school when I went to Europe, the chaperones presented me, at the end-of-summer awards dinner, with a squashed bun, meant to represent all the stuff I'd saved to put in my scrapbooks. I even saved sugar packets, emptying out the contents and placing the empty packets carefully on a page next to ticket stubs, postcards and theater programs.
It's a habit I've carried around with me most of my life. But when you move into a place half the size of your old one, you have to make some hard choices. Some of them turn out not to be as hard as you thought. For example, I had two yolk separators. When was the last time I used a yolk separator? (I kept one. I figured maybe it was a sign. Hey, baby steps.)
Today, I pulled a pile of notebooks out of a box, and they turned out to be some of the notes I'd saved from college, along with some papers I'd written. I don't exactly know why I'd saved these notes. Did I think I'd need the knowledge I'd gleaned from those classes someday? I'd think, what did Daniel Defoe mean in that one section of Robinson Crusoe? Oh, I know! I can just look it up!
Maybe I thought that one day they'd have historical value. I'd become famous, and my college notebooks would sell at auction for big bucks to one of my adoring acolytes. Well, I don't see that happening anytime soon, and I haven't touched these notebooks in more than a decade, so it's trash they will become. (Or recycling, that is. I am taking a break from tearing all the pages, a few at a time, out of the wire rings. And now the couch, the floor and my legs are covered in little bits of paper. Being environmentally responsible is a real drag sometimse.)
I did take one last look through the notebooks before I have to consign them to the curb, and just as I suspected -- or should have suspected when I saved them in the first place -- I found them boring and incomprehensible. Couldn't get through a few words without my eyes glazing over. Did Nabokov's notes provoke such disinterest? Surely not. Ergo, I am no Nabokov. I'm glad I could finally clear that up.
Perhaps another reason I could barely read my notes is that they were written in cursive. Yes, when I was in college, I took notes in cursive. I insisted I could write in cursive faster than I could print, which in fact was true; at some point shortly after college, I switched to print as my default writing out of embarrassment. (There are many ways in which I was uncool. Writing in cursive was the easiest of these to fix.) Seeing as how I now only use cursive -- or "cursive," I should say -- to sign my name, I'm fascinated to picture myself in my jeans and flannel (it was the '90s), casually and quickly scribbling away in such a neat, proper and, dare I say it, classy manner.
A sample:
I also found little messages written to other people who would have been sitting next to me. If college students today don't take notes with pen and paper (do they?), then this is an art of communication that has sadly been lost. They probably just text each other.
Also, doodles. I seem to have drawn a lot of flowers.
One day, I had bacon on my mind. It's nice that some things never change.
And so, the last perusal complete, out these notebooks go. What daring insights am I tossing away, never to be plumbed again? Sorry, history.
As an aside, I am, however, keeping the papers I wrote that were in that same pile. I was a much better -- though not as disciplined -- writer when I was 21 than I am now. I blame the Internet. Though it did make me tear up a little to read my Mass Communications 10 TA's enthusiastic comments saying, "You have a lot to offer the world; I hope you find your calling -- the world needs it!" All this time later, I still haven't found my calling. But it's heartwarming to know that he so wanted me to find it.
