Memories

So I was looking for something this weekend. Just out of nowhere I suddenly really, really, really needed to find this thing and I was pretty sure I had seen it at some point somewhere, probably in the attic. In a box. Maybe.

So I had to go through the boxes in my attic. This was of course at 11pm Saturday night, which is really s great time to go pawing through dusty boxes in a sweltering attic environment in search of something that I may not have thought to save in the first place because, “why bother? I have it on disk! And 2.5 disks are always going to be readable! , why yes, please throw away that ancient, out modded word processor! I’m never going to need that thing again!” Hard copies people, it’s all about keeping hard copies. If you want to keep it, print it out! If it is “saved” on obsolete software it is trapped not saved.

I had to remember which box I was pretty sure what I was looking for lived in, and I was pretty sure where that box was. I have a lot of boxes. It wasn’t in the first group of boxes I went though. I thought I had found the right box, but instead it was full of stuff an alter server schedule dating from junior high – how did I save this? Better question why?. I don’t need it to remember happy days of alter server yore, being an alter server or a distaff Alter Boy for you who grew up in less progressive parishes, was hardly a happy task. It was a task and I only did it because my friend did it and then she promptly dropped out - I didn’t. I should have. But back into the box it went because there must be a reason that it has survived 24 or so plus years and a house fire and at least a dozen moves in the interim - I decided to treat it like a vase at the bottom of the ocean it shouldn’t have survived but there it is, be impressed with its resistance to the forces of nature.

There were also a lot of old letters. Huge amounts of old letters. Remember snail mail? It looks as though I had a healthy correspondence with just about every human being I ever met. There were even a few from people I couldn’t remember who they were. I think those dated from a pen pal phase I went though, the phase left me with a lot of bundled letters from people I can’t remember. It was a little jarring to find these strangers intermingling with my old high school paper press pass and clippings about the death of a friend.

A few years ago I went through another sifting through of my boxes and I pulled out all the letters I could find (and after digging through a few boxes, I found that I didn’t find very many) from a friend of mine that I had a correspondence with for years - She always surprised me, I would see her over the summer and she would inevitable ask “Hey, how is So and So?” and I was always Damn, did I tell her about him? When was the last time I even spoke to that person? She actually reads for content? Shit! I hope I’m not expected to know who her friends are. What’s the name again of that one she thinks is kind of a bitch? How do I frame that question, “Hey, how is whatshername? That girl you think is a bitch?”. I kind of hummed a lot.

I used to write letters, now I blog.