I tend to write a lot about memory and things from the past – specifically my memory and my past. It’s not that I don’t like living in the present, but I am a ruminator of days gone by when it comes to putting things down on paper (or computer). Maybe it has to do with my reticence to form an early opinion – you won’t find me Tweet-ing or Status-ing a heck of a lot. I read the backlist of books more often than new releases. I like to cull pictures and memorabilia five or ten years later – when I have some sense of what’s really important to me.
What’s important to me is subjective, but as a memory keeper for my family I do sometimes hold onto things that I think maybe my boys will one day agree is important: their favorite t-shirts from teenager-hood, picture books from toddlerhood and even some baby teeth and the locks of first haircuts. Rick and I also have things saved from our teenage and toddler years and then, beyond that, I have things that I saved of my mother’s – greeting cards from us kids, her wedding invitation collection and a stack of Edmonton Journal comics pages that I cannot recycle. Not yet. Maybe not ever.
A couple weeks ago Rick and I wandered into the Old Strathcona Antique Mall, a place burgeoning with nostalgia, complete with price tags. We have a few things we might want to sell so we were looking for similar things – and we quickly learned we weren’t going to get rich. But it was fascinating to see what was deemed saveable and saleable: a used paper cup with a John Deere emblem, a framed and signed photo of Wayne Gretzky on ice only wearing skates and gym shorts circa 1980-something, hundreds of mugs and badges and signs emblazoned with old logos and all the Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys books ten times over.
As we wandered the aisles, we did a lot of “I remember that!” and “My auntie had one of those!” and also plenty of “I can’t believe that someone would want that/pay for that/saved that!” But then, everyone’s memory is subjective – and important. I recently read Susan Orlean’s The Library Book, which chronicles the history of the Los Angeles Central Library told with the through-line of the devastating fire that nearly wiped it out in the 1986. I found it so interesting that the library wasn’t just the storehouse of books, magazines and DVDs. Of course, I’m aware that most libraries have collections or archives of some sort. But a large library like the one in Los Angeles also is the repository of old maps, single subject book collections (like about rubber or oranges) donated posthumously by a passionate collector’s family, and any and all paraphernalia deposited there by defunct social action groups. It’s like they think everything is important.
And it is. Maybe not to you or me, but to someone else it could the connection to a history they thought was lost. Or never knew about at all. It reminds me of an episode of Marie Kondo’s show Tidying Up, where a retired couple had never cleaned out the house they inherited from the husband’s parents, just moved in themselves. Once they started sifting and purging their closets, old photos surfaced and antiques they never knew about – and never would have if someone hadn’t saved it in the first place.
I’m not saying we should save everything – gosh, people are paying too much for storage lockers as it is. But curating a collection of things important to you – in a bureau or a box or a book – is actually good way to secure your place in the future, a way to remember and be remembered.
