I had a very interesting day yesterday. What was planned was a quiet evening at home. Doing a little bit of painting (we are still finishing up our hallway) and some blogging in the evening turned into something different altogether. At 10 am I got a phone call from my aunt stating that my brothers were doing a major cleanup operation at my parents house. The where cleaning out the attic, the basement and what have you. Because I still had stuff lying around there, she thought it would be prudent to let me know. So I called up the cleaning-crew, stalled the operations a little bit and tried to salvage what I could. Now I admit, the basement looks like it is from a scene of a bad Mad max movie. Junk all over the place that has not been touched in years.. But that was exactly the point why I still had stuff lying around there. Cause no one was going to touch it for years. Of course .. that all changed. Thus I bolted homeward with our little van for what seemed like a salvage-what-you-can-before-they-throw-it-away operation.
So I spent the better part of my evening lugging around dusty boxes that I had put in the attick or in the basement. Most of it looked like crap, and yet, a box of letters from 20 years ago, postcards from friends, personal letters .. those are things you might just want to hang on to.. Or at least chuck in the scanner and turn it into a PDF before you throw it out.
Some of the other gems I dug up where my classic star wars toy collection (I still have an AT-AT walker and a Millennium Falcon from 1982) that might just get me some $$ on ebay someday. But apart from that they have a great sentimental value too.
And last but not least : My very first computer : My commodore 64 ! (with all the peripherals) including a bunch of old computer game magazines ! So classic. What it comes down to is that all this crap might be totally worthless in many people's eyes. And looking at the 'functionality' of it all.. It probably is. What is a 33 year old guy gonna do with an X-wing fighter, What use is there in holding on to a letter from your first girlfriend. (or the first letter from a girl that broke your heart) .. Nothing at all.
But they make up a part of our tangible legacy. A part of our past. And it is something you can touch. Looking back at my legacy of the last 5 years .. it is mostly digital. 9 gigabytes of digital pictures, 1700 shots on Flickr, an old blog on Lifejounal, articles I wrote on blogspot, the Knightwise website.. 37 podcasts, 20 more with the global geek. A fair part of work I must say. A lot of memories .. yet none of them are tangible. So I might just want to hold on to some of the memories of days gone by. Even if they appear stupid and will perhaps never be used again. They say that if you haven't used something for two years or more, you can throw it out. But some things just have their value in the fact that they are obsolete. They remind us of where we come from. Show us what we left behind and perhaps teach us just how precious the present is.