::Heavy sigh::
Still hacking from spending several hours a couple of weeks ago in my attic trying to weed out some baseball material. As you can imagine, it’s very difficult. Part of it must be psychological: As long as you have “stuff,” you’ll never die. To put it another away, “I can’t die; look at all the stuff I’ve got!”
Of course, part of it I blame on my mother, a Depression-era child who never got rid of anything (at least it seemed that way when we cleaned out her apartment after she passed away (so much for that theory). It took a month.) If you have it, you keep it, because you never know when you’re going to need it.
But reality set in and I realized it’s not fair to burden the family with having to get rid of a lifetime of accumulated books, magazines, and paper. So bit by bit, I’m purging.
First on the list, getting rid of a several years’ worth of Baseball Weekly. I had every issue since it first came out, before USA Today ruined it by changing it to Sports Weekly. I even kept the one my wife ripped in half when she was mad at me for some reason.
What was I really keeping them for? Out they went in last week’s recycling. Actually felt kind of good. Cleansing. Still it’s a long battle. I have magazines from the 1960s and 70s that I’m loathe to part with for their historical and nostalgic value. I know, I know. I also have several large albums of clippings about the 1993 Mets season when I was working on a book about the travails of being a fan of a team that was really stinko. Do I really need to hold onto those? They’re really just a testament to wasted time. Still if I could find a “home” for them, I’d rather go that route.
Obviously, this is a work in progress. Next up, a box of baseball cards from the 1990s. I know I should just toss them but I. Just. Can’t. Do it.
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{ 3 comments }
Hi Ron.
I’ve got the same job in front of me. I have boxes of magazines and newspapers that I have sifted through in nearly 30 years. Let me know if you find some kind of a 12-step program for recycling magazines that have Rod Carew on the cover.
Recycle them at least. I kept Baseball/Sports Weekly for years for no real reason and then one year I was hired to edit a book called Best Baseball Writing that included numerous Sports Weekly stories (USA Today was paying). So my stack of Sports Weeklys actually came in handy. Once. Now I always keep a year’s worth of them in my office, which slides into two years, and it’s been five years since the book came out (there was no sequel). The stack grows higher with each worthless issue. I feel your pain.
Oh, absolutely to recycling, Matt. The library has strict policies about donations, so I sometimes sneak a box of stuff over before the open. The older ones end up being sold at the occasional used book sales they hold.
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