I’m a pack rat.  I save everything.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve really stepped up my clean up effort at the house.  During the past few days alone, I’ve thrown out five large bundles of newspapers and four large boxes of “stuff” that I was saving for some reason.  I had newspapers from pretty much every memorable event over the past 20 years.  Most of them were sports related.

I have mentioned before that I save wedding invitations.  I felt like if I just threw them in the trash, it would be a bad omen for the couple.  Over the past weekend, I found practically every invitation to every wedding I have ever attended.  Some of these weddings have even already ended in divorces.  I also found graduation cards, Christmas cards, birthday cards, letters and even receipts – some of them were 15-20 years old.  A lot of the letters and cards were from my college days.  I found letters from family members, friends and even former co-workers.

I spent a lot of the weekend re-reading some of these items, keeping only the most important items, and throwing most of them away.  Hopefully in doing so, I will send no bad karma to anyone’s marriage (if so, I apologize in advance).  Today, I can now officially say that I was a pack rat.  One can’t continue to physically save everything.  We can only rely on our memories and feelings to remember people.

Because of these feelings (and few things that happened last week) and because I am a maudlin sap, it has been a really emotional couple of days.  And because of this, I have recently a few messages to people I’ve known a really long time thanking them for those cards and letters.

Sometimes we need to stop and remember our past.  The clock and calendar never stop moving.