How long do you keep stuff?

MODS: This needs to be moved to Anything Goes, sorry.

So rearranging the home office, which is also my work office and was wondering what's the statute of limitations on keeping things?

I still have Little League baseball and pee wee football trophies. Swim team medals, weight lifting trophies.

It appears going through junk that I've kept every card ever mailed to me.

Hundreds of CDs I haven't listened to in at least 15 years. VHS tapes of vacations A high school letter jacket and my high school football jersey. Fraternity stuff. College stuff.

Thousands of pictures, plus negatives, plus, in some cases, CDs of those pictures.

Copies of papers and magazines I was published in or edited. Writing awards.

Just so much stuff and I don't know what to do with it.

So how long do you keep stuff?

 

I have two or three big plastic tubs with pretty much everything I wrote during the five years I worked at a daily paper. Most of my freelance work since then has been for a magazine, so all those are on shelves in the living room. I have my pee wee baseball uniform, elementary school report cards....lots and lots of stuff. We keep every Christmas card each year, and I enjoy looking back through those because they're often photo cards, and I can see how kids of friends have grown up. In my desk at work, I've kept every card sent to me by former students.

I'm a bit of a pack rat.

 

I used to be a pack rat. Last year at this time, I was filling up the back of my car with things I knew I would never use to try to streamline my studio space. There's an artists' coop and a smArt and they were getting the benefit of my need to clear out unused stuff. That will resume as soon as it's safe.

Some things that went away last year: old yearbooks, clothes, craft stuff, boxes of sports swag... I still have a lot to go to cleaning out my space. What was my inspiration? There was a documentary about Harlan Ellison and all I could think when they showed his workspace was it was lucky he was married. Otherwise, if he died in his office, it might take months to find him.

 

I've moved too often over the years to keep much. I have kept all of my finisher medals from the marathons I've done but little else that I don't use regularly.

When it comes to clothes, shoes and some other stuff that I'm not using enough to keep, I'm quick to post it on eBay.

 

I am nestled in now, but generally speaking I would say if I haven't touched something in two (2) years, off to the circular file it goes.

(Says the guy with a pile of Hardy Boys books in this room.)

 

Having lived in eight places in six different states - well, five ... North Carolina in two different stints and maybe again soon - in the last 14 years will test how much you want and like your stuff.

I have component audio, two sets of speakers and a TV still boxed up. But accounting for that and everything else not called my vehicle, it all easily fit in a 16-foot truck. Probably would have fit in a 10-footer, but I wanted something with a ramp as the drawers in which I store clothes are not removable.

I really like a lot of what I have, but I don't have much. Good that way.

 

When we moved my dad into assisted living and sold his apartment, he didn't want to save anything. It's just stuff, he said, and let us all off the hook. A lot of stuff went right down the trash chute. He had a beautiful refinished baby grand piano from the Twenties that I learned on and we had no space for. No one wants old pianos unless they're rare or special, not even the two orgs that are like adoption shelters for pianos. You have to pay someone to dump it in the landfill. At the last minute a family friend took it.

So my mantra is "it's just stuff." I have a two car garage that I park two cars in.

 

The last two times we have moved, we've thrown out or donated several tons of stuff. I refuse to get rid of books, but I threw out many of the letters I've received and birthday cards from 45 years ago and other shit like that. I'm a feral pack rat that my wife tries to tame.

 

My mom had to clear out all of her parents' stuff when my grandmother died. That was a long, arduous process, because it was a third-floor walk-up and a lot of the furniture and other things were valuable. (Also, we discovered my grandmother was a bit of a hoarder. A decade later, I'm still not sure my mom has had to buy bath soap. ) I found her local antiques experts and specialist consignment shops -- and, like goalmouth, there was a baby grand piano. (I think the landlord downstairs took the piano... or left it there when his sister took over the apartment.)

My parents lived in the same apartment for around 30 years (and my first 17!), so we had a lot of stuff to move to their first house. My mom has been there for about 25 years, and accumulated a lot more stuff. I know my college files and other random ephemera is in the attic, along with more of my grandparents' stuff -- both sides of the family.

I've lived in my current small apartment since 1998, and have way too much stuff. I purged a couple of corners in the spring -- lots of recycled newspapers -- with one significant corner to go once I finally order replacement rugs. But I kept my CDs after uploading them to my laptop, so I can play them in my car. I even have cassette tapes, and a Walkman-style device to play them on! I don't enjoy shopping, so I wear clothes until it's embarrassing to donate them. Books are relatively permanent fixtures too, though I usually borrow from the library rather than buy new ones.

My part of our very small office is a whole different mess. That's where my pack-rat tendencies are clear... and that's a lot of paper!

 

I've been a pack rat most of my life although these past 10 or so years I've gotten better with tossing things. I have about 4 of those big tubs with notes, copies of scoresheets, etc, etc. from a string of about 2 decades if not more. I still have ever book I've purchased or given to me (a 10-year-old shouldn't be reading Ball Four and certainly a 12-year-old shouldn't be reading Helter Skelter!). Heck, I still have my first-ever published sports story some place intact. It was for my middle school newspaper (remember those memographed sheets back in 1975?) and was about the high school basketball team's season. I used to keep stats on the high school basketball tournaments that were broadcast on local radio when I was in middle school (just scoring and score by quarters). Still have those sheets. One summer in the late 1990s I spent an entire summer transferring hand-written stat sheets for local high school football teams into a software program. I still have those side-spiral notebooks. Unless you want to enter the land of boredom stop reading now.....
I started writing about my high school's basketball team for my local newspaper in my sophomore year. The summer after high school graduation I worked there and wrote a on a variety of sports topics, typical fare like "Remember When" "Coaches Corner" "Where Are They Now". For one of the "Where Are They Now" pieces I briefly interviewed the head coach of a DII football program who got his coaching start at a local high school. I still have that story and remember finding it a few years ago. After reading it wondering "I was a pretty ____ good writer when I was 17. What the ____ has happened to me since then!"
EOS

 

I used to be really bad about keeping everything, not from a hoarder standpoint but from a nostalgia standpoint. I have finally come to the realization that unless it's functional, it's outta here. I don't have kids, so when I'm dead, whoever is left cleaning up my mess isn't going to know or care why I kept a seemingly random piece of paper or bottle cap. Just this past fall, I discovered in a box with every single high school grade slip I ever got. I used them to start a fire. I won't ever have a Presidential Library, so no future generations will really care that I had a 99 average in 11th grade U.S. History.