Everything.
I’m at my late mother’s house. My sisters have been working hard to sort out the years and years of stuff Mom had stashed away. They have dragged out boxes and boxes of stuff.
Would you believe she kept all of my report cards? Somehow she also got her hands on my university exams and put them in bags and boxes. Right now I’m looking at my exam from Genetics 453, The Genetics of the Evolutionary Process, from Winter quarter 1979 at the University of Washington. I got a 7.3 out of 8.0 on it, with a 3.8 grade for the term. I’m kind of flabbergasted. My mother should have been a CIA operative.
There’s so much more. I was the assistant editor of the O’Brien Elementary newsletter in 5th grade. Mom had a copy. It’s silly.
In 3rd grade, I almost died of acute appendicitis (I survived, don’t worry), and missed a couple of weeks of school. My classmates wrote me “get well soon” letters. Mom saved them, of course. Among them is a letter from one Mary Gjerness, who about 15 years later was going to become Mary Myers. Weird. She is mildly upset now that she made several misspellings.
Throughout college and grad school, I was regularly writing letters home — you know Mom filed them all away. The mindblowing thing to me was how neat and tidy and well laid out my handwriting was, all written with a fountain pen. Partway into grad school I got a home computer and a dot matrix printer, and that was the beginning of the end of my penmanship. I should probably go buy a fountain pen and start practicing again.
It’s not just me, either. My brothers and sisters are all archived in this vast collection of personal documents.
I thought I was going to see a few old photographs, but no, I’m now deluged with ancient artifacts from my past. I have to stop looking at these things, because I’ve got a week of banking and probate law to deal with.
If only I were interesting enough to deserve a book written about me, my biographer would be set.
Aaw. Poignant nostalgia, you have good reason for it.
—
But hey, next stage in your lives coming up.
And it’s gonna be good.
your wife’s baby letter was adorable, love it. also i thought i got appendicitis young at 19. 3rd grade? woof.
Bonus: You get to do the week’s worth of banking and probate (and lawyerly) annoyances in only four days because tomorrow (Monday) is a holiday, which will at least enable you to sort through a couple more boxes before the fun begins…
So…what are you going to do with all that? Do you have the heart to throw it all out, or will you hand it down to your own kids? My mother was the same. We found boxes of check stubs dating back to the 40s, I think. And news clippings of everything (if the local paper had burned down, she could’ve restored their morgue).
I think it’s a result of living through the Depression. Unfortunately, I absorbed that same fear of throwing things away (though these days it’s more not knowing how to toss things responsibly).
On the other hand, I think about artifacts that now treasured, like old Civil War letters and photos that got saved and handed down (not thinking about my stuff here). I wonder what it will be like to be a historian in the next century (assuming people are still around).
I heard of someone who, when they died and relatives were clearing their house, they found a box labelled “pieces of string too short to be of use”.
My mother was an avid reader. Always had her nose in a paperback. We were going through her stuff packing up her “library” when I discovered a $50 bill in one of the books. We flipped through all of them and collected over $800 as I recall. She never mentioned this strange and wonderful habit!
A delightful post!
PZ — I realize it’s tempting to dismiss these as trivia, but they seem like a wonderful miscellany of American life.
johnstumbles @ #6 — That someone seems like my partner but without the labeling.
Your mother left you and your siblings a treasure trove. And you, like everyone else who ever lived, is interesting enough to deserve a biography. (One of the few advantages of the ‘fantastic AI’ that we’re being promised like we were promised flying cars is that there would be someone to write a thorough, detailed, and loving, biography of each of us.)
You might consider this junk, but your grandkids and great-grandkids will be interested, just as I have become interested in my grandparents in my latter years, and curse that so much was thrown away.
But you have an option previous generations never had:
Scanning the papers and saving them in digital form!
Please take the suggestion seriously. Your adult grandkids will be curious about your parent’s generation, and when you are gone your great-grandkids will eventually wonder about you and your wife. The photos and other papers compressed to ones and zeros can accompany the Myers clan indefinitely without taking up space in the attic.
My niece has already scanned all of the pile I’ve looked at. There’s more, but she seems to have made it a project to archive it all.
“I hop your back in school.”
Hmm, doesn’t quite capture the emptiness of my soul in his absence.
“I sure wish that you could come to school.”
That’s the ticket.
profpedant wrote: “One of the few advantages of the ‘fantastic AI’ that we’re being promised…is that there would be someone to write a thorough, detailed, and loving, biography of each of us.”
That’s kind of the premise of Orson Scott Card’s “Speaker For the Dead.” While Card is a homophobic asshole, I still like the idea from that book, unrealistic and impractical as it may be.
I am the person in our family who has collected all of the memorabilia. When we moved from Texas to California, we had quite a few boxes full of papers and pictures. I bought clear plastic boxes, labeled one for each of our five kids, one for my husband and me, and one for family pictures and papers. I sorted as I unpacked moving boxes.
Since my husband is retiring at the end of this year, beginning next year, he can start digitizing.
I plan to do the old-fashioned scrapbook/ picture album for each of the kids. I even have their HS letter jackets!
I plan to send the packages directly to their spouses, so that there is a greater chance of these things not being immediately hidden.
I’m hoping that someday, someone in the family will appreciate and want the china, glass collections and antique furniture from both sides of the family that I have. I would hate for all of it to wind up in an impersonal antique shop when I’m gone.
I had two sets of grandparents on opposite ends of the spectrum. My maternal grandmother was constantly giving things away in anticipation of having to downsize (as in, she was giving us back gifts we had given her the previous Christmas. It seems like a no-brainer to just send a card or something to let them know we were thinking of them, but then Grandpa got upset). My dad’s parents, however, kept everything. My aunt and uncle from California went out there for the summer for three years running to help Grandma get rid of stuff. When I was there helping, I went into the office, and she and Grandpa had saved every single magazine from when my dad was the editor of Kansas Wildlife (back from 1976-1983) and then Wyoming Wildlife (he retired in 2013). Grandma moved out to California in 2009. When I showed Aunt Kate what I had found, her response was, “I can’t take it anymore!”
Don’t throw anything away PZ. In 10 years you will use it to write a memoir.
My mother kept all my report cards starting in kindergarten…
When my mother in law died we found the same for my wife and her sister. Report cards for their entire childhood. She also had certificates for my father in law and his brother from church, 1917 and 1920.
When my mother died we found the hospital bill for my and my twin’s birth. Since I was number 2 in the order I was cheap.
Um, either Larry Sandler or I gave you that 3.8. If it was me, if only I’d known you’d become the one and only PZ Myers I would have made it higher. Hope you didn’t hate our course too much.
PS I declared here that Seattle area was a “seller’s market” for housing. That is not really true, as your real estate agent will have told you. Buyers are hesitant because of high interest rates on mortgages. Best wishes in selling.
No, it was a great course. I was looking at the answers I gave, and I think you graded me generously as it was. I felt like whipping out my red pen and taking a few more points off. Or tenths of a point.
Sounds familiar. My mother was a great hoarder. She kept Christmas and birthday cards and letters. Most interesting was one from my aunt welcoming her to the family. That was very significant since her and my father were the closest of the siblings. We did the tidy up of a lot of the papers when my mother went into a nursing home and my father moved into a nearby retirement village. Sadly he spent most of his days before the move tidying up the house that was their dream home. This meant throwing out everything. My sister and I would arrive to find piles of garbage bags in the lounge room ready to be taken away by a disposal service. We lost a lot of memorabilia. Old family photos, books and saddest of all his old morse keys which he used in his pre-war job as a telegraphist. These were automatic morse keys designed to be tuned to send high speed morse and were a marvel of engineering. We did however recover a lot of significance and still have tangible memories of both of them.
hear you about writing. Mine was always terrible and made worse by being left-handed. It wasn’t until high school when at the suggestion of a teacher I switched from a biro to a fountain pen. This meant writing a little slower and meant I formed the letters better and ended up with something approaching handwriting. Still my erudite English teacher called it “The Waltz of the Fly in Ink time” while my maths teacher reckoned I used an alcoholic spider. I still use a fountain pen it helps my writing as the arthritis in my hands gets worse.
On the topic of using your mother’s archives to do a biography or biographies. I suggest a joint project rather then letting one person do all the writing. My great grandfather’s diary and my great grandmother’s household accounts book were discovered in their old house during renovations long after their deaths. My uncle got hold of them and prepared a biography of his grandfather based on them, his personal memories and interviews with his very elderly aunt who was in the grip of dementia. The portrayal of my great grandfather was so unflattering that my father who had very different memories of his grandfather tossed his copy and other family members were not happy either. I eventually got hold of both the diary and accounts book together with the biography and agreed with my father although I only had his accounts of memories of him. The diary begins with great grandfathers voyage to Australia from Ireland on an immigrant ship. It contains copies of his references from employers and others who knew him. He meticulously recorded details of the ship, its daily position and events on the voyage. He recorded his efforts to find work and his negotiations with his employer for a fair wage. They were short paying him according to the government award rate. You could see in his letters and notes the dispute becoming increasingly acrimonious as he kicked against the pricks who were ignoring his requests. Eventually he was dismissed. My uncle claimed it was because he was a hopeless drunk. My father had a story of him arriving home in the small hours of a Saturday riding his horse backwards after spending most of the night drinking with his mates at a sly grog shop. However after his sacking he started his own haulage business and he and his wife raised five children. Life wasn’t easy back then and it was reflected mostly in the household accounts book but there is another story of a successful businessman who ended up owning two houses before they moved to the city.
My late mother kept tax forms from 1953 which was before I was born . . The IRS needs to go back to those much, much simpler forms. The only thing I have from her is her high school yearbook from 1944 and a snake plant that she was given as a wedding present which makes that plant at least 71 years old!
The proof of my late mother’s unconditional love for us, was her saving one of my wretched report cards. I shredded it as soon as I found it. I’m not a Republican. But there is some history that belongs in the dustbin.
Spoiler warning: the narrator survives! :)
I told my son that whatever things he finds of his when I’m gone are clues to a mother’s heart. For myself, as a young adult I cleaned up, threw out my third grade math papers and a lot of other stuff including my collection of baseball cards from the 50’s and 60’s. Regret that latter, and it inhibits me from throwing out other stuff.
My mother should have been a CIA operative.
Perhaps she was – one with enough savvy to stash the secret documents where the family could never find ’em.