Visiting The Past--Carefully

These days Tom is kinda-sorta certain he wants that Virginia job and so I have kinda-sorta been digging through boxes of all that paper they tell you not to keep (but you keep anyway).

I'm tossing stuff which survived previous cuts, but won't make the in-case-we-move-to-Virginia cut.

Good gracious. The junk we keep! So far, the silliest folder I've found is the one I labeled "Baby Information." And, uhm, well, every how-to-care-for-your-soon-to-arrive-baby article inside that folder was 27 years old! Rampant sentimentality at its worst--and into the recycling bag they went.

There are calendars I stashed away from 20 years ago, ones I kept as 'diaries' since back then I wasn't organized/awake/together enough to keep a real diary. Only three, or so, I'll save to remind me of the places we went and people we saw during Naomi's high school years, but the others? They joined the baby information.

Receipts from car repairs of cars we no longer own, insurance information from items long ago sold, my old typewritten lesson plans from eleven years ago when I taught adult Sunday School and women's seminars at church. All in paper grocery bags now.

And after all that sorting, I have that took-a-trip-back-in-time feeling. You know, the hazy one which clings to your head because suddenly you've bombarded your brain, like an awakened bee hive, with memories of people, gatherings and happenings you'd not recalled in years.

Perhaps you take trips back to the Past often, but I don't. No, I seldom travel back that way, even by way of video home movies. But when I do? I remain only ten minutes, or so, for those trips feel too much like riding a bicycle where I turn my head to stare and then lose my balance or crash into a telephone pole.

I lose my balance when I visit the Past and glimpse only the good times, but ignore the bad ones. 

You'd think that's a positive thing, but it isn't if it creates a yearning to return to something which was never as perfect as I recall it. Or there are the memories which mostly I recall as dark and humiliating and those are the kind that can jump into Today and haunt me for hours. 

No, if I take the road back to my past, I peek just a few moments and only as long as appreciation accompanies me, and generally, only long enough to learn something valuable. Besides, my past is now a lonely place, for all my loved ones live other places--they have moved on from there--and so should I. 





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