Toss Away, Toss Away, Wait A Minute -- Stop

Here is something you don't think about when you start off young. Over the course of your life you will gather all kinds of junk like a magnet. It will begin to overflow drawers, clutter up closets and if not whipped back with a super strength of will, wipe out whole rooms. One day you wake up old and you say what in the world am I gonna do with all this stuff?

There is a general rule of thumb, so I have heard, that if you ain't used it in the last six months, toss it out.

Yeah, easy for you with a non-hoarder heart to say.

Dang, I got stuff I ain't seen in six years. In fact, as I just discovered, stuff I ain't seen in six decades.

(That's about how long ago it was someone told me I ain't supposed to use the word "ain't". And as you can see its still cluttering up my grammar.)

Ain't that a shame.

Anyway, the Little Woman and I decided a few weeks ago we ought to get rid of all this claptrap of life. It is a hard thing to do for me. I don't know why. I know it is silly to hang on to things I'll never use.

For instance, I use to have four thousand books. That was just the start in the picture on the right. Bookshelves lined the walls of the family room and we have a large family room.  I had even more, but we had a leak one year and several hundred got ruined.

A couple years ago I gave away about 1,000 books to a local library and I tossed quiet a few more that were damaged or simply obsolete (there are some books that become obsolete, such as computer manuals).

Despite this, I still have way too many books and I should give more to the library, especially the novels. I know full well I am not going to re-read all the novels I own; I couldn't, I won't live that long. But to box them up and haul them away is very difficult for me.

I fight this pack rat urge all the time. The other day I pulled everything out of a big storage closet we have. Among the Christmas decorations, four bowling balls (like we haven't bowled in twenty-five years), 78 RPM records and other miscellaneous antiquities were two cartons of Plasticville buildings. These use to be on my model train layouts when I was a boy; WHEN I WAS A BOY!  Do you understand that my model trains were steam engines when I was a boy? This is how long I have held on to these objects.

I know I am not going to be putting up train platforms anytime again on God's green earth, so I steeled myself and decided they go out with the trash. So I mention this to the Little Woman and what does she say? "Oh, if they don't take up much space maybe we should keep those."

Woman, you aren't helping!

One carton is about three and a half feet high by two feet by two feet. The other carton is four foot long by two feet by one foot. They take up a bit of space and that is all they will ever do now.

Sigh!

Anyway, I pulled a large plastic tub out a few days ago and inside I found a stack of original copies of stories and poems I wrote. In the middle of the stack were some old sketches I did as a teenager, so I pulled these out and scanned them into the computer.  I was going to post them in my  "Tatters" Blog. But this morning I found in another old plastic tub a scrapbook and when I opened it I found a lot more old drawings, going back to when I was 7 years old. With so many old pieces, I decided to give them a separate blog called "Charcoal and Pen Lines".

One of the old drawings I found is the one at the top of this post, a sketch I did of my friend Ronald, known today as Retired in Delaware.  It was drawn in September of 1960.

I took a detail from a charcoal drawing, "Awakening", that I did in 1956 at the age of 15 to use as my banner on the new Blog.  Sometimes even things you haven't seen in six decades you still want to keep.