I have the tendency to collect and save scraps of my life, while my wife has the disposition to get rid of clutter, so we usually meet in the middle. However, I do periodically question my penchant for collecting what too often turns out to be the apparent trivia of our lives.
We moved to our present home in New Jersey 22 years ago, and despite my relentless vow to bring order out of chaos, our file folders are bulging, our garage is like a hastily arranged garage sale, our closets are bursting at the seams, and the top of my desk is so loaded that I occasionally shift the piles to permit dusting.
It's not that I'm against order and neatness. In fact, one of my major flaws is "perfectionitis," an absurd overdoing of something or just about anything, instead of leaving well enough alone.
The fallout from all this is that periodically when we have to locate something of importance, we panic with the thought that the sought-after document has been tossed and went away with a recent trash collection, but more often than not, the missing item turns up.
Nevertheless, as a boy, I remember a velvet-covered photo album that my mother kept in a desk drawer, and I frequently would stare at the black and white photos of men with long beards and women in dresses and hairdos that seemed very peculiar to a boy growing up during the World War II years. I would sometimes ask my mother who this one or that one was, and sometimes she didn't know.
My oldest brother ended up with that album, but he is deceased and nobody in the family seemed to know for sure what became of it. We have some photos and snapshots from it, but most of the photos are gone – evidently forever.
In going through some of my old files and boxes in the garage and a closet recently, I understood both the feeling of wanting to cling to memories of your past, as well as the feeling of wanting to remove clutter and unnecessary or meaningless mementos.
Deep inside one of my boxes are 8-millimeter and even 16-millimeter film of our children growing up, and of the pets we had, and of the wonderful times that we shared with family and friends, and of relatives and friends who have since died. There are also photos and albums from our youth, and our marriage and honeymoon, and jobs and births and deaths, and all the other apparent trivia that make up ordinary lives.
But ordinary memories should not be forgotten; in fact, they should be passed on – before the memories may be irretrievably lost.
Once when visiting the restored Ford Theater in Washington, D.C., where Abraham Lincoln had been shot, and going to the room where the president had been taken, and seeing the makeshift bed and pillow that he had been on, I had an urge to touch the pillow or bed, but it was roped off to the public.
It was a feeling that I wanted to touch greatness, for most of us pass through life as ordinary humans, and we are awed by the occasionally great ones among us – be they presidents or ballplayers or artists or scientists or whatever.
In any event, while the seeming trivia in a great person's life – like the wood splitting by Lincoln – become the stuff from which legends are made; the apparent trivia in ordinary lives become the basis for giving meaning and substance to ourselves and our loved ones and our family history.
One of our photo albums at home says simply on its cover: "Memories grow more beautiful each time they come to mind."
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