Deboxing Is Essential
As my friend Jim and I stopped to rest on a bench during a walk through a nearby park not long ago, he told me he had found a box filled with photographs in his basement, pulled out an envelope with prints and negatives, looked at them, tossed them into the trash and then chucked the entire box. He said he‘s now ready to attack the many other boxes gathering dust down there.
Jim is two decades younger than I am, but his health is fragile. He has no children or intimates who would want those pictures, he decided. The memories he had recorded would disappear when he did.
I understand.
Just about every elderly person I know is trying to dispose of stuff that has accumulated over many years. I‘m among them. My stuff is mostly paper, several banker‘s boxes in a storage space above the laundry room downstairs, several more piled up in the guestroom in my flat, in front of book cases and two tall oak filing cabints that are also full of paper. It would be unkind to leave the chore of getting rid of all that to my offspring. My daughter reminds me that they weigh on my mind. If I get rid of them I would feel free, she says, and I think she‘s right, but I never seem to find the necessary time.
The record of much of my life and work is in those boxes. Notes, research, stories published and not. Themes I‘ve been following for years. Dump all that?
Yes, an inner voice answers. It‘s all interesting but who will want it? Nobody comes to mind. And you don‘t need them.
Like Jim, I‘ve made a start. I have pulled out files from the 1970s and leafed through them. That was a decade rich with hope and ideas. Many of us thought we could bring about significant changes in the country. Land reform proposals were introduced, in keeping with policies the U.S. government proposed for developing countries where large landholders prevented the establishment of democracy. In my files I found a proposal by Peter Barnes, campaign aide for progressive presidential candidate Fred Harris, for reclaiming for the public the huge expanses of land that had been given to the railroads as right-of-ways. (Also working for Harris‘ election was Jim Hightower, former secretary of agriculture of Texas, who still is out there with his newsletter, Hightower Lowdown, a witty pro-democracy voice.)
The American Indian Movement came to the fore in the 1970s, demanding that the government fulfill broken promises, and I interviewed Dennis Banks, Russell Means, Janet McCloud and other AIM leaders. Until I came out west from New York in 1967 I was not even aware that Native Americans still existed, and now here was a group calling itself Indians of All Tribes, occupying Alcatraz.
That was a thrilling, promising time. And of course there were the psychedelics, which enabled many people to expand their vision beyond conventional reality. Someone deeded a ranch to God and the authorities did not know how to record the deed. I wrote about that too, and shall I now toss out those files?
Yes, says the little voice inside me. And I have made a beginning, whittling down fat folders and tossing out a few. The information I have surely also exists elsewhere. Keep your published stories, if you like, says the voice.
All right, but not so fast! Yesterday I opened another of those boxes and pulled out a fat folder held together by rubber bands: the typed manuscript of my first book, Turning On, the copy I had sent to the publisher, with a proof-reader‘s pencilled notations in the margins. This book marked a major turning point in my life. Toss the manuscript?
I realized that I had not actually read the book since it was published in 1989. So now I opened the folder, started to leaf through the still-crisp pages, and kept on reading, for most of the day. I had forgotten some of what I had written. Somehow, in manuscript the book was freshened, renewed. Some sections were well-done, I thought, but I also found drivel that I, as an editor of many years‘ experience now, would have cut out. I also would have been more sparing of the new lingo that had sprung up to describe new experiences (turning on, for one). Annoyed and embarrassed, I had to remind myself to be tolerant of that young writer who went by my name in 1967, to remember how much the times have changed.
My editor for Turning On at Macmillan was Alan Rinzler, who was also one of the editors of my most recent book, Flight. We have both gotten much much better at our work in the intervening years. I wrote him a message saying that. And now those old typed pages go into the recycling bin.
A friend whose father was on President Roosevelt‘s Council of Economic Advisers had papers far more important than mine. He kept them for years, then eventually discarded them. Only a few weeks later, someone turned up who wanted them for a history project. Too late. Oh well.
My mother, who lived to 101, kept a little book recording her work hours as a nurse on Russian troop trains bringing back wounded soldiers from the front during World War I. She kept it almost to the end of her life. One morning I found it, torn to pieces in her trash basket. I retrieved it and will keep it to pass on. Why? Because I can‘t throw away something my mother kept for so long. It‘s in a small box I‘m keeping of her stuff, including her U.S. citizenship papers and our old family album, in a small suitcase we brought with us when we fled from our native land during World War II. There‘s room at the bottom of my closet for that. No more boxes will clutter the guest room! And my mind will be open for whatever tomorrow brings.
