Sunday, June 19, 2005

TREASURES

*emerges from the depths of the closet and catches sight of herself in the mirror; an impossibly huge smile plastered across her face*

*removes coat hanger from her mouth*

Ahhh.....wondered where that went.

While going through closets, drawers and {shudder!} the basement has been somewhat torturous, I have mined some treasures along the way.
  • A note written to me by my youngest daughter when she was 7, complaining that her best friend was "a big fat snot".
  • Long ago photographs of the girls; Jenni, age 3 in dance class, woefully out of step; Meghan with chocolate cake from her first birthday smeared all over her sleepy face.
  • A photograph of me with college friends, taken after several of us had gotten married; all of us with embarrassing '70's hair.
  • A card from my ex-husband, stating his wish that we remain friends
  • A card from a friend that I received about 10 years ago to bolster me during a down time. That card has magically re-appeared over the years during times of stress.
  • A letter from another college friend containing the most romantic thing anyone has ever said to me, which is really interesting since he and I were never romantically involved.
  • My girls with my sister's children; all between ages of 3 and 7; dirty, sweaty, sleepy and happy after a day of playing hard at Grandma and Grandpa's.
  • The last letter I received from a high school friend before she died of breast cancer.
  • My oldest daughter's writings about our trip to Colorado several years ago, containing notes of all the places she saw God on that trip.

It got me to thinking about the digital age in which we now live. Photographs are kept on CD's or hard drives and e-mailed to family and friends. Or we view them through websites. We stay in touch with one another through e-mail, text-messages and IM's. Some of us keep journals on websites. Will this mean our future will be more clutter-free?

If this is the case, then in the future, where will we unearth the treasures from our past? Where will we find long forgotten love letters and photographs to remind us of the times when we were young, in love and had horrible hairstyles? How will the spirit and memory of a departed friend unexpectedly arise from the depths of a drawer? Will we find treasures documenting the progression of our children from their whiney, self-centered complaints to their eloquent expressions of the wonderment of God?

I think we may be missing out by having all of our treasures stored in RAM.

And I don't honestly think my drawers will ever be clutter-free.

9 comments:

rita said...

My mom prints every email she gets, along with any photos, and saves them all. I've been meaning to start a journal to give to Avery when she's older (planned to start it 6 years ago, before she was born) and Mom has all the emails I'd sent her before Av was born, and since. I can go through them and find my thoughts at any time in the child's life.

If I ever do it.

My grandmother went from "Have the girls written today?" to "Have the girls called today?" to "Have the girls emailed today?" It was so cool the way she adapted to modern things.

PollyME said...

Sly! This is great! It's about time you started a blog!

Anonymous said...

Not to be a grammar sergeant, but shouldn't it be Slyeyes' Ramblings in the window title instead of Slyeye's Ramblings?

And as far as saving things goes, memory is getting cheaper and smaller; soon, there will be no reason to delete emails, simply archive them (gmail is at this point already). However, there's rarely any reason to be looking through that archive, so important emails may never be "found."

Technology is moving forward so fast that each new generation is going to have a new set of values and ways to communicate and have fun.

DonnaJo said...

Bis, thanks for catching the error. I'll correct it if I can figure out the editing function.

Anonymous said...

Yay! fixed!

I didn't want anyonw to get the mistaken notion that only one of your eyes is sly...

Anonymous said...

Saving things on the computer is good. While I don't print out all my emails, certain things do get printed out, or at least written down on scraps of paper. I've already come across some that I had forgotten, so had the fun of rediscovering them.

Anonymous said...

It seems I forgot to put my name on that post...ooops.

Anonymous said...

I think the key is keeping things--whether on paper or electronically. I saved every letter I ever got, practically. When my father died, I went through his letters and shared a brilliant one at his memorial--a letter he wrote to me on my 27th birthday. My sister felt sad that she had no such memento from him--it's because she throws things out. I'm a packrat. Packrats win in the end!

wysiwyg said...

Sly, what you'll uncover in the ages to come will be a pile of old outdated personal computers gathering dust.

I know this will be true because I've already gotten my collection building up in the shed. I'm up to 4 pcs and two laptops so far.