What do you keep?

I'm very sentimental, so I err on the side of saving. Ihave a bag full of letters and notes passed between my best friend and me all through middle and high school. Rereading those has brought me hours and hours of joy. I also get a big kick out of rereading my kindergarten notebooks (seriously) and that kind of stuff. Most of my pre-college stuff is stored in boxes at my parents house and my post-college stuff is stashed in boxes in a storage space in my building.

I'd suggest saving things your kids (current or future) might get a kick out of seeing. I loved looking through my mom's old college papers and things she saved and always wished my dad had saved his stuff, too.

I think what Cadet's doing is a great idea, not just for medical records, but for any document of value to you. After 9/11, I embarked on what I called "The Great Scanning Project." It took me over a year, but I scanned every photo and every post-college little piece of memorabilia I had in my photo albums and scrapbooks. I have a set of CDs at my place, one at my parents' (they live several hundred miles away) and one in a safety deposit box.

 

I love re-reading all of my diaries, of which I just found the box three years ago when my parents moved (yes, a box!):

"I love David. Does David love me? I'm not really sure. Maybe we'll go roller skating Friday night. Hope my Dad doesn't go this time, though. If David doesn't love me, then I'll just ask Chris to go out with me. He always looks at me during class. Mrs. Livingstone says I should stop passing notes to Katie. I bet I will marry David."

 

Where are the X-rated passages?

 

I would urge you to keep more than you think you should. After my mom passed, I was really grateful for all of the things she and my dad and my grandmother had kept of hers, even little things like stuff from when she was in high school.

Even though I wasn't around for that part of her life, it's still really important to me to have it to look at and hold.

 

For some silly reason, I can't find those.



Seriously though, to answer your question, I think you should keep everything that doesn't take up tooooo much space.
I always think what if a fire were to burn down my house and all those precious items were destroyed. Guess what? In the long run, they're just things, just possessions you cannot take with you to the next life (see thread, do you believe in God).

 

I am tempted to save more now after reading this thread. I'm thinking that I'll save what fits in one storage container under the bed, but that's it.

 

The potential problem with this -- and I'm not saying it's not worth doing -- is that there's a good chance that 10 years from now the stuff could be all but unretrievable. For instance, if you did this a while back (not really possible, I know) you would have been saving your stuff to a 5 1/2-inch floppy disk, and good luck trying to find a way to read it now.

 

Agreed. My aunt married, and her husband died within months of the marriage - massive heart attack. Anyway, she was completely wrecked by it. She tossed everything - I mean EVERYTHING. It was weird. Anyway, she was just throwing shit out to throw shit out. One day, I'm doing a project in school and I ask my mom and dad where the family documents are that were STAMPED BY THE KING OF FUCKING ENGLAND! And my parents say (pretty pissed off, mind you) that my aunt burnt them when she went through that phase.

 

I have a box with newspaper clippings from my (meager) high school/amateur baseball/soccer careers, varsity letter and numerals, and tons of letters from when I was in college and then first out in the world, back when people used snail-mail.

Also have a lot of photos, in another box, and a shoebox full of old numbers from my running career, with time and a brief description written on the back. They don't take up much room and they have great sentimental value to me. And clippings from several years, from back in the days when we had a librarian that kept a clip file for every reporter.

My parents moved several years ago and I had to throw out a bunch of stuff from when I was a kid. I would have saved a lot more of it if I didn't live so far away from them.

 

All your clips.

Baseball cards.

 

Yeah, I eventually need to get all my baseball cards from my parents' house and move them to my apartment. That will be a haul.

 

Wow. I don't save much of anything. I could walk out of my apartment with one box full of stuff and never think twice about the rest of my belongings.