Scrapbooks, Unfinished

My recent posts have a retro component. The reason? As we clear out my parents’ house, we find boxes of papers, photos, letters from the last century and a quarter. Little by little, we sort through, so I live in someone else’s past a lot lately. Today I went through a box of what apparently was going to be a 1994 travel scrapbook. Or maybe my parents compiled the scrapbook, and these scraps were left over, I don’t know. The latter is more likely. But the trip was a France tour, so this box held extra interest for me.

High points of Paris, Normandy, and Brittany traced on a pink photocopied map, the 1994 tour guide’s instructions, my parents’ tour badges and Paris Visite passes, some unwritten picture postcards, and lots of bilingual brochures. Since my dad was the one conceiving this scrapbook in his head during the tour, I found two of every brochure. I’m not sure I can explain his logic (He thought he was Noah?), but given that in general my dad liked to save and my mom likes to pitch, I am pretty sure collecting doubles was my dad’s doing. Another clue is the page headings printed on his dot-matrix printer. Another clue is the huge number of newspaper clippings on the fiftieth anniversary of D-Day. Mom and Dad’s tour, which included D-Day beaches and museums, was about a month before this anniversary. Both my parents served in World War II, but Dad had a special interest in D-Day.

This project produced a couple of Notes-to-Self :

• Finish my own scrapbooks. My dad probably did finish memorializing this 1994 trip and I’m now just seeing stuff that didn’t make it into the scrapbook. But I have unfinished scrapbook ideas and materials that I feel sad I did not put together.
• Decide on a statute of limitations on travel scrapbooks. If a trip is ??? years ago, and I still haven’t done the book, let it go.
• Do the book. Pitch the leftovers.
• I may have inherited my father’s “presentation gene.” When I approach a farmers’ market display of roses, my mind automatically frames a photo. As I stroll through a museum, my mind classifies lessons and reactions into themes to better explain it to someone. I usually pick up a brochure (just one) to help me remember later. I feel giddy to find some goofy visual like rabbit stickers or a die-cut Renault to put in my scrapbook. I like the idea of presenting my trip in an organized and creative way to show, but especially to treasure the memories.

I wonder sometimes if my father honed his “presentation” skill during the decades when his antennae were tuned for story problems to present in the eleven mathematics textbooks he wrote. I can just imagine him screeching to a halt at a random construction site to note how he could use the angles of a gabled roof in a geometry illustration. 

Me, I have no excuse. I must have inherited this tendency to present a story, as well as to keep stuff attached to happy memories.

Cleaning Closets

Today is Clean Junk Off Closet Floor Day. 

Receipts before 2008 our accountant says we can pitch. Going through them to save ones we may need for warranties, I note more than half are for stores that have gone out of business. Stacks of papers. A few newspaper columns of a writer I enjoyed. Say, his columns haven’t appeared since …? Googling his name yields nothing but columns from 2008. Did he retire? Do writers retire? Grocery list from 2007. Sermon notes from September 21, 2008, with the name of a book I’d wanted to explore. Did a whole nine-month book group study on that book; probably don’t need the note anymore. Printout the wireless network installation guy gave us with router name and firmware version, among other bits and bytes, none of which I understand, so will file it with computer records. No doubt, someday a Geek Squad agent will come to the house and tell me this paper is from three networks ago. Info about a small publisher I’d hoped to submit writing to; Google search yielded nothing. Gone the way of Border’s, Casual Corner, and Eckerd’s drugstores, apparently.

On the upside, this techno-weenie has been procrastinating installing Sitemeter on her new blog because she doesn’t remember how she did it before. Today she found the instructions! And this week I futilely searched all logical files for my notes from my metaphor class at University of Iowa. Not proud to admit this, but today I discovered the notes in a plastic grocery bag in a pile in my clothes closet. Found handfuls of one-inch yellow, orange, and blue Post-It notes stuck together. Most notes-to-self were complete mysteries, like “shapes of spaces between clouds.” Yes, all notes were my handwriting. But some I understood and was glad to find, like … um … oh, guess not.

Glad for my discoveries of “lost” helpful papers, glad my piles of papers are short stacks. Still, appalled that I tossed them in a closet instead of organizing/pitching in the moment. I know exactly what those moments were, too. They were crunch-times half an hour before company was due to arrive. One obvious question is: Why didn’t I retrieve the stack after company left and deal with it? Since I do not have any stacks from recent years, I apparently have decided I no longer care if visitors see my messes. That’s a relief, as is seeing my closet floor mostly cleared and wastebaskets full of stuff I don’t need.

Next project is deciding what to do with travel journals and vacation memorabilia. Back when I made scrapbooks, that was easy. Stories, photos, postcards, brochures, tour tickets, menus were artsily arranged in a scrapbook. I’ve had a digital camera for a few years now, so with no physical photos, I’ve not made scrapbooks. I’ve made virtual scrapbooks of select photos, but have not scanned other memorabilia to include there. And I haven’t figured out how to combine my travel stories with the visuals, except in this blog. So I don’t know. Seems something is still missing. How do I keep travel memorabilia in meaningful ways and merge stories with visuals? Any suggestions?