Downsizing
Inspired by my lack of interest in taking care of things - in fact, of even having so many things - and reinforcement from friends and relatives who have happily jettisoning from their lives baggage they live beautifully without, I have begun the process myself.
I’ve been thinking for a little while what I can let go of, and the longer I looked around the house, the sillier it seemed to me I was hanging on to the past with things I don’t even look at anymore, but have neatly labeled and stored out of the way. Or not out of the way, but taking up space for no reason whatsoever.
About 300 books are going to get donated to the library, one Ingles milk box full at a time (it’s too hot to organize the whole batch at once, and be climbing those stairs). I’ve started a box for the animal shelter thrift store of clothes that don’t or never fit.
I contacted the Center for American War Letters Archives, who said they’d be interested the the letters I got from a sailor aboard the USS Sanctuary - a Red Cross ship my sister Bridget worked on. So I just shipped off not only all those letters, but also a book my mother put together with the letters Bridget sent to her from Vietnam. So my bookshelves are less burdened. I can always go to the library to check out what I donated (frankly, I read very few of them), and I re-read Tommy’s Vietnam letters this morning and there was absolutely nothing in them of sentimental value to me. They were full of the kinds of stream-of-consciousness thinking you could expect from a 19-year-old would-be hippie who didn’t know what else to do but join the service just in order to have some kind of life. (I tried to join the Coast Guard right out of high school, but they told me I was too short. This was before “keyboarding” was invented; I would have rocked it.)
My dad had told all of us, “If you can type, you can get a job.” He could type very well, on a cast iron Underwood that weighed probably 15 lbs, maybe more. And that’s what we learned to type on. In my high school typing class, the fastest I could go was 29 wpm, before deducting for errors. As hard as those keys were to depress, you were quite committed to pressing the correct ones.
I was pretty sure I wasn’t college material (having been referred to as stupid, even by teachers in grade school), so I went to work at The Phone Company instead of applying for higher education. One of the jobs I did was running/receiving all the teletypes at the HQ building in downtown Milwaukee. I had 11 machines to monitor in my own office, and loved every minute of it. In between teletyping, my supervisor would occasionally ask me to do data entry for the engineering department several floors below. This meant I’d be producing a lot of those thick, wide, green-and-white striped perforated documents - most of them at least 100 pages long. The only lines of text on those massive sheets were composed of single-digit numbers.
I’d gotten so fast producing the teletype ticker-tapes, most of which were top-row-of-the-typewriter number keys, that I knocked those documents out without looking at my fingers or pretty much anything else.
One day, half a dozen engineers showed up at the typing pool and told the supervisor they wanted to meet “the girl” who typed these up - because I had made not a single mistake in thousands of entries. There was a woman in the engineering department whose only job was to proofread what I’d printed out. She hated me. I think her name was Brenda. I felt sorry for her. I ended up dating one of the engineers.
One day, an engineer showed up with a black plastic box and set it down. It was labeled “DataFax.” I asked him what it was and what I’d be doing with it. He said something along the lines of, “Don’t touch it; don’t worry about it” so I didn’t. I think that was around the time I got pregnant and when I came back from maternity leave, they made me a customer service rep, which was frightening for quite a while, until I got really good at it.
I’m still pretty good at it, but I have only my dogs to practice on now.
Please stay cool, but get off your collective butts if you haven’t already, and help get out the vote. Lordy!
Off to see what else I can box up…
Love,
Lucy