100 word minimum

Old media

Today, for some reason, I thought it would be a good idea to clear out my closet so I could actually store clothes in it.

Back in 1995, when I moved into this house, I was one person (still am) in a 1600 square foot house with three huge closets. One closet was my attic and storage, one was attic overflow and off-season item storage, and the third closet was my clothes. Now we are two people here, with two people's worth of stuff in the closets which have additionally accumulated a fair amount of crap and dust over the past twelve years. There has also been some room juggling and now "my" room is the one with the attic closet.

I'm not sure what I thought was going to happen when I started the purge. I certainly didn't think it would take all day (yes, I'm still seriously underemployed). I found more books, a box of embroidery stuff and extremely grubby cross-stitches I did as a kid, a box of old dolls and doll things, helpfully labeled "C—'s stuff", very old shoes including a pair of my mother's black leather boots from the 1970's with three-inch wedge heels, a box of letters and photos (this I kept), two boxes of cassette tapes, and more.

The cassette tapes, wow! I haven't listened to any of them since I moved. Or my LPs, which I still have and have not listened to for even longer. The LPs are in a different closet. I used to tape my records so I wouldn't wear them out and also because I didn't have a record player at college and tapes were my only option. When I look at the titles, I can feel my dorm room springing up around me. My musical taste was so eighties, but that's when I was in high school and college. It's not like I had a choice. Cyndi Lauper, Tears for Fears, Howard Jones, The Police, U2, Yaz, Simple Minds, Kate Bush … And a fair number of Broadway recordings. There must have been a gay man inside me trying to bust out.

I also found the Georgetown University School of Languages and Linguistics language tapes which were doled out to every language major at the beginning of every semester. We were supposed to take our tapes to the language lab every week to get the week's audio lesson recorded onto them, and then listen to them for homework. We were regularly reprimanded by our professor: "I checked in the language lab! No one has been getting their tapes! You must get your tapes!" No one ever got the tapes. We recorded music onto them.

I found the tapes my grandfather recorded for me. Classical music from CD (he was an early adopter of new technology), carefully labeled in his engineer's handwriting. Back in the thirties and on into the eighties, engineers were taught to write properly and my grandfather's writing never lost its precision. Nowadays, the drafting is all done on computers and engineers have the worst penmanship. Engineering school just about did for my nice handwriting.

So I culled through my stuff and saved out the things most special to me. I have room in the closet for clothes now, partly because I moved some items to another closet. Obviously I have a ways to go with this stuff-reduction process.