Hope for the pack rats

I know I shouldn't be writing this, but I am anyway. Over the past few days, I've been thinking about how I don't really keep records of my life in traditional ways. I've tried journals, believe me, but I just can't keep them. I'm insanely lazy when it comes to documenting my existence formally, and I use to make the excuse that my being a pack rat does that for me anyway. It's true, I keep just about everything. There are those out there cringing at the very thought of all the stuff that I've accumulated, but I can't help it. I'm a sentimentalist, it's my way of showing what I've done and where I've been (sort of), it helps me remember past times, and it's bailed me out of some sticky situations (like when I was applying to PT schools - THIS IS WHY YOU KEEP YOUR SYLLABI!).

Yet, at the rate of accumulation I'm currently proceeding at, I'm going to end up like my father. Not that I don't love my father, believe you me, I am my father's child (in many more ways than one), but there just comes a time when there is too much stuff to go through. When I feel so fed up with the stuff that I have, I wish I was more judicial and pragmatic as my mother (and just so you know, I'm as equally like my mother as I am my father - it's the price I pay being the baby of 3 kids, the older 2 are 7-9 years head of me, respectively). So you can see where my internal torment arises from, lol. Yet I can't bring myself to throw certain things away. I guess it's because I have this looming fear that I'm going to forget. I hate forgetting. I've been forgotten by my peers a number of times when I was growing up and I vowed that I would never do that to someone else. As a consequence of that vow and also being a very visual person, I need physical things to help keep me on track with that goal, a goal that has expanded beyond interpersonal relationships to every other aspect of my life.

I guess keeping things also feeds my other pseudoly subconscious fear of never being known. For example, the only way anyone outside of my athletic training program would have known that I had been there and performed as well as I did (or at least think I did) would be if you looked at the injury treatment records, a few select game films or talked to my CI's. At the same time, I get slapped with examples that my fears are silly and superficial ( like when I hear about former athletes still asking for me to treat them).

What is it about being forgotten that bothers me? Why do I even care so much? I guess I just want my progeny to know that they're ancestor lived. Some may never get the chance to know me, and I want them to know that they had a good example to look to, and from whom they might have gotten some of their traits. *smirk* It may also have to do the fact that I draw most of my identity from my relatives. I had a cool experience this summer where I was finally introduced to two sections of my family that I had only heard about but never met. The first being my biological grandfather's side of the family as a whole. Due to some poor decisions on my grandfather's part, he's never been apart of my life, and as a consequence neither have my great uncles and subsequent cousins on that side, until my great uncle "Shorty" passed away out in Dallas area. Consequently enough, his funeral coincided with my family's trip to see my brother out in Dallas, so we had the opportunity to attend. That was probably one of the sweetest, most self-defining occasions of my life, as I came to know a man who I wish I had known in this mortal life - what a good soul he was, and what he had meant to my father. Also, that man's children and what good people they were, and that it was only my grandfather who was the only "bad seed" so to speak. I had cousins! This probably isn't as exciting to some people, but when you come from a relatively small family, it means a little more.

Also, consequently, I had the opportunity to meet my father's father. The man that I had never known and was discouraged to ask my father about...he was nothing more than a man to me. We were cordial to one another and that was about it. It was weird for me to look at him and think this is my grandfather and to not have any sort of attachment come flooding over me like I do when I think of my mother's father, and even then he passed away when I was 12. The last thing I need this to turn into is a sob story about the lack of male authority figures in my life, but at the same time, it explains so much of me...

Due to my birth order, I've had to come to know many of the people in my life through their writings, their possessions, records, pictures, scraps of paper, knicknacks, and stories! My example for this comes from my great aunt's funeral I attended to support my father's mother out in Safford, AZ. My grandmother came from a fairly large family in the Pima, AZ area, which is a large farming community. A number of her siblings stayed local or in surrounding smaller towns, and since my grandmother moved to the valley after she married, that's another section of family I had never really known. I met some at a family reunion back in 1997, but I was 13 and who are we kidding, I barely remember meeting anyone. (I also realize now that everytime I lose a relative, I gain about 15 more at their funeral). But to get off that tangent, for my grandmother's family, I had only known them through stories and letters and a few pictures. It was a treat to finally put faces with the names I had so often heard from her. Meeting my great-aunts and reintroducing myself to the great-uncles and the various cousins was different - I formed attachments that day, ones that I didn't even know about until months later. (My great aunt Elouise later told my grandmother in a phone call that I was the first person in a long time who had just treated her like a human being when I met her - a great source of pride for my grandmother for one (I'll explain another time) but also for me, as that comment was a measurement for how I treat people I barely know).

I get jealous of those who still have their great grandparents living and have both sets of grandparents with lots of cousins to bend upon, but at the same time, I wouldn't wouldn't change much about my family... only that I wish we all lived much closer to one another so I can hear the stories on a more regular basis and feel the love and safety more often.

Moral of the story: it's okay to be a pack rat...