Lately I've been having trouble sleeping. or, perhaps more accurately I've been having trouble WITH sleeping. There certainly has been a lot going on, and understandably the Christmas season is always a little bittersweet.
After my Dad passed away at Christmas a few years ago, it was left up to me to go through all of his things and sort out what was to be given to Goodwill, what was to be kept, and what was to be tossed out. Upon opening his storage locker, I was astounded to find literally a mountain of plastic grocery store bags all stuffed to the brim with papers, all secured by the loop handles of the bag tied exactly the same way. My father it seems was the pack rat of the century. Undaunted, I started opening them one by one and going through the contents. Hundreds of lottery tickets from years past purchased out of desperation, old telephone bills from 25 years ago, his half-written and discarded term papers from his ambitious but ultimately failed attempt at going back to University after my Mom died, years-old Christmas cards from people I didn't know, pictures of friend's kids who I didn't have the foggiest idea of who they were, old bus tickets, magazines, and tons of trinkets that he would get as a "free gift" for subscribing to the hundreds of junk magazines that he never read but kept stuffing up our mailbox. I remember stuffing full green garbage bags of his papers - there were so many bags going on that at one point, the living room floor looked like it was covered with 3 foot-high green boulders. It took days to go through. With so much that I didn't know - I had to open each envelope and carefully examine the contents. It might have been labor intensive, but this was the only way to find things pertaining to his finances and his estate. I actually found his WILL in there, along with some life insurance policies which had been wrapped up with an elastic band, and stuck in the same bag as some old Maclean's magazines from 1997. How could he let this happen? How could ANYONE collect this much crap?
I had 10 days off this Christmas break, and with my significant other out of town, decided on a massive house cleaning. There were closets full of clothes that I no longer wore, and seeing as how I've been a little *cough-cough* overdue on filing some income taxes, there was no time like the present to get my affairs in order. Next month is the 5 year anniversary of my living in this apartment, and my closets were full of grocery bags stuffed with old papers. (what are the odds of that?) I've always felt a bit transient ever since moving to (and subsequently back from) Montreal, and these bags full of crap brought into focus exactly how much I'd avoided some responsibilities, letting some things go from my past, and setting down some roots for the future. Luckily (for tax purposes anyway) I have a bad habit of keeping every piece of paper that is given to me; be it a gas station receipt for a pack of gum in 2005, or an old boarding pass for a long forgotten flight - it was a 10 year old time capsule. At first groaning about my sheer stupidity for ever letting it get to this point, it remarkably turned into days of reclaiming things I thought long gone from another life. Just some of the unearthed moments were:
After my Dad passed away at Christmas a few years ago, it was left up to me to go through all of his things and sort out what was to be given to Goodwill, what was to be kept, and what was to be tossed out. Upon opening his storage locker, I was astounded to find literally a mountain of plastic grocery store bags all stuffed to the brim with papers, all secured by the loop handles of the bag tied exactly the same way. My father it seems was the pack rat of the century. Undaunted, I started opening them one by one and going through the contents. Hundreds of lottery tickets from years past purchased out of desperation, old telephone bills from 25 years ago, his half-written and discarded term papers from his ambitious but ultimately failed attempt at going back to University after my Mom died, years-old Christmas cards from people I didn't know, pictures of friend's kids who I didn't have the foggiest idea of who they were, old bus tickets, magazines, and tons of trinkets that he would get as a "free gift" for subscribing to the hundreds of junk magazines that he never read but kept stuffing up our mailbox. I remember stuffing full green garbage bags of his papers - there were so many bags going on that at one point, the living room floor looked like it was covered with 3 foot-high green boulders. It took days to go through. With so much that I didn't know - I had to open each envelope and carefully examine the contents. It might have been labor intensive, but this was the only way to find things pertaining to his finances and his estate. I actually found his WILL in there, along with some life insurance policies which had been wrapped up with an elastic band, and stuck in the same bag as some old Maclean's magazines from 1997. How could he let this happen? How could ANYONE collect this much crap?
I had 10 days off this Christmas break, and with my significant other out of town, decided on a massive house cleaning. There were closets full of clothes that I no longer wore, and seeing as how I've been a little *cough-cough* overdue on filing some income taxes, there was no time like the present to get my affairs in order. Next month is the 5 year anniversary of my living in this apartment, and my closets were full of grocery bags stuffed with old papers. (what are the odds of that?) I've always felt a bit transient ever since moving to (and subsequently back from) Montreal, and these bags full of crap brought into focus exactly how much I'd avoided some responsibilities, letting some things go from my past, and setting down some roots for the future. Luckily (for tax purposes anyway) I have a bad habit of keeping every piece of paper that is given to me; be it a gas station receipt for a pack of gum in 2005, or an old boarding pass for a long forgotten flight - it was a 10 year old time capsule. At first groaning about my sheer stupidity for ever letting it get to this point, it remarkably turned into days of reclaiming things I thought long gone from another life. Just some of the unearthed moments were:
- A credit card receipt for an expensive restaurant in Montreal turned into the evening where my then girlfriend at the time and I went for dinner, then to the opera. She dragged me out of there at intermission to grab a bottle of wine, go back to my apartment and make love until the morning. I still remember what she wore that night.
- An paper confirmation from British Airways became that crazy weekend in 2001 where a last minute seat sale took me from Montreal to London England, and back in 50 or so hours. I called in sick for work, crossed the Atlantic in Friday morning, and stayed at a friend's house in Notting Hill. We had a lost weekend in Old Blighty, all culminated with me flying back home to Montreal on Sunday night, and showing up at work Monday morning. We had such a great time, and people at my office asked me did I do anything on the weekend, I just said "Not really".
- A gas station receipt turned into a memento of driving across Canada in the summer of 1999. Blind River, Ontario for $35.00 of regular unleaded was just a cover story for my venture into the great unknown.
- In 2002, a security deposit slip from a medical supply company for bottles of oxygen and a hospital bed that I had arranged for Dad for our home care when he was on the steep slide downwards.
- A boarding pass from January of 2005 for an amazing weekend in Chicago to visit my first love after reconnecting with her after 23 years.
- A receipt from the year 2000, from a photo store in Old Montreal, it was me flying back to Vancouver for a weekend to be the photographer for my dear friends Bonnie & Steve's wedding. Randy, Sab and Stevie all came to the airport to pick me up.
- An old letter from a girlfriend who, 10 years ago really loved me. Now, she won't speak to me since she has married.
- A cheesy plastic place mat that Terry made for Sab for one of his birthdays from years ago, which featured photos of him at all the important stages of his life, a baby photo, cheesy high school mustache, graduation, when him and Terry were married, when their first child was born, and yes - him and I drunk in a hot tub. I was honored to realize that I was a part of collage of their lives even way back then.
- An old birthday card mailed to me from my Dad, and a Christmas card from my Uncle Stan.
- My hurriedly hand-written eulogy for my Aunt, from 1997, which I found out the night before the service that I was supposed to be speaking. I sat at my cousin's kitchen table in Prince George, drank an ungodly amount of scotch, and wrote until very late that evening, and ultimately pulled it off.
After three days of going through all that stuff, it slowly dawned on me that my Dad, although a pack-rat of the highest order, might have kept all of that stuff for other reasons too.
0 comments:
Post a Comment