Sorting

Sorting junk turns out to be really hard. Of course, it isn’t because the stuff is worth anything. It’s because it has all these feelings attached to it. I’m a tosser by nature, married to a keeper. For Bob this process has been exhausting and difficult. Every hour of sorting is like personal archeology. Some of it fun, like when he finds a notebook where he doodled in the margins and the doodles are way cooler than the notes. Sometimes we find stuff that’s painful. Sometimes I find something that makes me realize that I have edited my memories. That things were more complicated, or darker than I remember.

I like to throw things away because I like to shed my past. I take a perverse pleasure in getting rid of books, personal records, my S.A.T. scores and my report cards from my junior year of high school. With those report cards go my memories of my utter lack of compassion for the fat girl who was on the fringes of the group I hung with. She was annoying. She misjudged the tone of conversations. She was fat. She never looked anyone in the eye and when she talked to someone she would stare at the top of their head; a characteristic we made ruthless fun of between ourselves when she wasn’t there. Now I wonder what she was avoiding when she never made eye contact? What she didn’t want to see in our faces. I don’t have to wonder much.

She got pregnant after high school. I lived in a nearly segregated white town (there were two black families who had high school age kids. They were accepted because they were utter novelties, and we expected them to act completely white except for when they were black in ways that we approved of or that entertained us.) The fat girl’s boyfriend was black, although we never met him and I don’t even know if ‘boyfriend’ is an accurate term. He got her pregnant. Maybe she lived with him, maybe not. I was in college. Of the five of us, three were in college. One was married and working. And she was a single mom with a mixed-raced child in a small racist southern Ohio town. (One or two of the kids I went to school with probably had fathers who were in the Klan.)

I wanted to leave that town and she represented everything I feared and hated. And I hated her for it. I’m very happy to throw away a lot of the memorabilia from my high school.