We've a grandkid almost as old as I was when I wrote that.
I was struck by a few things--how much better my handwriting was then, and how pompous some of my phrasing was. I'd write on those topics much better now--and did, sometimes several times. I was young enough to know everything, I guess. The story fragments weren't memorable, and I know how organizations work much better now. And the math problems were going at them the wrong way.
It feels strange; would I have liked the old me if we met now? I didn't care for his work; trashed it.
You are in my neighborhood with this. I still have a few small boxes out in the shed of things written in college, mostly fiction that did not work. But pompous and too self-assured, yes. I have known this for years and neither gone back to read them nor destroyed them. Now my wife tells me just today that there is a box she kept that includes letters I wrote to her in the summer of '74, when we had just started dating. I tremble to look.
ReplyDeleteThe pile of photographs look like they came from my grandmother through my mother: many of the cousins in dressed up pictures, mostly from the early 60s, black and white.
Getting all those pictures labeled is quite a chore, but if our generation doesn't do it, it won't get done. True, great-grandmother is an abstraction to most of the youngsters, but if one or two want to know...
ReplyDeleteWe did some of that and blessed the name of others before us who had done the same. Yet we also didn't care about most of what was there. My grandfather's HS friends on their trip to Crawford Notch? Even I don't care.
ReplyDeleteYour children will look over the nostalgic stuff for an hour and will weep with each other, almost independent of what exactly you preserved. Then they will curse your name for every hour after that.
I read some of the love letters my wife had saved. I was hypomanic and I couldn't bear to read my own words. Painful.